Following Hadrian: A Second-Century Journey Through the Roman Empire

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Summary: Speller Brings a Great but Flawed Emperor to Life
Review: "Following Hadrian" is a quite compelling book. Hard to categorize, though; Elizabeth Speller's scholarship is impeccable; there are areas of original (and fascinating) research, but worn very lightly; yet she is not afraid to conjecture -- not least through the imagined words of the very real poet (and Hadrian's empress's closest companion) Iulia Balbilla.

It makes, as I said, for a compelling mix in which not only does the Hellenophile, restless, melancholy and endlessly-travelling Emperor Hadrian come vividly to life, but so do his surroundings, whether human or geographical, whether at home in his great villa at Tivoli; abroad in Egypt or (disastrously) Judea; or in the reeking, clattering, treacherous city of Rome, then the centre of the Empire and, it seemed, the world. The still-pronounced papal blessing "Urbi et Orbi" -- the City and the World -- takes on a new significance in the light of the world-view Speller presents.

Why Rome? Rome, I suppose, because we in the West have, ever since the Roman empire two thousand years ago, been just another, later sort of Roman. So much of our culture, our politics, our law, our understanding, and, above all, the exercise of power, derives from Rome. Particularly notable is Speller's exposition of Hadrian's disastrous -- and uncharacteristic -- attempt to invade, overturn and subdue a Semitic desert people who had aroused his anger by their response to what they saw as (what we'd now call) Rome's "cultural imperialism". Sound familiar? Regime Change? Then, it was the Jews, and the result was terrorism, guerilla warfare, an endless strain on Imperial resources, and the fateful Diaspora of the Jews. Now... now, we all know what it is, but we don't know the outcome. Yet.

But Speller has produced more than a historical tract linking past and present. "Following Hadrian" is also a deeply moving insight into the life of the then most potent human being on the planet, and the melancholical perplexity at the heart of his life. She ties together the majestic Grand Ringmaster of the Empire -- Hadrian had an understanding of power of the grand effect, particularly architectural, still unsurpassed -- with the trouble traveller, the seeker after obscure and often bizarre magical mysteries, the negligent husband, and (for which he is most famous) the lover of the young Antinous, still an icon of male beauty, whose mysterious death in the Nile -- suicide? murder? sacrifice? another of Hadrian's special effects? -- still exercises our imagination almost two millennia after it happened. If it ever did.

In sum, then, a remarkable book, as illuminating for the general reader as for an ancient historian, which belongs on student reading lists as well as on every historically-cultured person's bookshelf. Recommended without reservation.

Rating:
Summary: A desert trek
Review: Following Hadrian by Elizabeth Speller claims tofollow the Emperor Hadrian as he travels around his vast empire. It does in fact only cover a trip into Egypt in detail.

Speller gives a good biographical sketch of Hadrian and a very compelling assessment of his character. After those chapters the book pretty much ends. Speller relies on invented diary entries by an historic poetess to fill pages and clumsy attempts at irony and endless foreshadowing to give her narrative impetus.

This book is not a travelogue filled with the sights, sounds, dangers and pleasures of a lost world. For that read Tony Perrot's "Route 66 A.D." "Following Hadrian is a trek though the desert, dusty, dry and monotonous. It is an essay for a scholarly journal padded out into a book.