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And another thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

From Hadrian to Gordon: sublime to ridiculous

Why do men want to rule the world? The question is prompted by the British Museum’s exhibition of objects from Hadrian’s day. They have gone to a lot of trouble. Worth it? Hadrian was one of those supremely busy, and colossally boring, people who crop up on history’s pages to puzzle us. He had been brought up by his distant relative Trajan (a much more interesting fellow) to assume wide responsibil-ities — the two tramped the empire together. No doubt old Trajan wanted him to succeed. Even so, Hadrian only did so by murdering four important people. That proved he wanted the job badly, of course. But, having got it, he spent most of his 20-year reign going all over his enormous property inspecting it. According to Gibbon, his life was ‘almost a perpetual journey ... Careless of the difference of seasons and of climates, he marched on foot, and bare-headed, over the snows of Caledonia, and the sultry plains of the Upper Egypt.’ No province of the empire remained unvisited by this tireless and tiresome man, as we know from endless medals and inscriptions.

Hadrian was a bisexual, it seems. He was married to a niece of Trajan’s wife, for reasons of power, but the love of his life was a dreadful youth called Antinous. The many images of ‘Tony-boy’ that survive testify to Hadrian’s bad taste. He was an upper-shoot rent boy, of the type which did in poor James Pope-Hennessy, whose house off Holland Park Road I never pass without a shudder. James had a dark saying, ‘An arse in the hand is worth two in Shepherd’s Bush’, which must have haunted him as he was being beaten to death. Hadrian, like many buggers, was interested in the arts; indeed was said to have been an artist of sorts himself. He certainly did a lot of building, and not just walls for military purposes. Some of his creations were horrors. His new town of Aelia Capitolina, built on the site of Jerusalem, in a vulgar style, led to a Jewish revolt, I suspect for aesthetic as well as religious reasons.

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