But though Dacia was quiet, in its neighborhood the
restless Sarmatians prowled and threatened. Hadrian, who had
already written a book on tactics, knew at once how to act.
Domitian's policy was before him; he followed the precedent, and
paid the Sarmatians to be still. It requires little acumen to see
that when Rome permitted herself to be blackmailed the end was
near.
For the time being, however, there was peace, and in its interest
Hadrian set out on that unequalled journey over a land that was
his. Had fate relented, Trajan could have made a wider one still.
But in Trajan was the soldier merely, when he journeyed it was
with the sword. In Hadrian was the dilettante, the erudite too; he
travelled not to conquer, but to learn, to satisfy an insatiable
curiosity, for self-improvement, for glory too. Behind him was an
army, not of soldiers, but of masons, captained by architects,
artists and engineers. Did a site please him, there was a temple
at once, or if not that, then a bridge, an aqueduct, a library, a
new fashion, sovereignty even, but everywhere the spectacle of an
emperor in flesh and blood. For the first time the provinces were
able to understand that a Caesar was not necessarily a brute, a
phantom and a god.
It would have been interesting to have made one of that court of
poets and savants that surrounded him; to have dined with him in
Paris, eaten oysters in London; sat with him while he watched that
wall go up before the Scots, and then to have passed down again
through a world still young--a world beautiful, ornate,
unutilitarian; a world to which trams, advertisements and
telegraph poles had not yet come; a world that still had
illusions, myths and mysteries; one in which religion and poetry
went hand in hand--a world without newspapers, hypocrisy and cant.
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