SOURCE: Henderson, Bernard W. “‘Rest after Toil’.” In The Life and Principate of the Emperor Hadrian A.D. 76-138, pp. 235-46. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1923.

[In the following excerpt, Henderson examines Hadrian's leisure activities and evaluates his contribution to literature.]

1. RELAXATION

So the day drew towards evening.

Hadrian had returned from Egypt to Rome in a.d. 131. The Jewish rebellion had called him again to the East for a brief time two years later. Except for this interlude he quitted home no more during his last seven years of life.

His Imperial work, other than the routine of administration from Rome, was ended. He had well earned some period of rest before night came. Far away in the savage north the German, eternal and immemorial foe of Italy, lurked in his black forests, held off from the south land, in spite of covetous dreaming, by the defences which he, Hadrian, had strengthened, by the army which he had disciplined, by the still unbroken magic of the Roman name. The troll could not yet grasp the treasure. On the Roman world there dawned the Golden Age, that marvel of Hadrian's making. Saeculum aureum, Temporum felicitas,¹ what was it but his work?

It was time, and there had come at last the opportunity, for the Emperor to seek some quiet pleasure out of life. And he, a man of many cultured interests, failed not to find it, until his last sore illness fell upon him. “He had no circle of trusty friends round him,” writes a German; the last years of his life were not only lonely but they were completely poisoned.”² This is a foolish and malicious picture.

His people had pleasures of their own, rude amusements, noisy delights in games and shows, which he smilingly encouraged. The gladiator, the huntsman of the arena, the actor, the Greek athlete and pugilist, all found in him their desired patron.³ The pleasures of appetite had never greatly ensnared him. His simplicity of fare was after an almost antique fashion.⁴ He sought to promote the like in Court circles. Men indeed resented his close and secret scrutiny of their daily lives. One merry tale told of him shows a fair give and take.⁵

“A certain man received an angry letter from his wife, complaining of his long absence from home. ‘You stay away,’ she wrote, ‘kept by your pleasures and your baths.’ Now Hadrian had already learnt this concerning him through his spies. When therefore the husband came to him, craving leave of absence, Hadrian reproached him for his self-indulgence and too great love of bathing. ‘What!’ cried the other, ‘Has she written to you too?’”

Yet for all his care for simplicity of life, the Emperor delighted in both giving and returning hospitality. His many guests found him of pleasant conversation, full of jokes and repartees. He would cap a story with a story, a song with a song.⁶ He never forgot what once he had read.⁷ He loved also to converse with common folk, and was always “most courteous in such conversation,” remonstrating sharply with those who, as if jealous for princely dignity, would grudge him this pleasure of human sympathy.⁸ One story has a flavour about it of that other tale of Trajan and the Importunate Widow which Dante has immortalized:

“It befel that as Hadrian passed along a certain way a woman made her prayer to him. But he passed on, saying, ‘I have no time’. But she cried aloud thereat, saying, ‘Then be King no longer!’ Thereupon he turned back to her and gave heed to her petition.”⁹

Yet, genial and courteous though the Emperor was, he was master of the Roman mob and knew how to withstand its clamours.¹⁰

To be generous in gifts to friends, as at the festal season of the Saturnalia,¹¹ was a real joy to Hadrian. Nothing pleased him more than to surprise another, whether acquaintance or stranger, with a timely present.¹² But his generosity was shrewd enough, as the tales told of it show. He himself went often, as a citizen among citizens, to the public baths. There one day he saw a veteran soldier whom he remembered (his memory for faces is said to have been as remarkable as that for books¹³), and noticed that he was rubbing himself against the wall. He sent to ask the man why “he used the marble as a scraper”. Said the other, “Because I have no slave to do it”. Then Hadrian made him a present of both slaves and money. But, continues the tale, when next the Emperor came to the baths, he saw many old men there, and all were rubbing their backs against the wall. He had them all called together to him. “Rub one another,” quoth Hadrian.¹⁴ And again:

“A certain man with white hair had asked of him a boon, which he refused. Presently the suitor appeared with his hair dyed, and made the same request. ‘Oh!’ said the Emperor, ‘I have already refused this to your father.’”¹⁵

Hadrian was not one to find time hang heavy on his hands:

“Your grandfather,” wrote the learned Fronto to Marcus Aurelius, “was a learned and wise prince, diligent not only in ruling but also in travel through the world. Yet I know that he was passionately devoted to music and to flute-playing, and he had besides an excellent taste for good fare.”¹⁶

So might also the grave Philosopher-King deign to unbend at a Festal Season!

There was one dish, we are told, which Hadrian's favourite, Ceionius Commodus,¹⁷ invented for the table. This was relished with peculiar gusto by the Emperor, and it figured frequently on the menu of Imperial banquets in later years. This so-called “Tetrafarmacum” (or more properly “Pentafarmacum”) a “strange ambiguous viand,” was a meat-pie, wherein pheasant, peacock, wild boar's flesh, sow's udder, and ham were all baked together in pastry. The peacock was the fifth ingredient added to make it perfect.¹⁸ “This,” says the writer gravely, “Hadrian always ate.” Shortly after its invention he fell ill! Here was a decline from the simplicity of the Emperor's dinners in earlier years, even though he continued to deny himself wine at breakfast.¹⁹

To turn to more serious pursuits again:

One writer calls Hadrian “a King most musical”;²⁰ another commends his skill in singing, harp-playing, and painting.²¹ He practised sculpture in both bronze and marble. “All but up to your Polycletus and Euphranor,” says an ancient critic genially.²² There seems to have been no art in which the Emperor did not strive to excel. His actual influence on the Fine Arts has been variously appraised. Some have ascribed to this the tendency in Roman sculpture to revert from the “naturalism” of Trajan's reign to an “academic renascence of classicistic (sic) art,” which is denounced as “a symptom of the decay of creative power”. “The progress of the new spirit was arrested,” thanks to Hadrian.²³ This seems partly a deduction from his well-known “archaistic” taste in literature.²⁴

Art and Philosophy rarely go hand in hand. They are cousins at best, who look askance at one another, not twin-sisters. Hadrian at least had very little inclination for philosophy, whether metaphysical or moral. It is true that he employed a Syrian “philosophus,” Heliodorus by name, as one of his State secretaries, and either he or his successor promoted the Syrian to be prefect of Egypt. But Heliodorus was also a rhetorician of repute, as was Celer, Hadrian's “Secretary for Greek letters,” and the philosophic treatises which earned for the former the more serious title are unknown to fame. “The Emperor can give you money,” said an envious rival once to Heliodorus, “yes, and honours too. But he cannot make you an orator.” Was it this unmannerly gibe which diverted the Syrian's studies to philosophy?²⁵

Hadrian's name is associated with two other philosophers of his day.

Euphrates²⁶ was a Stoic who had taught at Tyre before he followed Vespasian to Rome. Pliny, who had made his acquaintance when he himself was a young officer in Syria, writes about him in glowing terms. All Pliny's geese are swans. In his old age Euphrates fell ill of a disease which he judged to be incurable, and, true to his Stoic creed, committed suicide. It was Hadrian, says the chronicler, who sent the fatal hemlock to him. No philosophic example or belief persuaded the donor, when the like evil fate fell on him, to follow the Stoic's example.

“To sum up: remember that the door is open. Do not be a greater coward than the children, but do as they do. Children, when things do not please them, say, ‘I will not play any more’; so, when things seem to you to reach that point, just say, ‘I will not play any more,’ and so depart, instead of staying to make moan.”²⁷

To this effect wrote Epictetus, true Stoic and philosopher. Was he himself known to Hadrian, his Emperor?

His lectures, his doctrine, almost his great fame itself, have been preserved for all time thanks to Hadrian's own officer Arrian. And a passing remark by the ancient biographer of the Emperor states that the latter was “most familiar with the philosophers Epictetus and Heliodorus”.²⁸ But at no time in the second century is Epictetus known to have lived or to have lectured in Rome. It is possible that Hadrian met him in his famous lecture-room at Nicopolis or at Athens. That his doctrines had in fact the least influence upon, or interest for, the travelling Emperor there is nothing beyond this one sentence to show. Seneca's philosophy must have influenced Nero more—by repulsion. Hadrian was too catholic, too nonchalant, to be attracted greatly by any philosophic school, even by the popular philosophy of the day which was eminently practical, positive, and moral rather than psychological or metaphysical. The modern preacher has called Epictetus a “seeker after God”. Hadrian had little care either for the pursuers or the object of the quest. Plotina's son, even when in days now past he had granted her request on behalf of a pet philosopher, never showed any signs that he shared his mother's enthusiasm.²⁹

And this his nonchalance extended itself quite as certainly to religion. Curious concerning rite and mystery he may have been. Patron of Hellenic shrines and their divine inmates, side by side with whom he took an equal place, perhaps to his own amusement, he undoubtedly was. The Greeks and their flattery were not to be denied. He also took every care of the sacred shrines in Rome, and his own great new temple of Venus and Rome engaged his thoughts for many days of the last years of his life.³⁰ But Hadrian felt not the slightest disposition for religious enquiry, for any search for creed or verity. No clear light from above could be expected to shine upon the “fallacis semita vitae”. The path indeed was plain enough without any such supernal illumination. Life was to be lived, work was to be done. Who knew what should happen when these were over, when the soul, the body's little comrade, started upon its “dim journey into the unknown”?³¹

“Roman religion issued in a mere political worship of dead emperors and of the genius of the existing monarch and of the fortune of Rome—the deifications of force and power and outward peace, with scarce a spark of love or moral enthusiasm.”³² To this not inapt summary of the religious situation, albeit by an English Bishop forty years ago, Hadrian might well have given his ready assent. What had a Roman Emperor to do with religious love or moral enthusiasm? Enough for him to see that the ancient worships were decently celebrated and that the divinity of “Rome and Augustus” was properly and universally recognized. If Oriental fanatics wanted more than this, let them be as grotesque as they pleased so long as they kept the public peace (his officers should see to this) and refrained from insult to their neighbours' beliefs. Religion was not one of Hadrian's hobbies.

If one strand of credulity or superstition was interwoven into the mental complex of this “sharpwitted”³³ Emperor, this was at least the craze of the fashionable world for many a long year. Hadrian had a passion for reading the secrets of the future. It is probable that he used calculation of numbers rather than astrology for the purpose. He spent the evening of every New Year's Day, that day which has always been so fruitful of quaint plans and experiments, in setting down in writing all the events of the coming year, so far as these concerned his own fortunes. And he never made a mistake—so his biographer impressively asserts. Hence upon the first of January of the last year of his life, the Imperial forecast stopped abruptly at the day of his death. To such depths has historical biography descended. The Emperor Julian shared with Hadrian this amiable weakness.³⁴

But the Emperor's chief relaxations in his days of leisure were two—literature and architecture.

2. HADRIAN'S LITERARY ACTIVITIES

All accounts agree that Hadrian was devoted to literature, both Greek and Roman, but especially to the former.³⁵ Men nicknamed him (though scarcely in his presence) “The Little Greek”. Tragedies, comedies, farces, speeches,³⁶ all were his delight. His reputation for eloquence and for erudition survived to fill later doctors and writers with admiration. “In the judgment of great men he ranked among the most learned of mankind, rarely yielding the first place to any.”³⁷

The envious, indeed, declared that he intended all men to recognize his superiority; that in this as in all other respects he was greedy of fame, however stoutly he struggled to conceal this his passion for approbation; that he nourished secretly bitter anger against his literary rivals.³⁸ It is surely to an Emperor's credit that he should make the effort to hide his feelings and to this extent to mortify his cherished desire that men should recognize him as “the most eminent living scholar”. Valentinian presently was afflicted by the same engaging ambition.³⁹

However anxious his jealousy, Hadrian at least surrounded himself with literary men and artists of every kind, those who were the most famous of the day. He founded at Rome the Athenæum, where rhetoricians and poets gave recitations of their works, a use which this Institution long retained.⁴⁰ At times the Prince would poke fun at the pretensions of the throng, or ply them, philosophers, professors, poets, all alike with questions innumerable. At Alexandria he had himself furnished the answers of his questions to the professors of the Museum.⁴¹ Such Imperial learning must also have been displayed at Rome. If he found any intellectually unfit for their posts in his judgment, he dismissed them, with the temporary consolation of a handsome douceur.

Among Hadrian's own numerous writings, which were both in Greek and in Latin, in prose and in verse, there was a work on Grammar, consisting of two books certainly, if not more. One melancholy fragment of this alone survives, and that because the Emperor's opinion concerning the word “obiter” was unblushingly opposed to that of the learned grammarian Terentius Scaurus.⁴² This same question of the proper use of words concerned another savant, Favorinus of Arles. He graciously conceded to Hadrian on one occasion that he himself had used a word wrongly. His friends remonstrated with him, when he left the Presence. “You know,” said they, “that it is found in quite good authors.” Favorinus burst into a giant laugh. “The Lord of thirty legions, my friends,” he said, “must be allowed to know better.” The Arlesian scholar was in fact of a cringing disposition. He enjoyed some special exemption from taxation and was afraid of losing this. “He counted it,” he once remarked, “one of the three paradoxes of his life that he had ventured to differ from the Monarch and yet found himself still alive.” “This,” ventures his honest biographer, “redounds in my opinion rather to Hadrian's credit than to his own.”⁴³ But in fact the Emperor was generous of gift (as well as of life!) to all his literary circle. The professors went away happy and rich.⁴⁴ Hadrian was “the first Prince since Claudius to take a serious interest in literature”.⁴⁵ And this led the scornful and narrow-minded Emperor Julian to introduce him in Heaven as “a sophist”.

The Emperor's own literary taste was archaistic. He preferred Cato to Cicero, Ennius to Virgil, Coelius Antipater to Sallust. Such flaws in appreciation might seem venial. But when he ranked the tedious and verbose epic, the Thebais of Antimachus, above Homer, it is time seriously to deplore the fact. “His æsthetic judgment,” writes a German sorrowfully, “was not sound. Such bad taste is a clear symptom of a disordered Spirit.”⁴⁶ This same perturbed Spirit it was which caused the martyrdom of Bishop Telesphorus.⁴⁷ Equally lamentable, and mythical perhaps, were its divers operations.

Of Hadrian's own original works, a few trifles only have come down to us, keeping afloat, as an old writer put it, on the surface of the sea of time when other weightier matter has long since sunk for ever. His prose writings are completely lost. Among these the most welcome would have been the Imperial Autobiography, of which the ancient biographer made some meagre use.⁴⁸ Another work (whether in prose or in verse is uncertain) rejoiced in the “monstrous title”⁴⁹ of “Catachannae”. This was a country term for a tree upon which all manner of alien stocks had been grafted. The author must have employed it as signifying a medley of good things. But every fragment of this “most obscure” Miscellany, this Orchard of literature, fruit of a long life, has perished.⁵⁰ The same fate has overtaken the Hymns which Hadrian wrote in honour of the memory of Plotina.⁵¹

All that to-day remains to demonstrate the Emperor's literary craftsmanship are a few short specimens of Greek and Latin verse which have at least been ascribed to his authorship. With one quite extraordinary exception these are mediocre and prosaic, yet respectable effusions by a minor poet who was not seeking notoriety by turgidity or freakishness, or by Cubist, post-Jazz, or psycho-analytical versification, but found a subject or two which he sought to handle briefly, neatly, and effectively. The verses to Eros at Thespiae and the two epitaphs on the Batavian soldier and the horse Borysthenes have been already given.⁵² Some Greek lines written for a statue of Lucius Catilius Severus at Ephesus,⁵³ and for the tomb of Arete, wife of the elegiac poet Parthenius, who taught Virgil Greek, are heavy efforts. It was a kindlier act when the Emperor had the ruined tomb restored.⁵⁴

The Imperial poet was perhaps happier in lighter mood. The lascivious verses, of which he wrote a great number, have every one of them perished. His own Latin pentameter which he wrote for the tomb of his poetical friend Voconius must serve as his own apology for these:

“Lascivus versu, mente pudicus eras.”(55)

Martial's own generation may be left to provide the antidote for its own poison. “Wanton in your verses, modest in your mind” is well enough if the verses die with the mind. Some, unlike Hadrian's, have a trick of survival, and then the apology is inadequate. Lubricity in literature is not always as ephemeral as Pleasure in the Judgment of Hercules:

“Fantastic Power! whose transient charms allur'd,
While error's mist the reasoning mind obscur'd.”

Hadrian's Greek epigram on Archilochus is slight enough:

“Here lies Archilochus: the Muse loved Homer well
Who led his rival captive to the mad iamb's spell.”(56)

The Emperor's facility, already mentioned, in “capping” verses is still illustrated by one example in Greek and a second in Latin.

There came to him one day a withered old pedant seeking alms by means of a distich of a quite intolerable jangle:

“A half o' me 's already dead, a half is hungry, very!
Save thou this thing, a broken string, my King, or me they bury.”

Hadrian, his sensitive ear outraged and with a keen sense of the absurdity of the “broken string” metaphor, replied unkindly:

“The shades of night, the sun's bright light, both scurvily thou treatest:
Thou dost not shun to see the one, the other yet thou cheatest.”(57)

A direct and also jangling invitation to the beggar to go to—his own place.

Far worse poetry, and better known, is the Emperor's Latin repartee to a sally of the poet Publius Annius Florus.

Florus was critic, historian, and bard at one and the same time.⁵⁸ He was an African by birth and had travelled widely before he settled down to a peaceful life at Tarraco. There are about thirty lines of his poetry surviving, none of any great merit. Yet the claim has been made for him that he was the author of the Spring Song, the Pervigilium Veneris, with its haunting refrain,—the song of the lads on Arno's bank at Pisa:

“Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet”—

or, as I may dare to render it,

“He shall love upon the morrow love who never yet hath known,
And the lover who hath known love on the morrow love shall own.”

Were this surely Florus' poem, he would be dear to our hearts as “Flavian,” and Hadrian's reign would be famous in the history of Latin literature for a second poem.⁵⁹ But this most wonderful of Latin songs keeps the secret of its dead author.

In his latter years Florus came to Rome, to enjoy life under Hadrian in the gay capital. Remembering the discomforts of his own travels, the poet sent to the Emperor three or four wretched little lines of supposed verse:

“Caesar would I never be,
Now atramp in Germany,
Skulking now in Britain he,
Or in Scythia's misery.”

The Emperor promptly replied in like measure to the poet:

“Florus would I never be,
Now atramp in taverns he,
Skulking now in cookshops see,
Victim of the midges' glee.”(60)

And time has thought fit to preserve this fatuous exchange of complimentary abuse!

There are two other jeux d'esprit in the Latin Anthology which reveal Hadrian in the same humorous mood.⁶¹ The “comic idea” in both is to get the same three proper names into every one of the hexameter lines, the whole being an effort in mock heroics. The translator cannot use the actual Latin names with any comfort. A still more frivolous paraphrase may be attempted:

“'Twas Brown, and Jones, and also Smith, who sallied out to fight;
Brown in a cap, and Jones without, but Smith with bowler dight.
Brown Ealing owned, but Putney Jones, while Smith knew Primrose Hill;
Smith was not well, nor Jones robust, and Brown was slightly ill.
Jones rose at six, and Brown at five, but Smith at half past eight;
Jones' love was Mary, Ethel Brown's, and Smith was fond of Kate.
Brown hit a boy, and Smith a lad, while Jones he struck a child,
For Brown was cautious, Smith not bold, and Jones was more than mild.
Now earth the bodies doth contain of Brown, and Jones, and Smith.
Jones leaves no heir, and Smith no kin, while Brown he leaves no kith.”

Such are the Emperor Hadrian's contributions to extant classical literature. His example is said to have made poetry a craze at Court. Greek versifying in particular became “a fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits”.⁶² Aelius Verus, Hadrian's first choice for heir, loved verse-making.⁶³ The younger Verus, the colleague of Marcus Aurelius, practised poetry from boyhood. “He was a better orator than poet, or rather, a worse poet than he was speaker,” says his biographer unkindly.⁶⁴ Marcus Aurelius himself did not disdain to write hexameters in his youth. Yet this poor boy who was given seventeen tutors, namely four orators, four grammarians, one jurist, and eight philosophers (!), was allowed no instructor among them all in poesy. Despite which niggardliness, the lad “knew the whole of poetry”.⁶⁵

Whether Hadrian, either as poet himself or as patron, did valuable service to Letters may be questioned. Certainly poetical inspiration was lacking in his day. No creative spirit moved upon the face of the waters to trouble the placid languorous current of the life and thought of Imperial Rome under this cultured Prince. In earlier days, Rome's immortal poets had been begotten of civil strife or of the peace which followed hard upon the devastation of war. England's yet greater poetry proves by contrast that there is no law of external circumstances for genius. But no second Virgil or Horace (how impossible the thought!), no new Persius or Statius even, gave glory to the Age of Hadrian or of Pius.

Yet for one rare moment the Muse of Poetry touched Hadrian the Emperor himself with her finger.

In that hour when all the lustre and the triumph and the pleasure of the world were vanishing away before his dying gaze, in the last moments of long drawn-out pain, weakness, and loneliness when he beheld tardy death standing at last beside his bed, the very pathos of the futility of human life inspired Hadrian to the writing of those five lines of purest and most simple music of language which have themselves remained immortal, eternal alike for their fragile slender grace as for their sorrowful vain questioning into the unknown. No alien tongue can ever render the haunting melody, the plaintive delicacy of the Latin, most musical and incomparable of languages:

“Animula vagula blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec ut soles dabis jocos?”

Must a version be given?—

“Little tender wand'ring soul,
          Body's guest and comrade thou,
To what bourne, all bare and pale,
          Wilt thou be a'faring now,
All the merry jest and play
Thou so lovest put away?”

Or, keeping the five line stanza of the Latin—“The dying Emperor to his soul”:

“Pretty little wandering sprite,
Thou the body's comrade hight,
To what places wilt thou fare now,
Pale and rigid thou and bare now,
Jests no longer thy delight?”(66)

This is no “Lord of thirty legions,” but just an ailing child, looking wistfully after his darling toys, now for ever put aside, hardly fearful, yet doubtfully asking, of his journey into the unknown to-morrow.

Notes

1. Hadrian's coin legends (Cohen, 1321, 1436).

2. Herzog p. 374.

3. Vita 19, 6-8; Dio 69, 8, 2; cf. C.I.G. 5906, and Boeckh ad loc. = leave to the Collegium cultorum Herculis to have a Club-room in Rome, May 5, a.d. 134.

4. Vita 22, 5; Dio 69, 7, 3.

5. Vita 11, 4-6.

6. Vita 20, 8; Epit. § 7.

7. Vita 20, 10.

8. Vita 17, 8; 20, 1.

9. Dio 69, 6, 3.

10. Dio 69, 6, 1-3; 16, 3.

11. Corresponding in time and holiday-making to our Christmas.

12. Vita 17, 2, 3; 22, 9; 15, 1; Dio 69, 5, 2.

13. Vita 20, 9, 10; Epit. § 3.

14. Vita 17, 5-7.

15. Vita 20, 8.

16. Fronto, ed. Naber, p. 226, “De Feriis Alsiensibus”.

17. For Commodus, see below, p. 259.

18. Vita 21, 4; Vita Hel. 5, 4, 5; Lampridius, Vita Alex. Sev. 30, 6. Naturally this calls for more notice from the writers of the Augustan History than does, e.g. Hadrian's Journey to Arabia or the British Wall. “‘It doesn't sound very nice,’ said Alice doubtfully.” The White Knight reassures her.

19. Dio 69, 7, 3.

20. Athenaeus VIII, 361 f. So ap. Julian, Caesares, 311d.

21. Vita 14, 9; cf. Epit. § 2; Dio 69, 4, 2.

22. Epit. § 2; cf. Dio 69, 3, 2.

23. Stuart Jones, “Companion,” p. 396.

24. See below, next section.

25. Heliodorus: Dio 69, 3, 4-5; Vita 15, 5; 16, 10; cf. Prosop. Imp. Rom. I, p. 187. Celer: Philostratus, Vit. Soph. 2, 24; Vita Marci 2, 4; Vita Veri 2, 5.

26. Dio 69, 8, 3; Pliny, Epist. I, 10; cf. I, 12.

27. Epictetus, Discourses I, 24 (trans. Matheson). The “Altercatio Hadriani Aug. et Epicteti phil.” was a game of question and answer popular in the Middle Ages (Gregorovius p. 283). Of course it is not genuine.

28. Vita 16, 10.

29. See above, pp. 50-52.

30. See below, p. 248.

31. S. Dill, “Roman Society,” p. 503 (cf. p. 536, whence this last phrase is taken), dwells with some exaggeration upon Hadrian as “religious sceptic”. That Hadrian's cosmopolitanism prepared the way for the diffusion of Christianity and thus was “injurious to the power of Rome” is a very fanciful flight of the imagination by Bury (p. 494). The idea is perhaps to be found in embryo in Mommsen (cf. Ges. Schr. III, p. 413). The paving of some ways seems to be many feet in depth by the time it is happily finished. Usually it never is finished. Nor is Hadrian rightly labelled a “dilettante philosopher,” as by Herzog (whose whole appreciation however has many merits—pp. 372-376). He professed literature, not philosophy, and it cannot be said that he even dallied with the latter.

32. John Wordsworth, Bampton Lectures, 1881, pp. 240-241.

33. Mommsen.

34. Vita 16, 7; cf. 14, 9; Vita Hel. 3, 9; cf. Dio 69, 11, 3; Amm. Marcell. Julian, 25, 17.

35. “Poematum et litterarum nimium studiosissimus” (Vita 14, 8); “Oratione et versu promptissimus et in omnibus artibus peritissimus” (ib. 15, 10); “Facundissimus Latino sermone, Graeco eruditissimus” (Eutropius VIII, 7, 2); “Eruditissimus in utraque lingua” (Jerome ap. Euseb. Chron. 165); “Eloquio togaeque studiis accomodatior” (Victor, Caes. 14, 1); “Graecis litteris impensius eruditus, a plerisque Graeculus appellatus est” (Epit. § 2); “Atheniensium studia moresque hausit, non sermone tantum sed et ceteris disciplinis” (ib.). …

36. Hadrian's speeches—Vita 16, 5; 20, 7. Twelve Orations were published (Charisius, Gram. Lat. I, 222, 21; cf. Gellius XVI, 13, 4; Plotius, Bibl. 1, 86, ed. Bekker). Fragments of three survive, the harangues at Lambaesis, the speech De Italicensibus, and the Laudatio Matidiae. See above, pp. 94, 12, 25, respectively.

37. Treb. Pollio, Vit. Gallieni II, 3, 4.

38. Epit. § 6; Dio 69, 3, 2, 3.

39. Amm. Marcell. XXX, 8, 10.

40. Victor, Caes. 14, 2; Lampridius, Vit. Alex. Sev. 35, 2; Vit. Pertin. 11, 3; Vit. Gord. 3, 4.

41. Vita 15, 10, 11; 16, 8-9. See above, p. 129.

42. Charisius I, 209, 12. Cf. Schanz III, p. 10.

43. Dio 69, 3, 6; 4, 1; Vita 15, 12, 13; 16, 10. Philostratus, Vit. Soph., p. 489.

44. Vita 16, 8, 9.

45. Friedländer IV, p. 314.

46. Dio 69, 4, 6; Vita 16, 6; Schanz III, p. 8.

47. Lightfoot. See above, p. 227, note 5.

48. See Appendix A.

49. Vita 16, 2; Schanz III, p. 10.

50. The word is explained by Fronto, ed. Naber, pp. 35 N. and 155. Bernhardy and Ribbeck think the work was in verse. There is no telling.

51. Dio 69, 10, 3.

52. See above, pp. 16, 174, 17, respectively.

53. Kaibel, Epig. Graec. 888, 2.

54. Ib. 1089.

55. Apuleuis, Apol. II.

56. Anthol. Palat. 674.

57. Ib. IX, 137.

58. Accepting Schanz's identification of the three (III, pp. 56-65).

59. This is the view of Ribbeck and others, one of whom even dares to date it precisely on April 6, a.d. 123! But it is generally denied. Cf. Schanz pp. 61-62, who ponderously calls the poem “affected”! We may leave it hopefully to the boy poet Flavian, the comrade of “Marius the Epicurean”.

60. Vita 16, 3, 4. There is a terrible version by Hodgkin ap. Gregorovius p. 274. “Feel the bossy bowl assail me” (“calices” for “culices”) is shiver-producing. The lilt of the Latin, such as it is, requires rhyme as well as rhythm in English. The well-known trouble is that we have only three lines by Florus and four by Hadrian. The remedy is obvious, either to invent another line for Florus (as Bury) or to cancel one of Hadrian's. Germans therefore quarrel as to which of the four precious lines shall be sacrificed.

61. Anth. Lat. ed. Bücheler, 392, 393 = Bährens, Poet. Lat. min. 123, 124. One of the two is ascribed also variously to Ovid!, to Nero!!, and to Trajan!!!

62. Pater, “Marius,” p. 95.

63. Vita Hel. 5, 2.

64. Vita Veri, 2, 7.

65. Vita Marci 2.

66. Vita 25, 9. For other versions, etc., see Note at end of the chapter.