What could an ex-slave teach Hadrian? Quite a lot, actually
The most famous statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian shows him in Greek robes. He wears the beard of a sage. He looks like his protégé Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-king. Was Hadrian, too, a thinker?
This is one of the questions posed by the British Museum's superb summer blockbuster "Hadrian: Empire and Conflict". As a boy, he earned the nickname "Graeculus", the little Greek, because of his love of Greek literature. And Hadrian undoubtedly talked with philosophers throughout his life.
Epictetus was one. "Watch out, you who are engaged in litigation, for what you want to secure and where you want to succeed," the stoic once opined. Or, on another occasion: "Your integrity is your own; who can take it from you?"
It would have been quite a meeting: the ruler of the world before an emancipated slave-turned-teacher. Such encounters fired the imagination because, for all their differences, philosophers and emperors shared something: both lived apart from normal conventions and rules.
We do not know what happened when they met, though Epictetus appears to have approved of Hadrian. Marguerite Yourcenar, in her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, suggests that he respected stoicism, though he did not embrace it with the resolution of Marcus Aurelius. "It is not the philosophy of freedom that worries me, but the art of exercising it," Yourcenar has Hadrian muse.
There are more details, only possibly mythical, of Hadrian's encounter with Secundus the Silent. This philosopher took a vow of silence after his eloquence proved powerful enough to lure his mother into his adult bed. Would the emperor be able to break his vow?
Hadrian may have had the courage of a hunter, but he did not have much patience. The sophist Favorinus realised that when once he disagreed with Hadrian over a matter of grammar. Favorinus yielded, and when his friends criticised him, he retorted that the most learned of men is the one "who has 30 legions".
Secundus, who was no sophist, remained mute. The emperor, true to form, threatened him with death. So, a compromise was reached, whereby Secundus could write answers on a tablet. "For you are not beautiful like Achilles, nor shrewd as was Odysseus," the sage supposedly scribbled. Hadrian might have wished he'd allowed this philosopher to hold his peace.
In Hadrian's Villa, at Tivoli, there is a room known as the "Philosophers' Chamber". Seven niches in the rear wall were believed to have displayed statues of seven philosophers. Surely, this is the architecture of a philosopher-king? Except that scholars now believe the spaces held figures of the imperial family. All in all, the British Museum seems right to question the notion of Hadrian the philosopher.
Mark Vernon's "Well-Being" will be published in September by Acumen (£9.99)
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