Hadrian: The Wall, the Army in Being, and the Last Jewish War

The Renunciation and the Perimeter

The reign opened with the volume's first great strategic decision, taken in weeks and defended for a lifetime: Hadrian — Trajan's ward, cousin, and legate of Syria, his adoption announced from the deathbed chamber with a timing his enemies never stopped auditing — abandoned the eastern conquests entire. Armenia reverted to client-kingship, Mesopotamia and Assyria were evacuated, Parthamaspates was compensated with Osrhoene's edge, and the Euphrates resumed its old office; within the year the reign's dangerous men — Lusius Quietus dismissed from his Moorish command and killed with three other consulars in the affair of the "four ex-consuls" that stained the accession — were gone, and the new policy had its manifesto in the new coinage's grammar: not CAPTA but DISCIPLINA AUGUSTI, not conquest but the army itself as the advertised achievement. The Editor grades the renunciation as the sources could not agree to: the fourth-century epitomators transmit the criticism (envy of glory, betrayal of the dead emperor's gains), the modern strategic literature largely the defense (the conquests were unfundable, the revolt-fires still burning, the Danube stripped), and the reign's own answer was built rather than argued — the twenty-one-year conversion of the empire's edge from a direction into a thing. Hadrian spent more of his reign with the frontier armies than any emperor before him, and the perimeter he toured he fixed: in Germany, the continuous oak palisade thrown along the limes line — the empire's first unbroken artificial frontier, hundreds of miles of split trunks whose post-trenches archaeology still sections; in Africa, the fossatum's desert ditch-and-wall; and in Britain, from Tyne to Solway, the work that bears the name: eighty Roman miles of stone and turf, mile-castles and turrets at engineered intervals, sixteen forts, the great ditch and the rearward vallum zone — a system, not a rampart, built by the legions whose centurial quarry-and-course inscriptions sign it foot by foot, and whose purpose (the one sentence of the Historia Augusta the archaeology endorses: to separate the Romans and the barbarians) was less to stop armies than to convert movement itself into an administered thing: the gate, the toll, the patrol, the watched economy of a managed exterior. The compendium marks the world-historical hinge without ceremony: with Hadrian, the empire of expansion formally became the empire of the perimeter, and every war in the rest of this series is fought either on that perimeter, over it, or — increasingly — behind it.

The instrument the perimeter enclosed he drilled to its historical peak. The reign's military texture survives in a document this compendium ranks with the Vindolanda letters as AGrade A voice-of-the-institution: the Lambaesis inscriptions of 128 — the emperor's own review-speeches to the Third Augusta and its auxilia, carved on the parade-ground column base in Numidia — Hadrian addressing cohort by cohort, praising a wall built in a fraction of standard time with stones of a size others would balk at, excusing a cavalry unit whose maneuvers lost polish because their strength had been drafted away, criticizing an over-daring charge with the review-ground maxim that where the ground demands, art must supply — the commander-in-chief as inspecting professional, fluent in the trade's smallest grammar. Under that regime the army of the 120s–130s was the finest peacetime force of antiquity — and the reign's one great war demonstrated what the volume's thesis requires: that its tests now came from within the perimeter as readily as beyond it.

Bar Kokhba132–136

The third Jewish war was the worst, and the least narrated. Its causes the sources split as they split Trajan's motives — Dio's epitome gives the refoundation of Jerusalem as the colony Aelia Capitolina with a temple of Jupiter on the Temple's site; the Historia Augusta a ban on circumcision; the rabbinic tradition its own martyrology — and its leader steps out of the epitomes' anonymity only through the volume's most literal AGrade A stratum: the letters. Shim'on ben Kosiba — Bar Kokhba, "son of the star," in the messianic reading his coinage's iconography endorses; Bar Koziba, "son of the lie," in the tradition that survived him — commanded a prepared insurgency: the underground hideout-complexes honeycombing the Judaean hills (excavated by the hundred: ventilation-shafted, water-stored, connected by crawl-tunnels — a countryside pre-fitted for war beneath its villages), a rebel administration minting over-struck denarii ("Year One of the Redemption of Israel," struck across the emperor's face), and a chain of command whose actual field-orders, on papyrus in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, came out of the Cave of Letters in Yadin's 1960–61 seasons: the commander's own dispatches — requisitions of wheat and salt, a shipment of the four festival species for Sukkot in wartime, and the discipline of a hard-pressed chief ("I call heaven to witness... I shall put you in chains") — the only rebel commander's correspondence surviving from the ancient world. The war itself must be read from Dio's four epitome-paragraphs and the ground: no field battles — the insurgency declined them — but a countryside war of posts and tunnels that mauled the garrison beyond anything the tradition dared total (the XXII Deiotariana vanishes from the army lists in this generation, its fate probable and unproven; the war-diplomas show drafts converging from the whole empire); Hadrian summoned his best, Julius Severus from Britain, who conducted the reduction Dio describes in the passive voice of extermination — the strongpoints starved and stormed severally, fifty of them, and 985 villages razed, 580,000 rebels killed by the sword "and of those who perished by famine and disease no man could number"; the last act at Betar, the fortress southwest of Jerusalem where ben Kosiba died in the fall of 135/136, and in the refuge-caves above the Dead Sea, where the archaeology closes the file in its own medium — the Cave of Horror's starved skeletons under the cliff the garrison camped upon, and beside the Bar Kokhba letters in the Cave of Letters the bundled archive of Babatha daughter of Shim'on, a propertied widow's deeds, marriage contract, and lawsuits carried into the dark and never carried out: the war's civilian epitaph in one refugee's handbag. The sequel was erasure as policy: Judaea renamed Syria Palaestina, Jews barred from Aelia and its district on pain of death, the fiscus Judaicus continuing — and the cost acknowledged in the emperor's own dispatch, in the detail Dio thought worth his epitome: writing to the Senate, Hadrian omitted the formula every reader of this compendium now knows how to weigh — "I and the legions are in health." The Editor closes the chapter's ledger across both its halves: the reign that perfected the army and the wall fought its one great war against subjects inside them, at a price it declined to name; the perimeter, the volume's coming chapters will show, had the same property on its outer face.