Anniversaries are always welcome opportunities to reflect on historical events and themes. This could be observed in the field of ancient history in the last decades, for example, regarding 2,500 years of democracy, the clades Variana or the dates of government and life of ancient personalities. The 2,000th anniversary of Augustus’ death in 2014 brought with it a flood of new studies on the first princeps. The year 2017 saw the 1,900th anniversary of the death of Trajan, the optimus princeps, and the beginning of the reign of his successor, the medius princeps Hadrian, two rulers closely linked to the Golden Age of Rome, but who were, at the same time, already judged very differently by the ancient sources. This had corresponding consequences for their treatment by modern scholars. The anniversary alone does not determine the direction of the reflections, though. While the papers collected in A.F. Caballos Rufino (ed.), De Trajano a Adriano. Roma matura, Roma mutans (2018) analyse aspects of policy, administration and self-presentation of and under these two rulers, the volume under review focuses on the near 2,000-year reception history (p. 19).
The volume has its origins in a conference (and an accompanying student-designed exhibition, pp. 13–14) organised by the Unité Mixte de Recherche (8164) ‘HALMA’ (Histoire, Archéologie et Littérature des Mondes Anciens) as part of the Programme du laboratoire ‘Mémoire et Histoire’. The title of the volume is borrowed from M. Yourcenar's famous novel Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951), which in the guise of a letter written by the old Hadrian to the young Marcus Aurelius offers a fictionalised autobiography of Hadrian for which Yourcenar conducted intensive historical research. While Yourcenar is mentioned in several articles, and the conference took place in part at the Villa Marguerite-Yourcenar (p. 27), it comes as a little surprise that only one contribution (A. Terneuil) is devoted to the novel, and moreover to a partial aspect, to Yourcenar's reception of portraits of Trajan and Hadrian.
Why focus on these two principes? As Gautier and Hoët-Van Cauwenberghe stress in the introduction, the rationale of the organisers was that, on the one hand, the ancient evidence for the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian has significantly increased and, on the other hand, several exhibitions and studies have elucidated especially Hadrian's reign and its reception in the past few decades. It is certainly a promising concept to explore how far and according to which patterns these two emperors – often perceived as opposites particularly in their politics of empire – were evaluated differently and what lay at the basis of these receptions. It complements another approach of several studies in recent decades which either concentrated on single successful principes or compared ‘bad’ principes (e.g. Nero and Domitian) and the reasons for their negative evaluation.
While following the afterlives of Trajan and Hadrian over the centuries and the sometimes surprising shifts in their evaluation, readers are offered a broad panorama of studies on their reception in literature as well as in art. Apart from the introduction and the conclusion (Benoist), the volume is made up of 23 essays. The book covers diverse topics and reaches over two millennia, but it lacks a clear division into different parts, and at times one has the impression that the individual studies are rather disparate. The essays are not always grouped together in a coherent sequence; they can nevertheless be ordered as follows: four essays directly concern Trajan's and Hadrian's reign and their self-presentation (N. Lapini, C. Ansel, F. Lecocq, M. Villetard). Eight essays treat their reception in antiquity, i.e. the two principes in late antique sources (S. Destephen, A. Galimberti/M. Rizzi, É. Wolff), their possible function as role models for later emperors (C. Blonce, J.-M. Doyen), and especially Jewish and Christian perspectives (C. Batsch, L. Capponi, M. Kantiréa). Four essays treat medieval sources and themes (P. Maymó i Capdevila/J.A. Jiménez Sánchez, A. Gautier, A. Descorps-Declère, F. Laurent). Finally, seven essays deal with the reception of Trajan and Hadrian in modern times (M. Galinier, É. Marcq, C. Landrea, R. Poignault, Terneuil, O. Devillers, C. Hugot). Some of the contributions compare or contrast the two principes, whilst others concentrate on one of them. Hugot's essay, one of the longest in the book (pp. 439–76), does not deal with either of them in this nonetheless interesting study, which treats the reception of the letters used in the dedication inscription on the base of Trajan's column by typographers in the twentieth century.
The ancient literary sources on Trajan and Hadrian have been the subject of intensive discussion in recent decades. Lapini sees the depiction of Hadrian's succession in the Historia Augusta and Cassius Dio as dependent on models present in the tradition of the transfer of power from Augustus to Tiberius in Tacitus and Suetonius. However, her explanations remain unconvincing, as she takes too little account of the dependencies of the late antique tradition and ignores much of modern literature (cf. e.g. R.A. Bauman, Historia 43 [1994], on the similarities between Tanaquil in Livy and Livia in Tacitus). It would have been worthwhile to pursue this issue of the source base further. The second article is dedicated to a completely different topic. Ansel argues (following P. Veyne) that one of the panels of the arch of Beneventum was designed by Hadrian and – according to the latter's disposition to imperialism – showed the inclusion of Mesopotamia into the Roman empire in pacifistic iconography. This is unlikely, since Hadrian had immediately abandoned the eastern provinces of Trajan, and he would hardly have commemorated this fact by depicting their earlier conquest. Lecoq then reflects on the significance of the depiction of the phoenix on Hadrianic aurei in honour of the late Trajan. Villetard discusses possible implications of the new archaeological finds discovered during the works on the Metro C line in Rome, which have unearthed remains of auditoria and barracks probably built in Hadrian's reign. Kantiréa links Christian memory of Trajan and Hadrian to elements of their initiatives in the field of religion and interprets these rather unconvincingly as a reaction to Christian monotheism. The contributions dealing with the self-presentation of the two principes emphasise their character traits as explanations. Even though these are important, it might have been profitable to consider more strongly the significance of the dynamics of the principate's system for the self-styling of the individual ruler (cf. A. Winterling [ed.], Zwischen Strukturgeschichte und Biographie. Probleme und Perspektiven einer neuen römischen Kaisergeschichte [2011]).
Batsch shows that the Jewish memory as it is found in Talmudic treatises did not differentiate between the two emperors, but evaluated the conflicts of their reigns as one Jewish uprising. Capponi analyses the Acta Alexandrinorum concerning Trajan's relationship with Alexandria and the unrests there. Cross-references between the two essays might have been fruitful. The studies on a possible reception of the image of the two emperors and of the iconography of their monuments and coins by Gallienus (Doyen) and Constantine (Blonce) form another complex that could perhaps have been expanded and contextualised.
While Destephen reflects on the image of Hadrian as a traveller and benevolent emperor in late antiquity and Byzantium, Galimberti and Rizzi focus on the image of the two emperors in Malalas as an expression of a decidedly Eastern perspective on these emperors. Wolff's contribution on the very favourable image of Trajan – enriched by elements previously associated with Hadrian – in the sources up to the eighth century marks the transition to the Middle Ages. The contributions on this epoch display a stronger unity, both thematically and in terms of methodological approach.
Maymó i Capdevila and Jiménez Sánchez concentrate on the origins and the use and context of the legend of Trajan's redemption thanks to the tears of Pope Gregory I – a myth that spread as far as the British Isles. The latter are the focus of Gautier's article, who examines Trajan's surprising prominence there and the simultaneous absence of any memory of Hadrian. Descorps-Declère, taking up elements discussed in the other articles, stresses the ambivalence and shifts of Trajan's image (persecutor but also just ruler) from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Laurent analyses the role of Trajan and Hadrian as opposing models in the versified versions of the story of St Eustace.
With Galinier's study on the reception of Trajan's column and Hadrian's pantheon from Dante to the Encyclopédie the volume reaches modernity. The essays on this period treat a wide variety of aspects (e.g. opera, paintings, novel, manga). However, the evaluation of Trajan and Hadrian in historical scholarship plays a role in only one contribution. Landrea concentrates on the analysis of the interaction between the two emperors and the senate in historical works – solely French – from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries and their dependency on the senatorial perspective of the sources. Benoist concludes by summarising the main lines of the conference and the volume and situating them in terms of the study of cultures of memory.
Thus, as is often the case, the volume brings together a wide range of essays of varying quality that are often erudite and interesting in their own right, but do not start from an overarching question or method. As already noted, it would probably have been fruitful at times if the individual contributions were more closely related to each other. It is also regrettable that the book only offers black-and-white illustrations (with two rather surprising exceptions on p. 455), which are sometimes unnecessarily small. This is a real loss for a volume focused on the history of reception and especially irritating in Marcq's article about the depiction of the two emperors in oil paintings. A complete picture of the reception of Trajan and Hadrian cannot be achieved with the breadth of this approach. It is surprising, for example, that there is no contribution on their reception during the period of Italian fascism. As interesting and remarkable as Hadrian's reception in manga is, at least for this reviewer, the question arises as to why this particular medium was chosen with regard to popular culture. Considering that these media increasingly influence public perception of historical themes, it might also be asked how these emperors are portrayed in films or documentaries (are they at all?), for example, and how they are depicted in computer games (e.g. Trajan being the representative of Rome in the latest instalment [VII] of the popular game series ‘Civilization’) or on the internet (cf. e.g. https://followinghadrian.com).
Despite these criticisms, however, the volume with its diverse approaches undoubtedly provides rich material for future studies.
