Hadrian

Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire from AD 117 to 138 and abandoned some of Trajan’s recent conquests in favour of consolidation and defensible frontiers. He travelled extensively, inspected armies, reorganised administration and sponsored architecture across the empire, including the wall bearing his name in Britain. His reign also included the destructive Bar Kokhba revolt in Judaea. Hadrian’s relationship with Antinous and the cult created after the young man’s death became central to his cultural legacy.

Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian is the defining modern historical novel about the emperor, presenting his life as a reflective letter to Marcus Aurelius. Other Roman fiction often uses his journeys, building projects and frontier policy as a setting. Yourcenar’s psychologically subtle Hadrian has been highly influential, though it remains an imaginative reconstruction shaped by twentieth-century literary concerns.

In non-fiction, Hadrian is discussed in Adrian Goldsworthy’s In the Name of Rome, Adrian Goldsworthy’s Pax Romana, Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome, and Ammianus Marcellinus’s The Later Roman Empire. Adrian Goldsworthy’s In the Name of Rome approaches the subject through political ambition and government, military command and battlefield decision-making, and empire, conquest and resistance.