“If,” says Gibbon, “a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”; and he observes of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius that “their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”

This monumental eulogy of the period which we now approach—a eulogy which the more penetrating study of Renan and the more recent research of M. Boissier and Dr. Dill have not materially lessened—will suffice to warn the inexpert reader against the ancient and popular legend that Rome continued to sink under the burden of its vices until it tottered into the tomb of outworn nations. Under the Empresses whom we have now to consider there was a great improvement of character and recovery of vigour in the Roman Empire, but before we pass to that brighter phase I would enter a brief protest against the general exaggeration of the darkness of the period we have traversed. Even under its worst rulers Rome was far from being wholly corrupt. The vices of a Messalina, the crimes of an Agrippina, and the follies of a PoppÆa, stand out so prominently in that period only because they were perpetrated on the height of the throne. Even they were hardly worse than the crimes and follies of the wives or mistresses of kings in many a less censured period of history; and, if you care to count them, the lilies were as numerous as the poppies in this first series of Empresses, but the lilies drooped earlier, and have been less noticed. Whenever, in the course of our story, the light has passed from the throne to the less elevated crowd, we have found fine character mingled with the corrupt even in the darkest years of the early Empire. The heads that fell before the Imperial monsters were as many as the heads that bowed.

The truth is that, if we are not misled by the hasty generalizations and plebeian diatribes which Juvenal, in his “Satires,” founds upon the dubious bits of gossip that he picked up on the fringe of Roman society, and against which historians now warn us, there was much the same diversity of conduct in the early Empire as in most of the corresponding periods of luxury. The wealthier women of Rome assuredly fell far short of the cloistered virtue of the maid and the matron of Greece; but Greece had only succeeded in maintaining that standard of domestic virtue in its wives and daughters by cultivating a high caste of courtesans for their roaming husbands. It may be admitted, too, that the Roman woman was morally inferior to the wife of the Egyptian noble, and to the wife of the noble or the wealthy merchant of Babylonia. But the patrician women, even of CÆsarean Rome, will compare with the women of most of the later civilizations at the same stage of development; at the stage, that is to say, when the nation relaxes from the strain of empire-making, and its veins are flushed with the wealth of its conquests. I would instance the women of the early Teutonic nations as soon as they settle on southern Europe; the women of Italy in the early Middle Ages; the women of England under the Stuarts and, after a later expansion, under the Georges; the women of France under Louis XIII and Louis XIV; the women of Russia in the nineteenth century. At Rome, in spite of the positive insistence on vice of Caligula, Messalina, and Nero, in spite of their determined effort to weed out the good, we have found virtue and courage springing up afresh in each generation.

We now come to a period when, three centuries before the fall of Rome, the Empire is purged of its exceptional corruption, and character assumes the normal diversity that it has in any old and wealthy civilization. The city of Rome was assuredly vicious and in decay. But the city was not the Empire, as those rhetoricians forget who talk of its entire demoralization. Rome had been drenched with degrading agencies for half a century; but there was a quite normal amount of stout will and high character in the provinces, and this is now infused more freely into the metropolis. It is only by a similar influx of sounder blood from the provinces that any great city survives the feverish waste of its tissue. The remedy was retarded in Rome because the provincials, even of Italy, but especially of Gaul and Spain, were of alien race. Rome jealously remembered that it was the conqueror; the rest were the conquered. Under Vespasian, however, the provincials were admitted more freely, and with the accession of a Spaniard, Trajan, the process increased.

In the remote and primitive settlement which Agrippina had established on the banks of the Rhine, where the towers of Cologne Cathedral now keep watch over a splendid city, there dwelt, in the year 97, the commander of the forces in Lower Germany, Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, with his wife and a few female relatives. Trajan was of a moderate Spanish family, and had, like his father, cut his own path in the military service of the Empire. He was unambitious, but popular. A large, handsome man, in his forty-fifth year, of singularly graceful bearing and serene features, he charmed everybody by his simplicity and affability of manner, and liked a good carouse and a rough soldierly jest. His wife Plotina was a plain, honest matron of unknown origin. It has been conjectured that she was related to Pompeius Planta, at one time Governor of Egypt, but the only ground for the conjecture seems to be that Planta was a friend of Trajan’s. As she had neither beauty of person nor romantic defect of character, the chroniclers have left her largely to our imagination; but she was a type of woman whom it is not difficult to picture—a woman of plain features, level judgment, and of what is euphemistically called grave but agreeable conversation. She was by no means brilliant, but her close friendship for Hadrian suggests that she was not too dull and prosy, and had pretensions to culture. Her ways were simple, and her character can be relieved of the one imputation made against it. She compares well with Livia, but as a higher bourgeoise compares with a grande dame. In a word, she had none of the autumnal colour, the beauty of decay, of the CÆsarean women, but she had the less Æsthetic and more useful quality that they lacked, conscientiousness. To the courtly Pliny (“Panegyr.,” 83) she is the embodiment of all the virtues.

With her at Cologne was Trajan’s sister Marciana, a widow of much the same complexion as Plotina, and Marciana’s daughter Matidia, who in turn had two daughters, Sabina and Matidia. We can imagine the agitation of this tranquil establishment among the forests of Germany when a courier came from Rome with the news that Trajan was chosen as colleague of the Emperor. They had left Rome six years before, in the middle of Domitian’s reign. However, they seem to have received very sedately the prospect of a removal from the camp on the Rhine to the Imperial palace. Although Nerva died in the following January (98), Trajan remained for the year in Germany, completing his task of strengthening the frontier against the northern barbarians. Then the family set out on the long journey to the capital.

The fame of Trajan’s simplicity and geniality of manner had preceded him, but Rome looked with surprise on an Emperor who could wait a year before occupying the palace, enter the city on foot, without guards, and talk so affably with any of his subjects. Nor was Plotina long before she showed that they had received a new type of Empress. As she ascended the steps of the palace, she turned round and said to those below: “As I enter here to-day, I trust I shall leave it when the time comes.” The refreshing amiability, simplicity, and moderation of the Imperial couple captivated the Romans, and Trajan responded to their good will with the most judicious and untiring exertions in the public service. He trod out at once the hideous brood of informers, checked corrupt officials, and appointed the best men to public offices. Indifferent to the splendour and luxury of even the modest palace of Vespasian, he spent most of his reign in frontier-wars or in long journeys for the purpose of bracing the relaxed frame of the Empire; and he enriched and adorned Rome as no Emperor had done since Octavian.

That he was vigorously supported by Plotina is quite certain, and there is evidence that she was much more than a sympathetic witness of his labours. It is related by the Emperor Julian that Trajan often sought the advice of Plotina, and that it was always sound. At the beginning of his reign she had occasion to use her influence. Trajan’s dislike of informers was carried so far that, when a case of real extortion occurred in the provinces, the injured were prevented from bringing it to his notice. They appealed to Plotina, and she put the case judiciously to her husband and secured relief. In many other ways she gave useful assistance, so that the Senate offered the title of Augusta to her and Marciana. They declined, as Trajan had refused the special title offered to him, but he relented, and they followed his example.

The reign of Trajan and Plotina was thus one long episode of strenuous and enlightened public service, but before we enter into the particulars of their achievements it is proper to endeavour to obtain a nearer view of their personalities. In this the chroniclers give us little assistance, and the result cannot be very interesting. It is ever the painful reflection of the biographer that the description of a sober life—a life which neither sinks to the lower levels of vice nor soars to some unaccustomed height of virtue—has little interest for the majority of his readers; and this was the life of the Imperial court during the twenty years of Trajan’s reign. The Emperor himself was no paragon. Preferring the easy ways of a camp, he drank somewhat deeply of nights, his jests were apt to be coarse, and he was popularly accused of the vice which so generally infected the men of the Empire. Yet he had this distinction in a long line of Emperors, in the prime of life, that no woman ever shared, or sullied, his affection for Plotina. Gibbon has remarked, in extenuation of the conduct of his successor, that “of the first fifteen Emperors, Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct.” That would be a high compliment to Messalina, but in point of fact, as we saw, Claudius was not entitled to that distinction. The charge against Trajan is vague, and we must rather award the distinction to him. Merivale somewhat harshly speaks of him as only maintaining his self-respect because of the bluntness of his moral sense. If we put his strong sense of public duty and his fidelity in the scale against his one certain indulgence, in drink, we shall hardly agree to that verdict.

The virtue of Plotina, on the other hand, has been more seriously assailed by both ancient and recent writers. In the service of the Emperor was a very handsome and accomplished youth named Hadrian, an orphan, with great taste and skill in art and letters. He had been employed by Trajan at Cologne, both in military service and in filling up the long nights with an occasional carouse, and, after their return to Rome, he was a great favourite of the ladies at the palace. They formed a little circle in which letters were discussed and literary men were patronized. There was something of a literary revival; it was the age of Juvenal, Martial, Quinctilian, Pliny, Suetonius, Celsus, and Dio Chrysostom. Hadrian was a brilliant student, and he appreciated this open and easy way to distinction. Trajan is represented as using the young man for companion, but not regarding him as fitted for promotion, so that it fell to Plotina to urge, and ultimately to make, the fortune of the future Emperor. The magnificent mausoleum which Hadrian raised in memory of her long testified to his ardent and grateful attachment.

There is a good deal of exaggeration in this conception. We shall see that Trajan promoted Hadrian in such a way as to mark him in the eyes of all as his successor; and his chief advisers in this were the statesmen Sura and Attianus. In any case, there is no proof that Plotina, who must have been twenty years older than Hadrian, felt more than a very natural fondness for the gifted and charming youth. Pliny mentions that her friendship for him gave rise to gossip, but insists that she was “a most virtuous woman.” The “Augustan History” leaves her unassailed. Suetonius has no scandal to record. Dio alone describes their attachment as “erotic love”; but on an earlier page Dio has expressly said that her career was stainless. When he has described her standing at the top of the palace steps, to say that she trusted to leave that palace just as she entered it, he adds: “And she so bore herself throughout the whole reign as to incur no blame.”11 The remarkable eulogy of Pliny, the silence of the other authorities, and the conduct of Trajan, must enable us to choose between these contradictory statements of Dio, and indeed compel us to reject this unsubstantial charge against the virtue of Plotina.

The other ladies of the Imperial household were equally without reproach, and life at the palace was harmonious and uneventful. Emperor and Empress moved about Rome without guards, and entertained, or were entertained by, their friends in a simple and unceremonious way. But Trajan had little love for the atmosphere of a palace, and an outbreak in Dacia, two years after his arrival in Rome, gave him an excuse to return to the camp. He took Hadrian with him, and remained in Dacia a year. In the year 103 he rejoined Plotina at Rome, but the war broke out afresh shortly afterwards, and it now took him three years to subdue the province and link it to the Empire by a great bridge over the Danube. He returned in 107, and spent seven years in Rome before he set out on his final journey in the year 114.

The prolonged absence of the Emperor threw a good deal of responsibility on Plotina, and it would be of great interest, if it were possible, to trace her share in the vast work which was done for the city and the Empire at that time. This, unfortunately, we cannot do. There were able counsellors left at Rome in Trajan’s absence, and no doubt most of the work was directly controlled by Trajan during his stay in Rome from 107 to 114. We know only that he conferred freely with Plotina, and that he left great power to her when he went abroad. We can, therefore, only regard her, in a general way, as contributing to the prosperity and progress that characterize the reign of her husband. She kept Rome tranquil and content, and no doubt followed with close interest the great improvements which Trajan commanded. The neck of hill which linked the Capitoline to the Quirinal, in the heart of Rome, was cut away, and a fine Forum, or broad street with sheltered colonnade on either side, was constructed on the cleared ground between the hills. As previous Emperors had already made slight extensions of the old Forum, the citizens of Rome now had, in the centre of the city, a magnificent corso running out toward the great Circus, in the porticoes of which the packed dwellers of the Subura on one side, and Velabrum on the other, could lounge and take the air with comfort. Nor was this a mere meretricious concession to their entertainment. Trajan was equally attentive to their education. A beautiful basilica, two public libraries—one for Greek and one for Roman letters—and other splendid buildings were raised along the sides of the new Forum, and statues of marble and bronze were brought from all parts, even from the palace, to adorn it.

Other cities of the Empire shared in the generosity and public spirit of the new reign. Harbours were constructed for the increase of commerce, fresh roads were flung across the intervening country, and many towns were enriched with stimulating public edifices. Nor were the social needs of the Empire less regarded than the material. Previous Emperors had given a scanty practical expression to the doctrine of the brotherhood of men, which the Stoic philosophy was disseminating. Trajan gave a great extension to this new philanthropy, as we learn from the inscriptions that have been found in the soil of Italy. It is estimated that 300,000 poor and orphaned children were fed by charity or Imperial aid in Italy alone. The lot of the slave was improved, and the school system of the Empire became better than any that has since appeared in Europe until the second half of the nineteenth century. Men were returning to the sobriety of their fathers, and were tempering it with the new spirit of peace and mercy, and a regard for culture. Morality improved, and character became a qualification for office. The one open scandal of the long reign—an intrigue of the Vestal Virgins with three young knights—was punished with all the rigour of the old Roman law.

We must be content to know that Plotina had her part in this noble work of restoring the jaded frame of the Empire, and refrain from attempting to measure her particular influence. By the year 114 the administration ran so smoothly, and the Western world was so settled, that Trajan turned his attention to the East. The Parthians had been interfering in the affairs of the Ethiopians, who were vassals of Rome, and Trajan saw in this a pretext of establishing more strongly, if not enlarging, the eastern frontier of the Empire. He had never been in the East, and the deep attraction of its ancient cities and decadent mysticism gave a cultural interest to his expedition. He took with him Plotina and Matidia, his niece. Marciana seems to have died before this time, and Hadrian had married Sabina, the daughter of Matidia. Hadrian, and probably his wife, accompanied them.

The path to the East for the Roman lay through Athens, where Plotina and her companions would survey the decaying splendour of the Greek civilization in which they had long been interested. Envoys from the Parthians met Trajan there, and tried to disarm him, but he dismissed them, and pushed on to the field in which he trusted to win fresh laurels. They reached Antioch at the end of the year, and had, during their stay in that metropolis of Oriental vice and luxury, a novel experience. A great earthquake shook the city, and even the house in which the Emperor lodged. He was forced to make his escape by the window. The accounts of their later movements are meagre, and we can only imagine Plotina passing with wonder through the strange spectacles of western Asia. During the spring and summer an indecisive campaign was waged against the Parthians, and Trajan returned to Antioch for the winter. In the spring of the year 116 the Emperor set out again for Mesopotamia. He passed down the Euphrates, took the Parthian capital, sailed on the Persian Gulf, and even directed a longing eye over the ocean in the direction of India. The spirit of Alexander breathed in him as he trod this theatre of the historic conquerors, but the burden of age and an increasing infirmity put a reluctant limit to his ambition. He had, in fact, passed the range of his powers, and distended too far the frontier of the Empire. In the following year he became weaker, and the Eastern tribes advanced with spirit. Leaving the task to his generals, the Emperor turned towards Italy.

How far Plotina had accompanied her husband on these remote journeys we are not informed. It would not be surprising, or out of harmony with a general custom of the time, if she covered the whole, or the greater part, of the territory with him. However that may be, we find her with Trajan and Hadrian at Antioch once more in the course of the year 117. Trajan was seriously ill, and had to abandon all hope of settling the Eastern question. He maintained the troops at the frontier, left Hadrian at Antioch as legate of the East, and slowly and sadly moved towards Europe. His tall frame was bent with age, his hair was white, his limbs made heavy with dropsy and numbed with incipient paralysis. When they arrived at Selinus, a small town on a precipitous rock of the Cilician coast, only a few hundred miles from Edessa, his illness increased, and he died, in the month of August, 117, in the sixty-third year of his age.

The exact truth about Plotina’s conduct at the time of Trajan’s death will never be known, but an impartial analysis of the statements made by the chroniclers cannot discover any clear ground for dissatisfaction. Dio, whose authority on this point is claimed to be considerable, since his father was then governor of the province of Cilicia, first insinuates a suggestion of poison, in the usual form of an unsubstantial rumour, and then insists that Plotina forged a letter in Trajan’s name, nominating Hadrian his successor in the Imperial power. The writer of the sketch of Hadrian in the “Historia Augusta,” Spartianus, carries the legend further. He describes how Plotina put a confidant in the bed of the dead Emperor, drew the clothes about him, and directed him to murmur, in a feeble voice, to the assembled officials that he wished Hadrian to succeed him. This second version is wholly negligible. It comes only from an anonymous writer of the fourth century who excites our distrust at all times by his extravagant and unsupported statements. The latest commentators on his work warn us that his aim is prurient and his method devoid of scruple.

The authority of Dio, on the other hand, must not be exaggerated. His father might purvey gossip to him, like any other Greek or Roman, and his story of the forged letter—or forged signature to a letter—might easily be a piece of local gossip. Plotina was evidently anxious to secure the succession for Hadrian, and one may well admit that she concealed her husband’s death until Hadrian arrived at Selinus. That concealment would easily give rise to conjectures. Serviez naturally forces on his readers the more romantic version, but more sober writers acquit Plotina of anything more than a formal use of Trajan’s name after his death.

The suggestion of poison is frivolous. Trajan had been ailing for months, and his assiduous travelling in a climate so different from that to which he had been accustomed all his life must have worn him out. He arrived in Asia Minor in the sweltering and dangerous month of August, and a touch of the enteric fever which so commonly overcame the European in the insanitary East of the time put an end to his life. Plotina had for some time urged him to nominate Hadrian as his successor. We must not hastily infer from his reluctance that he thought Hadrian unfit to succeed him. He had just left him in a position of the gravest responsibility, and must have appreciated what a great historian calls Hadrian’s “vast and active genius.” But he may not have deemed it proper for him to dictate to the Senate how they should exercise their power of choice. What actually occurred is certainly obscure. A letter was dispatched to the Senate, after Trajan’s death, in which Hadrian was nominated, and Dio says that the signature was put to this letter by Plotina. One would imagine that such a deception, as Dio represents it to be, would easily be detected and resented by Hadrian’s powerful enemies in the Senate. It is probable that, as Merivale supposes, the letter was really dictated by Trajan, and the signing of it by Plotina was only formal. We may admit Dio’s narrative of facts, yet believe that the Empress was merely carrying out Trajan’s will.

On the other hand, there is no reason to quarrel with, or put a base interpretation on, her zeal for the succession of Hadrian. We shall see how well he maintained the sound work of Trajan. He was at once summoned to Selinus, to consult with Plotina and with the elderly Senator Attianus, who had been his guardian together with Trajan, and had been as zealous as the Empress in urging his advancement. They decided that Hadrian must return to his post at Antioch, and Plotina set out for Rome with the ashes of her husband in a golden urn. The last resting-place of Trajan was under the magnificent column which still bears witness in Rome to his many victories, and for centuries afterwards the most flattering compliment that the Senators could pay to an Emperor was to cry that he was “more fortunate than Augustus, and better than Trajan.”

Plotina lived at Rome for four years after the death of her husband. The first year was, as we shall see, one of great anxiety and trial. There was much discontent at Hadrian’s accession, and before long his reign was stained by the execution of four of the most distinguished nobles. Matidia died in the following year, and it was known to all Rome that Sabina lived unhappily with Hadrian. It is said that Plotina continued to have an active share in the administration of the Empire, though she must now have been in, or near, her seventh decade of life. Dio places her death in the year 121. Hadrian was in Gaul at the time, and the luxuriance of his mourning gave encouragement to the libellers. He went into deep mourning, breathed a passionate grief in a beautiful poem, and ordered the building of a temple for the cult of the divinity which he conferred on her. In NÎmes, where he was staying at the time when her death was announced, he raised the superb mausoleum which kept her name for ages in the mind of Europe.

It is both pleasant and legitimate to believe that there was neither rhetorical display nor the memory of an irregular love in the princely mourning of Hadrian over the death of his patroness. Apart from his own indebtedness to her, the world owed her much. She had been at least a most worthy and helpful companion of a great Emperor, a type of womanhood to which the eyes of Roman matrons might happily be directed. On the day when her inanimate frame was borne from the palace to the funeral pile, men could repeat that she had in truth left that home of temptation as she had entered it. The saner and sunnier life of the vast Empire was, in part, her monument.12