Hadrian’s final months left a bitter taste in the mouths of many senators. There was a movement to annul many of his final acts – including the naming of several of his favourites to places in the Senate and other high positions. Antoninus said these annulments would dishonour the memory of his adoptive father and refused to allow them. He insisted that the Senate should deify Hadrian, despite widespread reluctance. Thus, Marcus Pinarius retained his status as a senator and a priest of Antinous, and the late emperor became the Divine Hadrian.
AD 141
The construction and decoration of the mausoleum of Hadrian was at last complete. On this day the late emperor’s remains were to be officially interred.
To reach the mausoleum, a new bridge had been built across the Tiber. The bridge offered an impressive view of the huge structure, and it was here that the emperor Antoninus and a host of dignitaries assembled for the ceremony. Along with Hadrian, the remains of the empress Sabina and of Hadrian’s onetime heir, Ceionius, would also be interred.
For Marcus Pinarius, dressed in his senatorial toga, the occasion marked the pinnacle of his long career; it also provided a rare moment to simply stop and catch his breath. Marcus had never been so busy in his life, not even during the hectic years of the Dacian campaigns, when he was Apollodorus’s assistant. He regularly attended meetings of the Senate in Roma. He made frequent trips to the villa at Tibur to oversee the worship of Antinous, and he made new images of the Divine Youth whenever the inspiration struck him. But most of his efforts in the last few years had been consumed by the design and construction of the massive statue atop Hadrian’s mausoleum. The images of Antinous were unquestionably the most beautiful of all the works Marcus had made, the closest he would ever come to creating perfection, but the quadriga statue with Hadrian was by far the grandest.
Constructing a work on such an immense scale had been one challenge; creating a sculpture of sufficient grandeur to properly honour Hadrian was another. As he stood on the new bridge, listening with only one ear to the endless speeches and invocations, Marcus gazed up at the gigantic sculptural group and felt tremendous satisfaction. Apollodorus would have said that the statue was much too big, its bulk reducing the mausoleum beneath to a mere pedestal, making the whole structure appear top-heavy. But Marcus had resisted the temptation to revise Hadrian’s model and had stayed true to the emperor’s wishes, though he had employed various tricks of perspective to give the figures a more pleasing proportion when seen from the ground. Over the last few days Marcus had ventured all over the Seven Hills and out on the roads that radiated from the city, seeing what the sculpture looked like from various viewpoints and distances. For sheer prominence, Hadrian in his quadriga rivalled the Temple of Jupiter atop the Capitoline, the Colossus of Sol, and even the Flavian Amphitheatre. Indeed, Marcus had chanced upon one vantage point, north of the city, from which nothing of Roma could be seen except the quadriga; the illusion of seeing a titanic figure riding a gigantic chariot across a landscape devoid of humanity had been complete. As an artist, Marcus had known no moment of greater satisfaction, not even when gazing upon his images of the Divine Youth.
Next to Marcus stood Apollodora. Her features were those of an aging Eastern beauty, but she displayed the inscrutable expression of a true Roman matron. Marcus had no idea what she was feeling. It had been a long time since she had expressed resentment or grief about her father’s death.
Next to her was Lucius, who had continued to grow until he was a head taller than his father. Lucius was wearing the fascinum, though the amulet was hidden under the folds of his toga. He saw his son exchange glances with young Verus – or Aurelius, as everyone now called him.
The emperor himself had recently acquired a new cognomen. He was Antoninus Pius now, so named by the Senate, ostensibly in recognition of his filial piety in discharging his duties to his adoptive father, including his insistence that the Senate vote divine honours to Hadrian; but many people thought the granting of the cognomen Pius was to thank Antonius for saving the lives of a number of senators whom Hadrian would otherwise have put to death in the last days of his reign. “I had rather save the life of one innocent citizen than take the lives of a thousand enemies,” Antoninus had remarked. He had none of Hadrian’s restlessness or brooding nature; he was known for a placid temperament and a gentle sense of humour. Under his benevolent rule, the bitterness that had marked the end of Hadrian’s reign had almost faded from memory.
At last the speeches and rituals were done. Antoninus Pius carried the urn containing the ashes of Hadrian across the bridge and entered the mausoleum. In the vestibule, a niche housed a statue of Hadrian. To the right, a passageway lined with marble sloped gently upwards as it followed a spiral course. The ramp made a full circle, ending in a chamber just above the entrance, and from this room another passage led to a circular chamber at the very center of the building. Niches had been carved in the wall to make room for the urns containing the ashes of Hadrian, Sabina, and Ceionius. The chamber was large enough to provide a resting place for many emperors to come. Thus, the mausoleum was both a monument to the past and an expression of faith in the future. Men died, but the empire of Roma would go on and on. Here was a place to house the remains of generations not yet born.
Marcus watched as Antoninus placed the urn in its niche. He felt the sense of sadness and release that comes with the ending of an era. Hadrian, the inveterate traveler, had reached the end of his final journey.
A banquet followed. Exhausted from standing all day, Marcus excused himself early. Apollodora left with him, but Lucius stayed behind, saying that he wanted to keep Aurelius company.
“How fortunate we are that those two have become such close friends,” Marcus said to Apollodora as the litter carried them home. “For that happy outcome, as for so much else, we have the Divine Hadrian to thank.”
Apollodora made no reply. She only nodded and closed her eyes, as if she was too tired to speak. When they arrived home, she went directly to bed.
Despite his weariness, Marcus felt restless. It was often so on days when he was called upon to take part in ceremonies and rituals; such events filled him with a nervous excitement that made it hard to sleep. He paced his garden for a while, then went to his library. Amyntas, knowing his master’s habits and anticipating his needs, had left a lamp burning for him.
Marcus surveyed the scrolls in their pigeonholes, identified by dangling tags, and on a whim pulled out a volume from the late Suetonius’s imperial biographies. Suetonius had recently come up in conversation with young Marcus Aurelius, who had expressed astonishment that Marcus had never read the man’s work. “Are you telling me that you possess one of the very first copies, given to you by Suetonius himself, and you’ve never read it? Unbelievable! Really, you must read them.”
Marcus located the other volumes and piled them on the table, then began to skim through the text. From the sternly moralistic Augustus, power had passed to the dour Tiberius, who had ended in utter debauchery and left the world at the mercy of the monstrous Caligula, whose bloody death had led to the reign of the hapless Claudius, cuckolded by one wife, Messalina, and probably murdered by another, Agrippina, who had put her son Nero on the throne and been rewarded with death. After Nero had come four emperors in quick succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and then Vespasian, the bland but competent general who had left the empire to his sons, first the popular Titus, then the suspicious and cruel Domitian. There Suetonius’s account ended, but Marcus needed no historian to tell him about the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian.
Marcus could see why the biographies were so popular. The stories told by Suetonius were brutal, funny, and shocking. The people he described were, for the most part, appalling. Had Caligula really given his horse Incitatus a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets, and a collar of precious stones, all in preparation for making him a consul? Had Nero really tried to kill his mother by putting her on a collapsing boat? Had Domitian invited guests to a black room where he treated them like men already dead, and then released them, making a joke of their despair?
What amazing and terrible times Marcus’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather had lived through – and how very little Marcus knew about their lives!
As the first faint light of dawn began to emanate from the garden, Marcus realized that he had been reading all night. He went to bed, thinking that an hour of sleep would be better than none, and dreamed of mad emperors.
