AN EXHIBITION ON THE EMPEROR HADRIAN opens at the British Museum later this month. The Museum's director has an article profiling Hadrian and the exhibition in the London Times:

There’s more to Hadrian than wall-building
A military mastermind who retreated from Iraq, a politician motivated by peace, and a lover of Greek culture and Greek men - there’s more to Hadrian than wall-building, reveals the director of the British Museum

Neil MacGregor

We think we know the Romans. Countless books, films, plays and pieces of music have been inspired by an empire that, at its height, in AD117, stretched from the site of modern Glasgow in the north to the Sahara desert in the south, and from the Atlantic to Basra. Hollywood sword-and-sandal epics from Quo Vadis to Gladiator, as well as the BBC’s Rome, give us the impression of an empire at once brutal and noble, heroic and corrupt, bloody and decadent - an empire of slavery but also of many freedoms, of multiple identities, all drawn together in the service of Rome and its emperors. But how much do we know? It can be hard to glimpse the real empire through the histories that have survived the centuries, histories that are invariably biased depending on who wrote them, when and, above all, for whom.

Sometimes one has a chance to glimpse the real emotions of ordinary Romans, living their lives under this extraordinary empire. The Vindolanda tablets, housed in the British Museum, slightly predate the emperor Hadrian and his instruction to build his eponymous wall separating England from Scotland (Caledonia) in AD122. Vindolanda fort already existed, first constructed in the late first century. Soldiers from all over the empire were billeted there, of Celtic, Germanic, North African or Syrian origins: a multi-national force guarding the extremes of the realm. Excavations at the fort in 1973 revealed an extraordinary cache of wooden writing tablets, official military documents and personal letters concerning the day-to-day issues of life in the army. They reveal complaints about the cold, illnesses, receipt of care parcels providing socks and underpants, invitations to birthday parties and so on. These truly are the humble building blocks of history and are surely similar to the e-mails and text messages soldiers send home from Iraq today. At their most basic, they show how little has changed in nearly 2,000 years. There is another connection between these two regions: for the north of England and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) were once the northern and eastern borders of the Roman empire, under the enigmatic emperor Hadrian.

In many ways, Hadrian seems familiar to us. There is a perception of him - given to us via the Victorians and then Marguerite Yourcenar’s ever-popular fictional autobiography of the emperor (1951) - that he was somehow different, a maverick, a Greek-loving peacenik more interested in architecture and boys than in securing the legacy of mighty Rome. But how true is this portrait, and what of Hadrian’s legacy? Why is he still important now? These are the questions an exhibition at the British Museum is seeking to address. A huge number of archeological finds connected to Hadrian and excavated over the past 30 or so years have inspired a new scholarship and allowed a reassessment of his character.

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A truer glimpse of Hadrian’s character can be seen in the material borrowed from Israel for the exhibition. These loans include a magnificent bronze head and torso of Hadrian in military uniform; though his pose seems casual, he is every inch the tough military leader, a trait he exhibited to shocking effect during the second Jewish revolt (AD1325). Hadrian’s apparent banning of circumcision and his probable encroachments in Jerusalem unleashed a storm, led by Simeon Bar Kokhba, that cost Rome up to three legions. Hadrian decided to remind Judea that Rome was an imperial power that could brook no dissent: the proud rebels were mercilessly crushed, costing the lives of almost 600,000 Jews. It is no wonder that in the Talmud, Hadrian’s name was followed by the simple injunction “May his bones rot”.

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Read it all. The exhibition was announced back in January. For more on the Vindolanda finds (and a little more on Bar Kokhba), see here. And for more still on Bar Kokhba, see here.

UPDATE: Bad link now fixed. Sorry about that.

UPDATE (11 July): More here.