People could still remember the young man who read out Trajan’s letters to the Senate in a Spanish accent. A half foreigner, he had spent most of his adult career soldiering abroad on the empire’s barbarian frontiers. If he was to take to the road for long years in the provinces, as he meant to do, imperium would accompany him—and the city would risk losing its proud sense of itself as capital of the world. Hadrian took two steps that would prove beyond doubt his devotion, his pietas, that most traditional of virtues. First he designed a temple dedicated to the goddess Venus, mother of Aeneas, who renewed ruined Troy in the fields of Latium, and Roma, the city’s divine spirit. This huge structure was to rest on a high man-made platform on the Velia, a low hill between the Forum and the Colosseum. It was to be large enough to rival the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol, at the Forum’s other end, and no doubt that visual echo was what the emperor intended.
What do You think about Hadrian And The Triumph Of Rome?
