Hadrian exhibition: Look on this work, ye mighty, and despair
In post-imperial Europe empires usually get a bad press. Yet they continue to haunt our collective imagination. It is hard to look at the ever-expanding EU without thinking of the Roman empire, which successive conquerors have sought to recreate ever since. It was hard not to be conscious of the reviving power of imperial China during the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing. That was surely the point?
The upside of empire is order, stability, trade and prosperity, the spread of imperial best practice. The downside is taxation, incompetent tyranny and cultural suppression. One country I know didn't get its roads improved for a good 1,400 years after the empire pulled out. You know it, too: it's ours.
As you may have guessed I caught up with the British Museum's Hadrian exhibition this morning, at a viewing organised by the Guardian. I wasn't as impressed as I had been by the terracotta warriors from China – the first in a series of four on early world empires – perhaps because we all know more about Rome. The previously unknown has a bigger "wow" factor – none bigger than all those life-size warriors, inferior though they are to contemporary Greek sculpture.
Hadrian is being sold in the exhibition's publicity as a man to teach us plenty about our own circumstances. The obvious bit of relevance is that within days - or even hours - of finally clinching the messy succession to his patron, the expansionary warrior emperor, Trajan (of column fame), he ordered the withdrawal of over-extended Roman armies from what is now Iraq.
As the BM's director, Neil McGregor, reminds visitors, the sensitivity of the region has since been doubly reinforced by the flare-up to the north, the dispute between Russia and Georgia-with-US-backing. Hadrian pulled back from there too, leaving it to the Parthians, successors to the mighty Persian and Alexandrine empires.
In fact most of the geopolitical faultlines that troubled Hadrian (born AD76, died AD138) continue to give us grief today: the Caucuses, the Balkans, the Middle East, north Africa. My working assumption is usually that political and cultural instabilities chiefly arise from geography, deserts easily overrun but hard to hold, or mountainous areas almost impossible to conquer at all.
Cultivated and bookish, the Spanish-born "Greekling" (he wore a Greek beard) built great buildings that endure to this day, notably the Pantheon in Rome, which, what with the Venetians accidentally blowing up the Parthenon in Athens, so I was taught, is the only building from the classical era to survive with its roof intact. The BM exhibition also gives a fair impression of Hadrian's dacha at Tivoli, which was enormous; you can imagine Roman (sic) Abramovich copying it.
But Hadrian's fame as a top-ranking emperor rests basically on his famous consolidation of Rome's borders, roughly at the limits of intensive agriculture of the time: lands fertile and organised enough to be worth taxing and thus able to pay for their own upkeep. Beyond that lay the forest of the barbarians.
Hence the famous Wall that bears his name, which I still plan to walk (one day). It wasn't the only such delineation he established: ditches, walls, ramparts, he had them built on the Rhine, Danube and in Africa during his restless journeys through the empire, reforming the army, ensuring its loyalty.
Though Trajan was honoured as a great soldier, he'd actually screwed up and left much of the empire in revolt, not least Judea. Coins and other relics on display at the BM, from the Jews last stand on the desert plateau of Masada, are tokens of the last free Jewish state until 1948. No wonder Israeli soldiers sometimes swear "Masada shall not fall again".
There are delightful quirks in the exhibition, not least the deep crease in both of Hadrian's ear lobes, which allow archeologists to identity the busts and statues of the emperor which keep turning up, three huge fragments of a five metre job in Turkey only last year. They are on show at the BM, the foot 80cm (2.6ft) long, the head alone weighing half a tonne. This show has to be well-engineered too.
But such exhibitions also illustrate the transient nature of empire. Every year I read of ones of which I had never previously heard, mighty multinational constructions which endured a century or two, then went the way of Shelley's Ozymandias, "king of kings".
Looking back on our own imperial phase – about 350 years from start to finish – it now looks absurdly flimsy, caught in a near-permanent and costly running crisis. Yet we succumbed to all the illusions of grandeur and permanence well into the 20th century, when the writing was in the wall in flashing neon.
When all is said and done, that's the point about Hadrian, that he understood imperial overstretch and the need for realism as top-dog nations rarely do in their brief glory. Perhaps the BM should ship the show to Washington, via Moscow and Beijing – though its message is unlikely to be welcome to any of them.
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
The upside of empire is order, stability, trade and prosperity, the spread of imperial best practice. The downside is taxation, incompetent tyranny and cultural suppression. One country I know didn't get its roads improved for a good 1,400 years after the empire pulled out. You know it, too: it's ours.
As you may have guessed I caught up with the British Museum's Hadrian exhibition this morning, at a viewing organised by the Guardian. I wasn't as impressed as I had been by the terracotta warriors from China – the first in a series of four on early world empires – perhaps because we all know more about Rome. The previously unknown has a bigger "wow" factor – none bigger than all those life-size warriors, inferior though they are to contemporary Greek sculpture.
Hadrian is being sold in the exhibition's publicity as a man to teach us plenty about our own circumstances. The obvious bit of relevance is that within days - or even hours - of finally clinching the messy succession to his patron, the expansionary warrior emperor, Trajan (of column fame), he ordered the withdrawal of over-extended Roman armies from what is now Iraq.
As the BM's director, Neil McGregor, reminds visitors, the sensitivity of the region has since been doubly reinforced by the flare-up to the north, the dispute between Russia and Georgia-with-US-backing. Hadrian pulled back from there too, leaving it to the Parthians, successors to the mighty Persian and Alexandrine empires.
In fact most of the geopolitical faultlines that troubled Hadrian (born AD76, died AD138) continue to give us grief today: the Caucuses, the Balkans, the Middle East, north Africa. My working assumption is usually that political and cultural instabilities chiefly arise from geography, deserts easily overrun but hard to hold, or mountainous areas almost impossible to conquer at all.
Cultivated and bookish, the Spanish-born "Greekling" (he wore a Greek beard) built great buildings that endure to this day, notably the Pantheon in Rome, which, what with the Venetians accidentally blowing up the Parthenon in Athens, so I was taught, is the only building from the classical era to survive with its roof intact. The BM exhibition also gives a fair impression of Hadrian's dacha at Tivoli, which was enormous; you can imagine Roman (sic) Abramovich copying it.
But Hadrian's fame as a top-ranking emperor rests basically on his famous consolidation of Rome's borders, roughly at the limits of intensive agriculture of the time: lands fertile and organised enough to be worth taxing and thus able to pay for their own upkeep. Beyond that lay the forest of the barbarians.
Hence the famous Wall that bears his name, which I still plan to walk (one day). It wasn't the only such delineation he established: ditches, walls, ramparts, he had them built on the Rhine, Danube and in Africa during his restless journeys through the empire, reforming the army, ensuring its loyalty.
Though Trajan was honoured as a great soldier, he'd actually screwed up and left much of the empire in revolt, not least Judea. Coins and other relics on display at the BM, from the Jews last stand on the desert plateau of Masada, are tokens of the last free Jewish state until 1948. No wonder Israeli soldiers sometimes swear "Masada shall not fall again".
There are delightful quirks in the exhibition, not least the deep crease in both of Hadrian's ear lobes, which allow archeologists to identity the busts and statues of the emperor which keep turning up, three huge fragments of a five metre job in Turkey only last year. They are on show at the BM, the foot 80cm (2.6ft) long, the head alone weighing half a tonne. This show has to be well-engineered too.
But such exhibitions also illustrate the transient nature of empire. Every year I read of ones of which I had never previously heard, mighty multinational constructions which endured a century or two, then went the way of Shelley's Ozymandias, "king of kings".
Looking back on our own imperial phase – about 350 years from start to finish – it now looks absurdly flimsy, caught in a near-permanent and costly running crisis. Yet we succumbed to all the illusions of grandeur and permanence well into the 20th century, when the writing was in the wall in flashing neon.
When all is said and done, that's the point about Hadrian, that he understood imperial overstretch and the need for realism as top-dog nations rarely do in their brief glory. Perhaps the BM should ship the show to Washington, via Moscow and Beijing – though its message is unlikely to be welcome to any of them.