Insularity and Imperial Politics: Hadrian on the Greek Islands

Abstract

Since its conquest by Rome in the 2nd century BCE, Roman notables were a constant presence in Greece. While various sites on the mainland served as battlegrounds for Roman civil wars during the 1st century BCE (e.g., Pharsalus, Actium, Philippi), the early imperial period was characterized by the use of various Greek islands as places of – often self-imposed – exile and/or isolation for such notables as M. Vipsanius Agrippa (Lesbos) and Tiberius (Rhodes). Other imperial Romans sojourned in the Aegean islands for different reasons. Augustus spent a winter on Samos after his victory at Actium, using it as a temporary powerbase for the refinement of his imperial plans, and he visited it and other islands again as emperor. While the first two Julio-Claudian emperors maintained close contacts with the Greek world, in the 2nd century CE Hadrian took this connection a step further and promoted Hellenism as a major part of his imperial policy. Naturally, the Greek islands played an important role in imperial politics during his reign, but only as components of the wider Hellenic world and not as isolated entities. Hadrian visited Rhodes and Paros to restore and venerate older Hellenic monuments – the Colossus and the tomb of the poet Archilochus respectively – and possibly Samothrace in order to be initiated into the Mysteries of the Great Gods. He also visited other islands in Greece, but his exact travel itinerary can only be speculative given our fragmentary literary and epigraphic evidence. In this paper, I focus on Hadrian’s presence on the Aegean islands and argue that during his reign they served mainly as sites that allowed for the implementation of his imperial plans by virtue of their easy access from the mainland Greek and Asian provinces. Accordingly, by promoting certain aspects of older Hellenic culture on specific islands, Hadrian conferred renewed prestige to these islands in the Roman Empire.