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 PART IV

I

HADRIAN, 117- 138

Some four years after his correspondence with Pliny on the subject of the Christians in Bithynia, the Emperor Trajan died somewhat suddenly in the course of his Eastern campaign, at the Cilician, town of Selinus ( 117).

Trajan was succeeded by his kinsman Hadrian, who had married the Emperor's great-niece Julia Sabina. The circumstances of Hadrian's succession are somewhat confused. It was given out generally that he had been adopted by Trajan as his successor. It is certain, however, that his pretensions to the imperial power were favoured by Trajan's Empress, Plotina, and some even ascribe his succession largely to a palace intrigue; it is clear that no real opposition to his peaceable assumption of the imperial power was offered.

It is regrettable that we possess no notable contemporary history of one of the most remarkable of the Roman Emperors. How intensely interesting would have been a picture by Tacitus of so extraordinary and unique a personality!

What we know of Hadrian and his reign of twenty-one years we gather principally from the pages of Spartianus, one of the six writers of the Augustan history who lived in the days of Diocletian, more than a century and a half later, and from some brief notices of Dion Cassius, of the Emperor Julian, and of three or four other writers who have given us short sketches of his life, and also from a somewhat longer account of the eleventh century monk Xiphilinus, and from notices on medals and inscriptions.

The Emperor Hadrian was no ordinary man. Rarely