Ever since Marguerite Yourcenar published her acclaimed fictionalization of
the Emperor Hadrian’s lost memoirs in 1951, a vague sense that he was in
fact a moody yet sensitive existentialist has tended to haunt our
perceptions of him. Yourcenar herself, reflecting on the composition of her
novel, cited a sentence in one of Flaubert’s letters as a key inspiration:
“Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there
was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man
stood alone”. As the manifesto for a novel published only nine years after
L’Étranger, this had an obvious appeal; and sure enough, despite the
profound depth of Yourcenar’s scholarship, and the sustained brilliance of
her ventriloquism, Mémoires d’Hadrien is self-evidently a book of its time.
That Hadrian was a man of formidable intelligence is hardly to be doubted. Nor
is it to be doubted that, in the authentic manner of a French intellectual,
he wrote poetry, had a passion for art, and cheated on his wife.
Nevertheless, it is evident to scholars now, in a way that it was not sixty
years ago, that Hadrian was not merely, or even primarily, a philosopher.
Certainly, the world in which he lived, and which he sought with often
brutal energy to shape, stood at an incalculable remove from the
presumptions of the Rive Gauche – as it stands from those of the
twenty-first century too. Indeed, it may well be that the Hadrian of
contemporary scholarship will appear in sixty years time to be quite as
dated a figure as Yourcenar’s does to us.
Already, he seems recognizably the product of our own age: one that is
unembarrassed by homosexuality, finds it hard to believe that cultural
diplomacy can ever be wholly disinterested, and has little time for fighting
wars in Iraq. No longer Camus avant la lettre, he now tends to be cast as a
man wrestling with problems of multiculturalism, imperial overstretch and
globalization. Yet to acknowledge as much is in turn to prompt some obvious
questions. What is it precisely about Hadrian that has enabled him to hold
up such a haunting mirror both to Yourcenar’s time and to our own? Why, more
perhaps than any other Roman emperor, does he appear so eerily familiar to
us, even as our notion of what is familiar inevitably shifts and evolves?
It is the supreme merit of the new exhibition Hadrian: Empire and conflict at
the British Museum that it meets these issues head on, and from the start.
Directly inside the vestibule, the darkness is lit by the flickering of a
video screen: images of our moody, backlit hero loom, then morph back into
the shadows, just as they might do on a particularly stylish YouTube promo.
This is Hadrian as international man of mystery: “always in all things
changeable”, as the Historia Augusta described him. Next to the screen there
stands a solitary display-case, containing a couple of Marguerite
Yourcenar’s notebooks, and a manuscript of Mémoires d’Hadrien.
It is possible that not a few visitors, drawn by the promise of a blockbuster
show, will feel themselves to have been mildly short-changed as they stare
down at an assortment of scribblings in French and Latin – but they should
not abandon hope. Carry on into the Reading Room, where the main body of the
exhibition is being staged, and all their expectations will be spectacularly
met. For directly ahead of them, positioned at the top of a stairway, they
will find three hulking pieces of marble, fragments of the kind of statue
that form our own picture of Imperial Rome. A giant foot, a chunk of leg,
and a colossal head: here are exhibits that have never before been
displayed. Indeed, only a year ago, no one even suspected that they so much
as existed: for they lay buried amid the ruins of the Pisidian city of
Sagalassos, in what is now south-west Turkey. A photograph of the head at
the precise moment of its discovery, still half-covered by dirt, serves to
emphasize the point that is being made here. There can never be a final
history of Hadrian. New finds will always be made. Memorials to the
Emperor’s reign will continue to be uncovered and dusted down. Dead he may
be, and the Empire he ruled as well, but the study of ancient Rome, and the
ways in which we interpret it, refuse to stand still.
A truism, perhaps, and yet rarely has there been an exhibition which drives it
home with such subtlety and precision. On one level, of course, the
counterpointing of Yourcenar’s manuscript with the magnificent finds from
Sagalassos merely serves to emphasize how, on the material level at any
rate, our understanding of Hadrian has not simply evolved over the years,
but measurably improved. Simultaneously, however, the very decay of the
colossal wreck, the trunkless detritus of what had once been so splendid and
entire, can hardly help but symbolize, and in a most potent manner too, just
how incomplete is the evidence for Hadrian’s reign as a whole. The sifting
of the rubble of the ancient past can only ever, it goes without saying, be
a start. Scattered fragments of detail, once located, must necessarily be
assembled and reconstituted anew. In a book, of course, whether novel or
scholarly biography, this obligation has a purely metaphorical quality, but
in an exhibition it is literal. The conjunction of twentieth-century
manuscript and second-century sculpture provides the exhibition with
something more than merely an introduction: it hints as well at what is
surely its guiding manifesto.
Unlike its predecessor in the Reading Room, this is not a show which can
depend for its impact on the allure of the exotic. There is no equivalent of
the Terracotta Warriors to wow the crowds. Instead, it is the very
familiarity of many of the displays which enables the exhibition to develop
its most intriguing points. For the fact that most visitors will be more
familiar with the iconography of the Roman empire than with that of the
Chinese, and with Hadrian’s Wall than with Shi Huang Di’s, is precisely what
enables the show to make such fruitful play with its audience’s
expectations. Again and again, the truest fascination of an artefact is made
to derive from its broader setting. Nothing is left to stand alone. This is
an exhibition in which context is all.
Take, for example, the section which showcases what is, to a British audience,
the most familiar monument from Hadrian’s reign: his Wall. To earlier
generations – and it may be to the Romans themselves – this massive
undertaking served as an inspiringly visible stamp of Rome’s civilizing
mission. “An encamped army encloses the fairest portion of the world in a
ring like a rampart”: so gushed Aelius Aristeides, enthusing over Rome’s
supposed eirenic vocation. Recent scholarship, however, has given such
rhapsodies predictably short shrift. The Wall now tends to be seen in a much
more sinister light, less as a bulwark of civilization than as a
deliberately intimidatory tool of control and repression. Even so, it can
still give a jolt to turn from inspecting artefacts as familiar as the
Vindolanda tablets to the adjacent display-case, where there is another
letter, very different in tone, waiting to be perused. Written on the orders
of the Jewish insurrectionist Simon bar Kokhba – or perhaps even in his very
hand – it was found in the so-called Cave of Letters, where desperate
refugees had ended up taking refuge after the failure of the third Jewish
uprising against Roman rule in barely fifty years.
The twin troves of letters, one found on the moors of northern England, and
the other in a desert wadi beside the Dead Sea, have never before been
brought together – and their close proximity serves to inspire a measure of
sombre reflection. Britannia and Judaea, for all that they stood at the
opposite ends of the Empire, suddenly do not seem so far apart. We know that
the general entrusted by Hadrian with the ultimate suppression of the Jewish
revolt throughout 135–6 was one Sextus Julius Severus, a former governor of
Britain. The same man who was to show himself so proficient in the arts of
counter-insurgency and extermination in Judaea would also have been
intimately involved in the construction of the Wall. This, in Hadrian’s
Empire, was what globalization could mean.
Not that the reflections caught in the show’s hall of mirrors necessarily all
derive from Roman times. On his coins, bar Kokhba referred to himself as
“Nasi Yisrael”: “Israel’s Leader”. Nineteen hundred years on, and with an
independent Jewish state established in what, ever since Hadrian’s crushing
of the bar Kokhba revolt, had been known as Palestine, the President of
Israel rejoices in an identical title. That a war fought in the second
century should have served to cast a terrible shadow over more recent times
is discreetly but poignantly conveyed. “In Hebrew”, reads the caption to a
tile showing the hobnailed imprint of a passing legionary, “the word
‘kalgas’ (derived from the Latin for sandals) came to denote a thuggish
soldier and has been used more recently in reference to the Nazis.”
Simultaneously, the fact that what was once the Roman province of Judaea
remains, as it was back in the 130s, a breeding ground for terrorism and
nationalist yearnings, is not without implications, perhaps, for how we will
end up interpreting Hadrian’s Wall. For a while now, the modish academic
comparison has been with the US–Mexico border-fence; possibly, in the near
future, it will be with the Israeli security barrier.
And here, surely, is the key to the abiding fascination that ancient Rome
holds for a Western audience. No sooner do we look back at it than we set to
finding parallels, inspirations, warnings. So much would have been evident
had this exhibition been staged at any venue. At the British Museum,
however, the implications become peculiarly resonant, as the layout of the
show is at pains to emphasize. Moving on, for instance, from the artefacts
testifying to the loss and ruin inflicted on Judaea during Hadrian’s reign,
visitors will find a huge image of the building that still endures as his
supreme achievement: the Pantheon. Step up closer to inspect it, and
suddenly the low, flat, temporary roof enclosing much of the first section
of the show is gone, and there, directly above, is an unobstructed view up
to the dome of the Reading Room. Shi Huang Di and his terracotta warriors,
brought to the British Museum, were always going to appear transplants,
fabulous and alien visitors, no matter the setting provided for them;
Hadrian, by contrast, appears perfectly at home.
This is not, of course, simply because Sydney Smirke’s dome is so obviously a
homage to the Pantheon; nor because so many exhibits from its founding
collection of classical statuary originally came, via Sir Charles Townley
and assorted middlemen, from the Emperor’s own personal collection. Rather,
it is because the very ideal of a museum as a depository of universal
culture, born in the eighteenth century and given such a stirring new lease
of life by the British Museum’s current director, Neil MacGregor, ultimately
had no more glamorous model than that provided by Hadrian. The immense and
incomparable villa built for the globe-trotting Emperor at Tivoli, built on
the scale of a town rather than a private residence, was consciously
designed to serve as a simulacrum of the civilized world: just as the
British Museum aspires to be today. It is in that sense that the current
exhibition in the Reading Room, as well as being about Hadrian, is also, in
the subtlest and most unobtrusive manner possible, about the British Museum
itself: about how it came to have its collections, about what inspires
people to visit it, and about the darkness that is inevitably the obverse of
its ideals.
More broadly, it is also about the history of our responses to vanished
civilizations – about how our very yearning to reconstitute and resurrect
them has consistently offered us a measure of fulfilment precisely by being
frustrated. “Time has marred everything!” So exclaimed Pius II, who, back in
the fifteenth century, combined the business of being pope with the odd
ramble through the ruins of Hadrian’s villa. “Briars and brambles have
sprung up where purple-robed tribunes sat and queens’ chambers are the lairs
of serpents. So fleeting are mortal things!” Visitors to the Reading Room,
as they inspect the haunting and enigmatic fragments displayed there, may
well find themselves tempted to indulge in similarly lofty reflections.
After all, more than artefacts from any other period or culture, perhaps, it
is those from the Roman world of the second century ad which have
traditionally served to inspire in the beholder pleasurable shivers of
melancholy. In part, of course, this is because we know what will follow the
saeculum aureum of Hadrian and his Antonine successors. We know that the
civilization praised by Aristeides for “adorning the world like a pleasure
garden” will soon enough find all its greatness turning to weeds and slow
decay. But in part, as well, it is because the temptation to locate in
Hadrian himself a very similar melancholy has always been such an
overwhelming one. The Emperor too, after all, knew what it was to suffer
loss. Standing sentinel in the Great Court outside the Reading Room there
stands a forbidding statue of Antinous, his golden lover, whose death in the
currents of the Nile inspired the distraught Caesar to paroxysms of grief.
The pharaonic fancy dress of the effigy should serve us as a reminder that
the love affair between the two men was in reality the expression of a
weirdly alien mindset: one filled with erotic power games, black magic and
invented gods coming back to life. Yet Antinous, over the course of the past
500 years, has repeatedly shown that he still has it in him to seduce.
Raphael drew him, and Lorenzetto sculpted him for a Roman church. Of one
marble, the so-called “Mondragone Antinous”, Johann Winckelmann exclaimed
that it was “one of the most beautiful things in the world”. Only two years
ago, when the same bust was lent by the Louvre to the Henry Moore Institute
in Leeds, the curators were startled to find, on unpacking it, that its
mouth bore the lipsticked imprint of a kiss. Even in these non-classicizing
times, it seems, Hadrian’s lover can inspire admirers to play at being
Pygmalion.
The Mondragone Antinous, which dominates the final section of the exhibition,
is a fitting counterpart to the grimmer artefacts featured previously in the
show. To be sure, it is good to be reminded of the brutality and destruction
that underpinned the achievements of Roman civilization; but so too is it
good to be reminded of just how enduringly those same achievements have
underpinned modern presumptions about what civilization is. If it is true,
as Yourcenar and so many others have suggested, that Hadrian and his age
hold up a mirror to ourselves, then it is the great achievement of this
exhibition to remind us that the reflections we catch there have been, at
least in part, created by ourselves.
Tom Holland is the author of Persian Fire: The first world empire and
the battle for the West, 2005, and Rubicon: The triumph and tragedy of the
Roman Republic, 2003. Millennium: The end of the world and the forging of
Christendom is due to be published later this year.
