Hadrian Abandons Trajan's Eastern Conquests
Hadrian became emperor in August 117 and abandoned three provinces in his first months. The circumstances of the accession were doubtful. Trajan died in Cilicia, and the announcement that he had adopted Hadrian on his deathbed was made by the empress Plotina, who was present, with no other witness; the army in Syria, which Hadrian commanded, proclaimed him at once. Four consular senators were executed shortly afterwards for an alleged plot, which he blamed on the praetorian prefect and which nobody in Rome believed. The withdrawal was the first thing he did with the throne. Mesopotamia, Assyria and Armenia had been conquered in the previous three years and were in revolt across their whole extent; holding them required more legions than the empire had and a supply line across desert. He gave them up, restored a client king in Armenia, and set the frontier back on the Euphrates. The policy was general rather than eastern. Dacia was kept because it had been settled, and everywhere else the empire stopped expanding: the wall in Britain from 122, a palisade in Germany, and a fixed line elsewhere marked by roads and forts. He then spent more than half his reign travelling the provinces inspecting them, which no emperor had done, and reformed the army's training and the law's codification. The senate hated him and he was almost denied deification. The Bar Kokhba revolt from 132 was the exception to the quiet, and it was suppressed with the loss of some 580,000 Jewish lives by Cassius Dio's figure.
- Year: 117 CE
- Category: Political
