Tonight:
4°c
So many wonderful things await at the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. There's an extraordinarily sexy sculpture of Antinous in the guise of the Egyptian god, Osiris, all nipples and bottom. It's now thought to have come from the newly discovered "Antinoeion" at Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, a shrine to the boy. There's the amazing colossal marble head of Hadrian himself, uncovered only a year ago in southwest Turkey - accompanied by one giant foot in an ornate sandal. Add to that the barbaric bronze head of the emperor fished out of the Thames in 1834, which Marguerite Yourcenar saw in the British Museum as a girl, sparking an interest that culminated in her great novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, many years later.
Marvels all. Not to be missed. The greatest show in town. And yet this exhibition is also a tendentious lecture, as its subtitle "empire and Conflict" warns.
On entering, the first thing you see are some of Yourcenar's notes for her novel. Loving the book as I do, I was touched until I realised she was there only to be thoroughly corrected. Neil MacGregor, director of the BM, has derided her ultra-civilised Hadrian as post-war wish fulfilment. "The hadrian of the British Museum's exhibition is an altogether more unsettling companion than Marguerite Yourcenar's urbane philosopher-emperor," MacGregor boasts. So we see artefacts from the Jewish revolt of 132-135 AD, displayed to show Hadrian's brutality to all rebels against the empire, "poignant evidence of the huge human cost of hadrian's peace".
We are told that a statue of Hadrian in the British Museum wearing a Greek mantle, long taken as proof of his profound love of all things Greek, is a Victorian construct, marrying the head to the wrong body. Today's Hadrian exhibition presents him not as Yourcenar's philosopher-emperor but as George W Bush, ruthless imperialist. Current events "lend Hadrian's actions a surprising topicality that cannot but have an effect on how we perceive aspects of his reign", the catalogue remarks. "One of Hadrian's first official acts as a new ruler was to withdraw the Roman army from Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. At a time when western forces occupy the same territory this inevitably lends Hadrian's policies a different kind of attention."
We know exactly what this is supposed to make us think about - "the perennial question that all empires face, of the morality of imposing peace on peoples who want to run their own affairs", as MacGregor suggestively puts it. Now what could he possibly have in mind? Every generation reinvents Hadrian in its own image. But is the best response to that insight deliberately to embrace the distortion involved, rather than try to resist it, so far as scholarship permits?
In Hadrian: empire and Conflict, the archaeological finds and works of art are overborne by a modern political argument, familiar, humdrum, and therefore, in comparison with Hadrian himself, of quite limited interest.
