Hadrian: a hero for our times?

What did Hadrian achieve?

Between AD 117 and 138, Hadrian ruled over one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen, its territory covering much of the present-day EU, North Africa and the Near East – stretching from the Tyne to the Sahara, Lisbon to the Euphrates. Machiavelli dubbed him one of the "Five Good Emperors". The Roman Empire under his leadership reached the apogee from which the 18th century historian Edward Gibbon began the story of its decline and fall. "Under Hadrian's reign," Gibbon declared, "the empire flourished in peace and prosperity. He encouraged the arts, reformed the laws, asserted military discipline, and visited all his provinces in person."

Why is he of such interest today?

Hadrian has long been admired for what Gibbon called his "vast and active genius". Fascinated by art and architecture, he built great monuments which still stand - his splendid villa at Tivoli, for example, and the Pantheon in Rome. He was an intrepid traveller who spent much of his reign visiting far-flung corners of the empire, and a lover of Greek culture who read widely, studied philosophy and wrote poetry. He also had an intriguing, tragic love life. According to the Historia Augusta, the unhappily married Hadrian had affairs with both women and men. When his favourite consort, the young Greek Antinous, drowned in the Nile in mysterious circumstances in AD 130, Hadrian "wept like a woman" – before declaring Antinous a god and littering the empire with temples and statues in his honour. Busts of the languid, curly-haired young man are among the most common from antiquity. Hadrian's appeal is that in many ways he seems so contemporary: unembarrassed by homosexuality, multicultural in his interests. He even pulled his troops out of Iraq.

Why did he find himself having to withdraw from Iraq?

Because his predecessor, Trajan, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, had launched expeditions into what was then Mesopotamia. Trajan's aim was to control the rogue states threatening Roman interests there, but he got bogged down just south of modern Baghdad, and having installed a puppet king, found it impossible to quell the surrounding area. Hadrian saw at once that the task was hopeless, and within hours of taking the throne ordered Roman troops to withdraw, declaring: "It is better to abandon what cannot be kept." The frontier he drew still marks the border between Syria and Iraq. Hadrian recognised that the empire had its limits: he ordered his great wall to be built in northern England "to separate the Romans and the Barbarians", and focused his efforts on fortifying the pax Romana within the boundaries of the empire.

So was he an enlightened ruler?

Classical scholars have tended to cast him as a civilised, peace-loving aesthete: the best-known statue of him shows him sporting a sophisticated Greek mantle rather than a Roman toga, and a philhellene's beard (a style he popularised throughout the empire). But recent research shows that the body does not actually belong to Hadrian's head: the Victorians wrongly reconstructed the statue to suit their preconceptions of what Hadrian should look like. A more convincing image, say the curators of the current exhibition, is the huge statue of Hadrian as warrior, with his foot on the neck of a humbled barbarian.

Not a man of peace then?

Far from it. Like most emperors, Hadrian rose to power on the back of his reputation as a military leader; before coming to power he was active in the bloody wars against the Dacians on the Danube, and was in charge of Trajan's army in Syria. He was as ruthless and back-stabbing as any other high-flying Roman politician. His passage to the imperial throne was smoothed by the execution of four prominent rivals on trumped-up charges of "conspiracy". And his withdrawal from Mesopotamia was less about bringing peace to the Middle East than about liberating Roman military resources to quash other rebellions.

Where were the other rebellions?

In the Balkans as usual, in Mauretania (Morocco) and elsewhere. But Hadrian is most remembered for his ruthless suppression of Jewish uprisings. In AD 132, prompted among other things by a ban on circumcision (a practice Hadrian reviled), the Jews rebelled under Shimon bar Kokhba, the last king of Israel. The subsequent campaign of suppression lasted three years, cost Rome up to three legions, and involved great brutality. According to the Greek historian Cassius Dio, some 585,000 Jews were killed in battle. "As for the numbers who perished from starvation, disease or fire, that was impossible to establish." In an attempt to root out Judaism, which he blamed for the rebellions, Hadrian wiped Judaea off the map, renaming it Syria Palaestina. Most of the surviving Jews were killed, exiled or sold into slavery. In the Talmud, Hadrian's name is followed by the words: "May his bones rot".

And what was life like in Britain?

By the time Hadrian took the throne, the British had also suffered decades of violent repression, but guerilla warfare continued: when Hadrian visited in AD 122, it was not as a casual tourist but a military strategist. We tend to have a rosy view of his wall, built by his soldiers in four years, as protecting a civilised world of baths and temples against marauding Caledonians. But historians now think it was designed to cow and extract customs duties from tribes on both sides of the border, rather than to keep invading war parties out. The archaeological historian Neil Faulkner describes the Roman imperium as a system of "robbery with violence", while the contemporary Vindolanda Tablets show that Romans disdainfully called the locals Brittunculi: "wretched little Britons". ·