Word: hadrian
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Although married to a relative of Trajan, Hadrian openly loved a Greek youth, Antinous, who is known to have accompanied him on at least one lion-hunting trip. His relationship with this boy would have raised few eyebrows - the Roman élite embraced homoerotic culture and celebrated it in works of art. Hadrian's reaction to his death, however, was unprecedented. After Antinous drowned in the Nile in A.D. 130, Hadrian mourned him as if he were an Empress and encouraged cults to venerate the lowly youth. He surrounded himself with marble statues and busts of Antinous, at least...
...Hadrian also worked to secure his popularity outside the city, traveling the empire to cultivate alliances, particularly with the Greeks. Through iconography, he cast himself as the protector of Greek culture, which still held sway throughout the eastern Mediterranean and beyond: an imposing statue of Hadrian in military regalia shows him trampling a barbarian - powerful imagery in the Greek portion of the empire, which had been traumatized by rebellion. His breastplate further emphasizes the Greco-Roman union, displaying the Greek goddess Athena standing upon a she-wolf that was a symbol of Rome...
...Hadrian's interest in Greece went beyond state security. "He wanted to become a Greek," says Anthony Birley, author of the biography Hadrian: The Restless Emperor. Hadrian admired Greek language and architecture, and became the first emperor to sport a beard, then fashionable in the Greek world. Busts of Hadrian display his lavish curls, which specially trained slaves coiffed with irons...
...this exhibition makes clear, it would be too simplistic to remember Hadrian merely as a canny practitioner of realpolitik and a tragic victim of doomed love. He was also a victimizer - a ruler with a barbaric legacy in parts of his empire. Seeking to bring Jerusalem to heel as a Roman colony, he stripped it of its name, outlawed circumcision and built a temple to Jupiter near the site of the great Jewish Temple, which the Romans had sacked in A.D. 71. When Simon Bar Kokhba led a Jewish rebellion beginning in A.D. 132, Hadrian's troops exacted revenge: according...
...display are implements that belonged to refugees from this conflict - mirrors, pans, house keys and a jewelry box found alongside their skeletons in a cave where they hid. "The last people to touch these items before our colleagues in Israel's museums," says Opper, "were the people awaiting Hadrian's onslaught." These humble objects - perfectly preserved in the desert heat - may be quotidian, yet they offer as resonant an insight into Hadrian's world as the exquisitely refined statues that he commissioned to memorialize the love he had lost...