Publius Aelius Hadrianus (24 January 76 – 10 July 138) was Roman emperor from 117 to 138. The second provincian emperor, he succeeded Trajan both in the purple and the set of the Five Good Emperors, being considered another of the greatest of The Roman Empire. He was a deeply intellectual emperor with a very personal approach to just everything, similar to Trajan in many ways yet his complete opposite in others, all of which made him an extremely divisive figure, even back in his own time.
He came from an aristocratic family who settled in Italica, Hispania (modern day Santiponce), although sources are unsure whether he was really born there or in Rome and moved to Italica very young. He became an orphan at ten and was adopted by his distant relative Trajan, who endowed in him a love for Greek arts and culture. Hadrian apparently was a Genius Bruiser, excelling at hunting and sports yet also being so brainy that he earned the mocking nickname of Graeculus ("Little Greek" or "Greekling"). He served as a military tribune for several years, being supposedly who gave Trajan the news of his own promotion to emperor, and after this he became part of Trajan's politic entourage. It's said that Hadrian and Trajan were lovers in the old Greek style, and that other lovers to Trajan were jealous of him and stirred trouble between both (not to mention Trajan reportedly saw him as a worthy but excessively ambitious successor), but he had the support of the emperor's wife Pompeia Plotina and their backer Lucius Licinius Sura, which eventually got him the next in the line to be emperor after Trajan's death in 117.
Like Trajan in his own, Hadrian invested the first months of his mandate securing the empire's military positions, as well as suppressing the Jewish Revolts that had impeded Trajan from continuing his campaigns. However, probably influenced by those aforementioned experiences, Hadrian shocked the Senate by purging Trajan's four most powerful friends on accusations of conspiracy, making it very clear that things were going to change and nobody would stop it. He then cancelled all of Trajan's expansionist projects in Mesopotamia and adopted a conservative military policy that was similarly shocking on sheer suddenness, declaring the conquests to be Awesome, but Impractical and instead building fortifications to defend the Roman frontiers, like the famous Hadrian's Wall in Britannia. Combined with his growing relationships with the political landscape of his beloved Greek Mediterranean, these measures soured Hadrian to the high class and consequently the Senate never forgave him, considering him an autocrat and a snob (that is, the most un-Roman things imaginable) until the last day of his life. This image is not terribly far from reality, as Hadrian turned out quite zealous in his ideas about how to run the empire and could sprout massive Control Freak streaks, but he generally proved to be a thoroughly capable ruler, who produced a very prosperous administration.
Part of his bad relationship with the Senate came from the very first time he spoke there, although ironically, it was not because he already appeared snobbish to them, but rather the opposite. Far from scoring the badass, dignified introduction he expected, Hadrian saw the senators laughing at his heavy southern Hispanic accent, which already at the time was considered funny (the modern Andalusian accent strongly relates to the stereotype of southern Spaniards being something like The Idiot from Osaka). Hadrian toiled to get rid of the accent as soon as possible, but didn't forget the offense.
In any case, and over many other things, Hadrian stood out for his love for all things Greek, especially philosophy and high culture. He was a personal friend of the Stoic Epictetus and at the same time a benefactor of the Epicurean school, the last of which you can note in his ideas that the Roman Empire should be a peaceful, harmonious community rather than a land-grabbing predatory regime. Having some facial scars to hide, he even adopted the Greek tradition of sporting a beard, which he popularized to such degree (Nero had also one, but he was, well, Nero) that most emperors after him did the same, with or without scars, in order not to look any less smart and lordly. The most Greek thing he did, though, was loving a Greek teenager, Antinous, whose tragic death led the grieving Hadrian to found entire cities and religious cults in his honor. Less histrionically, Hadrian also built libraries, theaters and temples, rebuilt the Serapeum of Alexandria from damage suffered in the Jewish revolt, continued Trajan's merciful stance towards Christians, did the first attempt ever to codify Roman law in the the Perpetual Edict, and condemned the mistreatment of slaves in an act that was quite Fair for Its Day.
He was married to Vibia Sabina, Trajan's niece, who went to enjoy a high popularity as an empress, but their marriage was plagued by the fact that they simply couldn't stand each other, and ultimately produced no children. At least part of the problem was that Hadrian was way more interested in Antinous and the rest of his male lovers, which she considered the peak of conjugal dishonor. This has led to the modern belief that he was simply unattracted by women and never touched her at all, but reality seems to have been the opposite: Hadrian and Sabina did sleep together, only that she used contraceptives (she might have got at least one abortion) because she refused to have children with such a vicious husband. Probably as a way to spite Hadrian further, Sabina herself had an affair with historian Suetonius, which got him expelled from the court for the scandal.
By this point the reader might feel like Hadrian's biography is a roller coaster of virtue and gnarliness, and certainly, especially by the standards of the Five Good Emperors, Hadrian could be dangerously impulsive and over-sensitive for all of his enlightened mindset, which sometimes gives the implication he was not entirely well up there. At one instance, he lost his patience with a slave and stabbed him the eye with a pen, only for dearly repent immediately afterwards and try to compensate him with everything he could.note His obsession for having everything his way also led him to have an ugly relationship with the great architect Apollodorus of Damascus, whom Hadrian quarrelled so often with that he eventually got tired and had Apollodorus executed (and probably repented later). It's ironic and a bit sad that Hadrian admired the young Marcus Aurelius and considered him the perfect heir, yet in turn, although Marcus had nothing bad to say of Hadrian as an emperor, he does not list Hadrian among the people who ever taught him anything good in his Meditations.
Hadrian's defensive military approach was controversial at his time, with people even speculating that he had abandoned Trajan's glorious conquests as a deliberate way to belittling his legacy, although he was more likely sincere in his opinion that the whole thing was too costly and not entirely justifiable. He was still considered a perfectly competent general, obsessed with keeping his armies well oiled and drilled in preparation for any foreign attack, and had a few innovations in his resume, such as introducing heavy cavalry in the Persian style (the famous cataphracts) and incorporating non-citizen numeri troops. Being opposed to expansionism, his most famous actions would be suppressing local revolts across the empire, the bloody Bar Kokhba revolt being the most notorious, which was apparently caused by either mismanagement of local land owners or the typical clash between Jewish customs and Hellenic cosmopolitanism, and which ended with a difficult pacification and a comparable punishment.
Hadrian spent more than half of his mandate travelling throughout the empire, personally supervising its workings, but he returned at the end of his life, when his health declined dramatically, to clear out the difficult topic of his succession. As mentioned above, he had no children with Sabina, who had died years earlier (it was rumored he finally got tired of her and had her poisoned), which caused a string of adoptions ultimately concluding in future emperor Antoninus Pius, with the condition that Antoninus adopted Marcus Aurelius as his own. He died at the age of 62 after several attempts of putting himself out of his misery, bent on controlling all factors of his existence to the very end.
