It was a crucial moment in history. The empire was overstretched; treachery lay around each corner and there was little sense of control or succession. A new leader takes over and withdraws his armies from Iraq and builds new walls around the borders. Sound familiar?
No – it’s not today’s western Europe and the struggle in the middle east. It’s a description of what the Emperor Hadrian did when he succeeded Trajan and took control of the Roman Empire in AD117.
Hadrian: Empire and Conflict (July 24 - October 26) is one of the most eagerly awaited exhibitions in recent times in London, and not just because of its apparently topical themes. It’s been eagerly awaited because the show brings together many rarely seen artefacts; it re-unites and combines again objects and sculptures that together paint a fascinating picture of life in Hadrian’s empire.
More than anything, it presents to the visitor astonishing new discoveries fresh from the ground that open up new ways to see this fascinating, cultured but brutal man. One side of the legend is represented by delicate silver cups replete with fornicating men; statues of the great man himself dressed as a Greek god and the elaborate mausoleum built to honour his memory when he passed on.
But another and much more sinister side of the legend is demonstrated by the display here – for the very first time outside Israel – of incredibly well preserved but poignant objects from the Cave of Letters, where Jews sheltered from the Roman legions during the Jewish Rebellion in 132 AD.
It’s shocking to see just a few surviving relics from a once populous race who were exterminated in a systematic purge on a village-by-village, house-to-house basis.
And yet we find elsewhere in the show that Hadrian himself was a cultured artistic man. He valued the arts and particularly architecture and made it part of his life’s work to build extravagant structures that stretched the boundaries of what could be built using the technologies of the time.
Hadrian’s Pantheon, in Rome, is miraculously still standing, and must be one of the wonders of the world. A complex modern model of this marvel of concrete and stone construction stands directly under the cupola of the British Museum’s Reading Room at the core of the show – the cupola of the Reading Room modelled, much later but on the same scale, on the Pantheon itself.
So what of the wall across the north of England? Thorsten Opper, curator of this detailed and fascinating show, relates that Hadrian’s Wall is a valuable but small part of the Hadrian story. The whole Empire covered 40 countries, from the middle east to the far east and right across Europe to the untamed but fenced-off Scottish border.
To look at this great exhibition is to see the story of an Empire, and an Emperor, and the growth and decline of both. The death of Hadrian of course, wasn’t the end of this massive empire, but his legacy continues to be felt across the world.
According to Thorsten Opper, Hadrian’s Empire shows how we all have a stake in history, and that history has lessons for us all in the present day. It’s a superb exhibition, full of rarities, surprises, shocks and delicate and subtle lessons. Well worth a visit.
