It was not honorable warfare, but it was effective; then, too, it
was Hadrianesque, the mad insult of a madman to a race as mad as
he. The purple had done its work. History has left the rise of
this emperor conjectural; his fall is written in blood. As he
began he ended, a poet and a beast.
Presently he was in Rome. It was not homesickness that took him
there; he was far too cosmopolitan to suffer from any such malady
as that. It was the accumulations of a fifteen-year excursion
through the metropoles of art which demanded a gallery of their
own. Another with similar tastes and similar power might have
ordered everything which pleasured his eye to be carted to Rome,
but in his quality of artifex omnipotens Hadrian embellished and
never sacked. There were painters and sculptors enough in that
army at his heels, and whatever appealed to him was copied on the
spot. So much was copied that a park of ten square miles was just
large enough to form the open-air museum which he had designed,
one which centuries of excavation have not exhausted yet.
The museum became a mad-house. Hadrian was ill; tired in mind and
body, smitten with imperialia. It was then the young Verus died,
leaving for a wonder a child behind, and more wonderful still,
Antonin was adopted. Through Rome, meanwhile, terror stalked.
Hadrian, in search of a remedy against his increasing confusion of
mind, his visible weakness of body, turned from physicians to
oracles; from them to magic, and then to blood.
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