Mention may also be made, without attempting a comprehensive listing, of some details gleaned in other Lives of the Historia Augusta, in particular in the biographies of Antoninus and of Marcus Aurelius by Julius Capitolinus. Some phrases have been taken from Aurelius Victor’s Book of the Caesars and from the unknown author of the Epitome, professedly the work of Aurelius Victor, too. Both these writers, though only some half century later than Spartianus, already conceive of Hadrian’s life as almost legendary, but the splendor of their rhetoric puts them in a class apart. The historians Eutropius and Ammianus Marcellinus, also of the latter half of the fourth century, add little to the information given by earlier writers on Hadrian. Likewise the notice on this emperor in the Lexicon of the tenth-century Byzantine scholar Suidas, and the few pages devoted to him by the historian Zonaras, of the twelfth century, hardly do more than repeat Dio; but two other notices in Suidas provide each a fact little known about one episode in Hadrian’s life, namely that a Consolation was addressed to him by the philosopher Numenios, and that Mesomedes, the court musician, composed music for the funeral of Antinous.
From Hadrian himself we have a certain number of works of unquestioned authenticity: from his official life there is administrative correspondence and there are fragments of discourses or reports, like the noted address to the troops at Lambaesis, conserved for the most part in inscriptions; also his legal decisions, handed down by the jurists. From his personal life we have poems mentioned by authors of his time, such as his celebrated Animula Vagula Blandula, or occurring as votive inscriptions, like the poem to Eros and the Uranian Aphrodite on the temple wall at Thespiae (G. Kaibel, Epigr. Gr. 811). Three letters supposedly written by Hadrian, and concerning his personal life, are of doubtful authenticity (Letter to Matidia, Letter to Servianus, Letter addressed by the Dying Emperor to Antoninus, to be found respectively in the collection of Dositheus, in the Vita Saturnini of Vopiscus, and in a fragment of Fayum papyrus, edited by Grenfell and Hunt, Fayum Towns and Their Papyri, 1900). All three of these letters, nevertheless, are decidedly characteristic of the man to whom they are attributed, and therefore certain indications which they afford have been used in this book.
References or allusions to Hadrian or to his entourage are to be found scattered through most of the writers of the second and third centuries, and serve to complete suggestions in the chronicles, or fill in lacunae there. Thus, to cite only a few examples, the episode of the hunt in Libya is taken from a fragment of a poem of Pancrates, The Hunt of Hadrian and Antinous, found in Egypt and published in 1911 in the collection, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, VIII, No. 1085; Athenaeus, Aulus Gellius, and Philostratus have furnished numerous details on the sophists and poets of the imperial court; both the Younger Pliny and Martial add a few touches to the somewhat sketchy information left to us by Apuleius and by Trajan’s historians for two of Hadrian’s friends, Voconius and Licinius Sura. The description of Hadrian’s grief at the death of Antinous is drawn from the historians of the reign, but also from certain passages in the Church Fathers, who though indeed disapproving are sometimes more understanding on this subject, and above all more varied in their approach to it, than the usual blanket references to their opinions would reveal. We have allusions to that grief also in the writings of the emperor’s friend Arrian, from whom actual passages have been incorporated in these Memoirs (Letter from Arrian to the Emperor Hadrian on the Occasion of the Circumnavigation of the Black Sea, a text questioned by some scholars, but accepted by others as genuine except for minor interpolations). For the war in Palestine, certain details known to be authentic have been extracted from the Talmud, where they lie imbedded in an immense amount of legendary material; they serve to supplement the principal account of that war as given in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History. Details of the exile of Favorinus come from a fragment of that writer in a manuscript of the Vatican Library published in 1931 (M. Norsa and G. Vitelli, // Papiro Vaticano Greco II, in Studi e Testi, LIII); the horrible episode of the secretary blinded in one eye occurs in a treatise of Galen, who was physician to Marcus Aurelius; the picture of the dying Hadrian is built upon the somber portrait which Fronto, an intimate of Marcus Aurelius, gives of the emperor in his last years.
Statues, reliefs, inscriptions, and coins have provided factual details not recorded by ancient writers. Certain glimpses into the savagery of the Dacian and Sarmatian wars, such as prisoners burned alive and counselors of King Decebalus poisoning themselves on the day of their capitulation, are afforded by the scenes on Trajan’s Column (W. Froehner, La Colonne Trajane, 1865; I. A. Richmond, Trajan’s Army on Trajan’s Column, Papers of the British School at Rome, XIII, 1935). Certain inscriptions serve as points of departure for episodes constructed in this work: thus the three poems of Julia Balbilla carved on the legs of the Colossus of Memnon, and Hadrian’s own name carved on that statue as well, help to build the visit to Thebes (J. A. Letronne, Recueil des Inscriptions grecques et latines de I’Egypte, II, 1848, and R. Cagnat, Inscr. Graec. ad res Rom. pert., I, 1186-7). The day of the year on which Antinous was born is given as it occurs on an inscription left by a fraternity of workmen and slaves in Lanuvium, who chose that new deity for their patron and protector in the year 133 (Corp. Inscr. Lot. XIV, 2112). This precision as to the day has been questioned by Mommsen but has been accepted since his time by less hypercritical scholars. The several phrases presented in these Memoirs as if inscribed on the tomb of the favorite are taken from the long text in hieroglyphs on the obelisk of the Pincio in Rome, telling of Antinous’ funeral and detailing the ritual of his cult. (A. Erman, Obelisken Romischer Zeit, in Mitt. d. deutsch. arch. Inst., Rom. Abt., XI, 1896; O. Marucchi, Gli Obelischi Egiziani di Roma, 1898). The coins of the reign suggest many details for the voyages described; the legends on some of these coins have furnished titles for the parts of this book (with two exceptions, one drawn from Aurelius Victor), and have often provided the keynotes for Hadrian’s meditations themselves.
To discuss briefly the study of Hadrian and his period by modern and contemporary writers it may first be noted that already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all historians of Rome from Tillemont to Gibbon have touched upon this emperor, but their works, substantial as they are (the critical spirit which animates the article on Hadrian in Bayle’s Dictionnaire, for example, remains unrivaled in its kind), belong henceforth to History’s history. Nearer our time even the brilliant sketch by Renan in the first chapter of L’Eglise Chrétienne shows equally the marks of age. Nor is there a complete modern biography, properly speaking, to which the reader can be referred without reservation. The earliest work of the kind, that of Gregorovius, published in 1851 (revised edition 1884), is not without life and color, but is weak in everything that concerns Hadrian as administrator and prince, and is in great part outdated by researches of the past half century. The more methodical study of O. Th. Schulz, Leben des Kaisers Hadrian, Leipzig, 1904, is less rich in humanistic erudition than Gregorovius and is also outdated in part. The more recent biography by B. W. Henderson, The Life and Principate of the Emperor Hadrian, A.D. 76-138, published in 1923, though lengthy, gives only a superficial idea of Hadrian’s thought and of the intellectual currents of his time, making too little use of available sources.