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Hadrian

He made London the capital

Clonk. They were rebuilding London Bridge in 1834 when workmen hit something on the bed of the river. It was green and slimy, but after they had got the mud off they could see it was a fine Roman head, 43 centimetres high and slightly over life-size.

It was an emperor, with a long straight nose and a slight frown and – aha – a beard and well-trimmed moustache. He wasn’t as fleshy as Nero, and the beard was less bushy than Marcus Aurelius. It was a delicate sort of beard. It belonged to a Hellenophile aesthete and intellectual, one of the greatest administrators the world has ever seen.

He was called Publius Aelius Trajanus Hadrianus Augustus, or Hadrian. Born in 76 AD of Spanish/Italian descent, he had spent his career touring the Empire and bequeathing us some of the most colossal ruins of the ancient world – from the rebuilt Pantheon in Rome to the Temple of Zeus in Athens to the British wall that bears his name.

Someone had made this fine bronze head in his honour and stuck it in the marketplace; and then someone else had come and chopped it off and chucked it in the river. They didn’t melt it down to make saucepans. They wanted to show active contempt. They wanted to humiliate the emperor and his sneer of cold command.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is probably almost 1700 years since this crime was committed, but I am going to produce for you individuals who had the motive, and the opportunity, to carry out this macabre offence …

To understand the mystery of the decapitation of Hadrian, you must grasp that this bronze object was actually divine. It was the head of a god. Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, had instituted the cunning system of the imperial cult, by which the emperor himself personified the majesty and divinity of Rome. If you were an ambitious local, and you wanted to get on in the Roman Empire, you became a priest in the imperial cult. That was why the first important temple of Roman Britain was the temple of the deified Claudius, and that was why Boudica took such pleasure in burning it down. It was a seat of local government, a symbol of power.

So when in 121 AD it was announced that the emperor – the living god – was actually coming to Britain, the news broke over London like thunder.

The Romans had almost panicked when Boudica torched the early settlements. Nero came close to abandoning the province altogether. But once she had been defeated, they decided it must not happen again. They poured money into the place, and from 78 to 84 AD the governor Agricola subsidised the building of squares and temples and grand housing of one kind or another. There were still uprisings, and pressure from the Celtic fringe, but in a sense the very threat of revolt was good for London. Thanks to the bridge, London was the centre of military operations, and that meant soldiers flush with cash.

The Londoners built baths at Cheapside and then at Huggin Hill, where they shocked purists by enjoying mixed bathing. There is an amphitheatre under the Guildhall, and you can go and have the spooky experience of standing on the spot where men and beasts were slaughtered, and you can inspect the bones of a female gladiator. In the sixty years between the Boudica revolt and the arrival of Hadrian, the Londoners Romanised fast.

They steadily took off their trousers and put on togas and started to get rather good at Latin – Tacitus says they spoke it better than the Gauls. They invited each other round to their dining rooms, painted a fashionable arterial red, to eat turbot on expensive Mediterranean silverware and to toast each other in Bordeaux or Moselle. It was the beginning of the London dinner party. ‘The native Britons described these things as civilisation,’ sneers Tacitus, ‘when in fact they were simply part of their enslavement.’

London was already a loyal and growing outpost. But when they heard the Emperor was on his way, the citizens went into overdrive. It was like being awarded the right to host the Olympics: the place had to look its best – and that meant infrastructure investment. The Emperor was known to like sleeping in the barracks with the troops, so the London authorities seem to have erected a new barracks for his visit – a big square fort at Cripplegate – complete with the living quarters that he famously liked to inspect.

What looks like a governor’s palace was constructed, a splendid place of courtyards and fountains, on the site of what is now Cannon Street station. They built a new forum, far grander than the patch of gravel on which Suetonius Paulinus had addressed the first Londoners, in an area partly now occupied by Leadenhall market. At the north end of this vast space they built a basilica – a mixture of a shopping centre and law courts.

If you go downstairs at the barbers at 90 Gracechurch Street you can see that this wasn’t any old basilica. Look at that great chunk of brick and masonry that formed one of the piers of the structure and you get a sense of the scale. This was the biggest forum and basilica north of the Alps. The building was 164 yards long, and when you look at the model in the museum of London you are forced to adjust your preconceptions about our city’s place in the Roman world.

When Hadrian arrived in AD 122 he found a big, bustling place, with a population of perhaps 100,000 and a ruling elite in a state of sycophantic ecstasy. They installed the emperor and his retinue in the smart new barracks and governor’s palace. They showed him the upgraded baths and the renovated forum and, like the man from Del Monte, the emperor nodded his approval. Then there is no doubt that they took him to that great basilica, and somewhere near what is now Leadenhall Market (we have found a big bronze arm from the neighbourhood) they unveiled their special sign of esteem – the statue, garlanded with flowers. The emperor beamed.

Then it seems highly likely that the Londoners had some sort of service; cowled priests of the cult of Hadrian gave thanks for his divine presence. They may even have slaughtered a cow or bull – right there in front of him – just to show how much they revered him. Or they might have slaughtered the bull to Jupiter. It didn’t matter. They were both gods. It is one of the most attractive features of Roman London (and the whole Roman world) that for hundreds of years it was a place of religious and racial tolerance.

Somewhere near Blackfriars Bridge Londoners built a temple to Isis, an Egyptian goddess of motherhood, whose husband Osiris personified the annual flooding of the Nile. We also have proof that they worshipped Cybele, or the Great Mother – Magna Mater. This Cybele was supposed to have conceived a passion for a young man called Atys, and when Atys failed to respond to her advances, she became jealous. When she caught him having it off with someone else she drove him so mad that he castrated himself. I am afraid that respectable young Londoners would celebrate their devotion to Magna Mater by doing the same – and we know this for sure because the river near London Bridge has also yielded a fearful set of serrated forceps, adorned with the heads of Eastern divinities. Experts have no doubt as to its purpose.

There is even a theory that the cult of Magna Mater is remembered today in the name of the nearby Church of Magnus Martyr, noted by TS Eliot for its ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’. Naturally it might seem repulsive to modern Christians that the name of this beautiful church should be contaminated by the memory of this savage Eastern cult of self-mutilation. And yet the worship of Magna Mater had more in common with Christianity than you might suppose.

What early Londoners liked about the story of Atys was that he may have died of his terrible self-inflicted injuries – but he then rose joyously from the dead. In traditional Greco-Roman religion there wasn’t much of an afterlife, and the underworld was a cold and miserable environment, populated by gibbering shades. In a Roman society where many faced earthly lives of hardship and injustice, it is not surprising that these Eastern tales of rebirth became ever more popular. Indeed, not long after leaving Britain Hadrian was to start his own bizarre cult of a boyfriend of his called Antinous, who had mysteriously drowned in the Nile. Temples and oracles were founded in the name of Antinous; coins were struck of the sulky-looking youth.

His cult became so huge that some Londoners would certainly have been among his adherents, because it was essentially another resurrection and redemption story, like Atys and Osiris. But of all the Eastern cults in London, the most popular – especially with legionaries – was Mithraism. This was the story of Mithras, the son of a life-giving rock, who killed a bull and released its blood for – you’ve guessed it – the rejuvenation of mankind.

The important point is that all these religions co-existed more or less happily. Just as the modern Hindu can go from the temple of Ganesh to the temple of Hanuman, Roman Londoners saw nothing odd about having a temple of Isis at Blackfriars, a temple of Magna Mater at London Bridge and a temple of Mithras at Mansion House.

And then along came another Eastern religion. Christianity on the face of it seemed to have much in common with these other cults. It discussed a young man of surpassing moral virtue, who died and was reborn as God. It offered the promise of eternal life. But Christianity was like the Judaism from which it emerged (and like the Islam which emerged from them both) in that it did not tolerate – and Christians would not accept – the idea of any coexisting religion, whether it was Jupiter, Isis, Hadrian, Cybele or anyone else.

‘I am the way, the truth and the life’, said Jesus. ‘No man shall come to the father except through me.’ It took a long time before Londoners showed any interest in this bold monotheistic assertion, but in 312 AD the Emperor Constantine changed the course of history by making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

The pagans started to come under pressure. On 18 September 1954 there was a sensation in the world of archaeology – and pretty big news all round – when it was revealed that Professor W F Grimes had discovered the long-sought Temple of Mithras near the Mansion House. It was all astonishingly well preserved.

You could see the place where the bulls had been killed, and their steaming blood splashed to the ground. You could work out where the Mithraic torch-bearers had stood – Cautes with his torch pointed upwards, Cautopates with his torch pointed down. You could imagine the chanting congregation in the dark and smoky Mithraeum, all giving thanks and praise for the sacrifice of the animal. But as Professor Grimes studied the temple, he could see that something funny had been going on.

Significant objects appeared to have been buried in shallow pits beneath the nave and the aisles. There was a head of Mithras with his Phrygian snood; there was a statue of Serapis and a dagger-wielding hand. It wasn’t long before the archaeologists had come up with a theory.

Sometime in the early fourth century AD, the Mithraist Londoners began to face persecution; then one day they could take the insults and the bullying no longer. Fearing that the game was nearly up, they had stolen into their temple and buried their most sacred objects.

Shortly thereafter their religious competitors broke in and smashed every remaining statue, kicked down the altar and destroyed the Temple of Mithras, just as they destroyed the Serapaeum of Alexandria and other mighty shrines. The religious pluralism of early London gave way to the monotheism of Yahweh.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that it was these same people who went to their forum, pulled down the idolatrous statue of the pagan man-god Hadrian, and threw it in the river. My hunch is that it was the Christians; and that they may even have had particular objections to Hadrian. If you read the early Church fathers such as Tertullian, or Origen, and the homophobic venom to which they were inspired by the memory of Hadrian and the cult of Antinous, you will see what I mean.

Christianity triumphed across the Roman world and the cult of the emperor was over. You don’t have to go as far as Edward Gibbon, who blamed Christianity for the Fall of Rome (he claimed that its doctrine of meekness was antithetical to the Roman ancestral love of martial glory) to see that something had been lost.

That bronze head of Hadrian incarnated the authority of Rome, in divine form. Once it was clear the emperor was no longer divine – well, anybody could be emperor, or could try to be. From the middle of the third century on, the garrison of London was weakened by the demand for troops on other frontiers.

Units were constantly sent to support some of the myriad pretenders to the imperial throne, and the province became subject to terrifying raids from what are now Holland and Germany. Living standards declined in London; cows and pigs were housed on mosaic floors. After AD 402 no new imperial coinage entered London and from 410 the province was officially abandoned.

Roman Britain was a long time dying; and, as we shall see, the memory of that epoch was never entirely to fade in the imaginations of Londoners.

Hadrian’s mission to the city was brief but not insignificant. He triggered a spurt of building that helped shape the city for hundreds of years. He formally turned London into the capital of the province, and relegated Colchester. He set up the physical schism between England and Scotland that endures to this day, and that has excited Londoners such as Samuel Johnson to satirical rudeness.

His rule embraced a spirit of religious tolerance that the city was not to recapture until the twentieth century. Sometimes I stop my bike at the remains of the Temple of Mithras, which have been removed from their original site and are now displayed on Queen Victoria Street.

Go and look at those enigmatic courses of stone and brick, once deep in a cellar, now out in the wind and rain. Imagine the poor Mithraists, fleeing in terror before the Christians. Think of their tears as they watched their sacred statues smashed to bits. It wouldn’t have happened in our day, and it wouldn’t have happened in Hadrian’s.

What happened next is a terrible warning to all those liberal educationalists who believe that standards will always keep rising. Wave after wave of invaders so shattered the old Roman system that civilisation all but collapsed. Londoners forgot their Latin. They forgot how to read; they forgot how to repair a bridge. Between the years AD 400 and 850 we find no traces of any human occupation of Southwark. There is only one conclusion: that pontoon bridge of Aulus Plautius, repaired and reinforced by generations of Londoners, had decayed and toppled into the river. The vital link was gone. There were still some hairy-looking Londoners living around what is now Covent Garden – peasants and swineherds – but the population had plummeted.

In AD 800 Baghdad had a million people, a glorious circle of scholars and poets, and a library of thousands of books on everything from algebra to medicine to watch-making. By the same year London had returned to barbarism. They were neither Roman nor Christian, until in the early seventh century a man was sent from Rome to try to rescue the situation. His name was Mellitus, which means ‘honeyed’, and you have a job to find Londoners who have heard of him.