Library of Hadrian

Portrait of Emperor Hadrian (128-130) (2013-04-04 204).JPG

Portrait identified as the Emperor Hadrian from the library complex

The city of Athens was gifted with the Library of Hadrian by the then-emperor, Publius Aelius Hadrianus Buccellanus. Hadrian was born in 76 in Italica, Spain, where his predecessor and adoptive father, Trajan, was also from.

Known for his philhellenism (love of everything Greek), Hadrian toured the Greek east at least twice, endowing Athens with the library and an entirely new section of city, the entrance to which is still marked by a Roman gate. He made Athens the cultural capital of Greece and allowed the Greeks to have more limited self-government by “freeing” the cities.

Hadrian’s love for Antinous, a Greek youth, is well-known. Antinous, while traveling with the emperor in Egypt, committed suicide at the age of 19 by throwing himself into the Nile. (Some say he was murdered.) Grief-stricken, Hadrian had his beloved deified and had temples built to him all over the empire.

Hadrian died in 138 and was buried in his mausoleum, now known as the Castel Sant’Angelo, in Rome, Italy. There his ashes rested among other emperors until the Visigothic sack of the city in 410, at which point many of the dead’s ashes were scattered and the mausoleum damaged. A lidless reliquary from the second century is believed to be his.