WE are already familiar with the extraction and the training of the next Empress of Rome. Sabina was the elder daughter of Trajan’s niece Matidia, and came of the sound and sober stock of the Spanish provincials. We first meet her in the little settlement on the Rhine, where she lived with her widowed mother and grandmother, in Trajan’s house, during the reign of Galba and Nerva. She was in her early teens, a grave and modest child, easily directed by the three sedate ladies of the house. Very shortly after the accession of Trajan, a charming young officer burst into the camp to offer his congratulations. He had a romantic story to tell, how a jealous brother-in-law had bribed his servants to break down the chariot on the way, and he had crossed the great forests on foot to greet his guardian and cousin. It was the future Emperor, and her future husband, Hadrian.  
The wicked brother-in-law, Ursus Servianus, presently arrived, and put before Trajan a proof of his ward’s enormities in the shape of a list of his debts. But Trajan was charmed with the handsome and brilliant young officer, kept him in his suite, and took him to Rome when he went up to occupy the throne; and we saw that he became a great favourite of the Imperial ladies. His father had been a first cousin of Trajan, but Hadrian lost him at the age of ten, and was committed to the guardianship of Trajan and Attianus. The finest masters of Rome directed his studies in letters, art, rhetoric, and philosophy,150 and he became a most accomplished and learned, as well as, by hunting and exercise, a graceful and energetic youth. The “Historia Augusta” expressly says that Trajan “loved him,” and he advanced quickly, and enjoyed the brilliant literary society of the palace and the capital. About two years after their coming to Rome he married Sabina. One chronicler represents him as spending large sums of money to win her, and so incurring the annoyance of Trajan; another states that he turned with disdain from her plain propriety, and had to be persuaded by Plotina that the marriage was to his interest. It was, at all events, clearly a mariage de convenance, and was destined to have the customary sequel.
Sabina would be in her twelfth or thirteenth year at the time, and we can imagine the mating of the prim little maiden with the brilliant scholar and promising officer of twenty-four. For many years she is no more than the silent shadow of her husband, and we can only dimly follow her movements as she accompanies him about the Empire. Whether she accompanied him on the Dacian wars between 101 and 106, or, as seems more probable, remained at Rome to develop a taste for letters in the palace of Plotina, we cannot confidently say, but it is recorded that she did lean to culture. Hadrian was back in 106, high in the favour of Trajan, who gave him the diamond ring he had received from Nerva. He could both fight and carouse to the Emperor’s satisfaction. He was made pr?tor on his return, and gave brilliant games—at Trajan’s expense—in which 11,000 beasts were slain. In quick succession he became legate in Lower Pannonia and consul. The aged statesman Sura told him that he was destined for the throne; the rumour went about Rome, and the nobles, at first disdainful of his provincial accent and jealous of his progress, began to respect him. He, and most probably Sabina, accompanied Trajan on his fatal journey to the East, and we have seen what happened.
In the year 117, in about the thirtieth year of her age,151 Sabina found herself Empress of Rome, but the elevation seems to have brought her little happiness and impelled her to no exertion. There is little room for doubt that, either in the camp or in the tainted atmosphere of Rome or Antioch, Hadrian had contracted the vice which prevailed among Roman men. There is another reason, however, why Sabina remains in obscurity in the chronicles. Hadrian’s biographer, Gregorovius, has relieved him of the common charge that he relinquished the conquests of Trajan, and neglected Imperial interests, in a less enlightened zeal for art and letters. Hadrian had a clear, commendable, and vast policy. He believed that the Empire would only be weakened by extension, and that it was a saner ambition to enrich and uplift the life within its frontiers than to enlarge them. His life was spent in a magnificent realization of this design; and it was a design so far beyond the modest range of Sabina’s political intelligence that she was forced to remain a spectator of his work. She seems, very naturally, to have carped at his one frailty, which so nearly concerned her, and Hadrian replied peevishly, and merely conveyed her as an uninterested encumbrance in the remarkable voyages which fill the twenty years of his reign.
Hadrian was then in his fortieth year, a tall, very handsome and athletic man, of brilliant conversation, untiring energy, and great public spirit. The most artistic of all Roman Emperors, one of the most artistic and cultured of monarchs, indeed, he could nevertheless endure the plain bread-and-cheese of the soldier for weeks together; and he so much discarded his horse and his chariot, for their encouragement, that a chronicler describes him as having covered the entire Empire on foot. By diplomacy and by bribes, which we may or may not admire, he secured an almost unbroken peace for the Empire during two decades; and the works of use or adornment with which he enriched every province of the Empire during those twenty years make up an almost fabulous achievement. Much as we must sympathize with152 the Empress in her resentment of the practice into which his Greek-Oriental tastes betrayed him, we cannot deny that Hadrian was a great and beneficent ruler. The sketch of his life in that prurient work, the “Historia Augusta”—the chronique scandaleuse of the middle Empire—is a monumental, if unconscious, panegyric.
The biographer of the Empresses cannot escape the conclusion that Sabina was not a fitting mate for so versatile and constructive a genius. Her superiority in decency is enormously outweighed by Hadrian’s magnificent work for the Empire. The natural alienation of the two in sentiment would not encourage her to co-operate in his work, in the fashion set by Livia and Plotina, but one feels that this is not the sole explanation, and that her mediocre faculty was entirely absorbed in a small pursuit of culture. It is not impossible that, if there had been cordial co-operation between them, she would have saved Hadrian from the only serious stains on the record of his reign.
The first of these occurred in the year following his accession. Bringing to the Imperial task a fresh and vigorous mind, untainted by mere military ambition—though he was an excellent soldier—Hadrian glanced round the Empire, and saw that peace must first be established on its frontiers. The East was aflame with revolt, the African and German boundaries were disturbed, and trouble was announced from Britain. He at once sacrificed the conquests beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, appeased the Jews and the other peoples of the East, and passed to Lower Germany to still the restlessness of the northern frontier. There had been some discontent among the older soldiers and statesmen of Rome at his being forced on them. From Jud?a he had imprudently sent one of Trajan’s most fiery commanders, the Moorish prince Lusius Quietus, back in some disgrace to the capital, and this man and others formed a party of opposition. When they saw that he was sacrificing Trajan’s conquests and reversing his policy, and especially when he proposed to153 evacuate Dacia also, they entered, it is said, into something of the nature of a conspiracy.
How far Hadrian was really responsible for the execution of the leaders of this party we cannot say, and his emphatic denial of responsibility is entitled to consideration. We know that, when the aged statesman Attianus wrote to urge him that the Roman prefect and other distinguished malcontents ought to be removed, he refused to take any action. The Senate now announced that a plot to assassinate Hadrian had been detected, and it put to death, without trial, four men of consular rank, Nigrinus, Palma, Celsus, and Lusius Quietus. A sullen murmur passed through the city, and Hadrian hastily composed his affairs on the Danube and went to Rome. He resolutely denied that he had consented to the executions, and the question remains open.
With this public resentment in view, Hadrian at once lavished the most princely favours on Rome, and swore that he would never execute a Senator without the consent of his order. He remitted debts to the treasury to the extent of ￡9,000,000, extended the existing charities to orphans and widows, provided magnificent spectacles for the people, and made a sacrifice of Attianus, by deposing him, to the anger of the malcontents. When the Senate offered him the triumph which had been due to Trajan for the Eastern victories, he refused it, and placed a wax image of the dead Emperor in the triumphal chariot. The citizens of Rome may have been less impressed when he showed a zeal for public morals, and forbade the mixed bathing that had hitherto been permitted; but he succeeded, by two years of untiring public service, in removing the earlier resentment. That he wished to kill Attianus, and did actually execute the architect Apollodorus, are idle legends. Serviez seriously reproduces the story that the architect had snubbed him—telling him to “go and paint his pumpkins”—when he had made a suggestion to him in earlier years, and that Hadrian avenged himself when he came to the throne. The truth is that the “Historia154 Augusta” describes him in consultation with Apollodorus on some building project ten years later.
The details of this vast activity of Hadrian’s do not concern us, as Sabina seems to have taken no part in it. The busts we have of her seem to show a cold and irresponsive temper, as if the Empress were contemplating disdainfully the figure of the beautiful Oriental youth on whom Hadrian’s affection became concentrated. There is distinction in the smooth lines of the face and in the lofty forehead, and there is a proud strength that might very well make her “morose and harsh,” as Hadrian described her, when he gave her such palpable cause for resentment. Her mother died in 119. In a florid oration Hadrian praised her beauty of person and character, but the death would not be likely to improve the relations of the Imperial spouses.
In the year 120 or 121 Hadrian set out on the first of the long journeys which fill the rest of his career, and Sabina made the tour of the world with him. Had their intercourse been more pleasant, the lot of Sabina during the next fifteen years would have been one of great fortune. They passed together over the whole Roman world from Eboracum (York) to Arabia and Egypt, surveying the ruined Empires of the past and the young nations of the future in the light of whatever culture the age afforded; and so beneficent was their passage that myriads of inscriptions and coins, bearing such legends as “Golden Age” and “Restorer of the Earth,” handed on to posterity the memory of the great works which Hadrian everywhere inaugurated. Through Gaul—probably through the flourishing Greek colony of Massilia (Marseilles), the solid and cultured city of Lugdunum (Lyons), and the little trading centre, Lutetia, that would one day be brilliant Paris—they passed on to Germany, and traversed the boundless forests that hid the soil of a great modern nation. No glittering pomp of guards surrounded the Emperor. Bareheaded alike in the snows of Germany and under the sun of Syria, marching commonly on foot in the dress of155 a soldier, and living on soldier’s fare, he restored the rigid discipline of the legions wherever he went. Bridges, aqueducts, roads, temples, and colonnaded squares sprang up in the rear of his march. His staff was a band of engineers and architects.
 
SABINA
BUST IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM
In this novel and admirable company Sabina made the round of Gaul and Germany, and crossed over to Britain in the Imperial galleys. From the little colony of Londinium (London), which had been destroyed sixty years before, and was now restored by Hadrian, they passed along the solid Roman road to Eboracum (York), the last great station from which civilization looked out on the turbulent waves of Scottish barbarism. It was then that Hadrian ordered the building of the great wall, to keep off the Caledonian marauders, of which the traces still exist. Sabina may have remained in York while Hadrian surveyed the rough territory to the north, and it seems to have been on the Emperor’s return that an episode occurred which must have greatly embittered her.
One of Hadrian’s secretaries was the historian Suetonius, whose work on the Emperors has provided us with much material. With him and the cultivated commander of the Pr?torian Guards Sabina maintained a close friendship, and Hadrian made a grievance of it. So closely did he pry into the affairs of his friends that the rumour was set about that he had many mistresses among their wives. It was reported to him that Suetonius and Septicius Clarus “were behaving with more familiarity than the dignity of the Imperial house permitted,” as Spartianus puts it, and they were dismissed. There is no suggestion of grave irregularity on her part. The idea of divorcing Sabina, which Hadrian is said to have discussed, is expressly connected with what he called her “moroseness and asperity”; and we can well believe that her asperity took the form of bitter complaints about his own conduct. Nothin............