Lady of the Eternal City (64 page)

The order of events for Empress Plotina’s death, the secrecy-shrouded Eleusinian Mysteries, the Bar Kokhba rebellion, and the Pedanius-Servianus executions is extremely hazy; I’ve done my best to tease out a narrative in each case, but dates and details are conflicting. Minor changes have been made to Hadrian’s busy travel schedule: His bear hunt, his first round of journeying in Spain and Greece, and the incident in which he blinded a slave boy were moved by a year or two, as was the dismissal of Prefect Clarus and archivist Suetonius (author of the notorious
Twelve Caesars,
a work for which historical novelists from Robert Graves on down are fervently grateful!) Hadrian’s lightning-struck visit to the shrine on Mount Casius really happened, but sources conflict about when he made that climb; I chose the date that better suited the story.

Finally, a note about the Emperor’s Hades—Hadrian’s enormous villa with its spread of gardens and temples, its statues of Antinous, and its moated private sanctum still stands today, a crumbling ruin outside Rome, and a mysterious snippet comes down through time about its construction: Hadrian reportedly built a Hades on the grounds, a subterranean entrance to the Underworld. What was this Hades, where was it, and why did Hadrian build it? We will probably never know.

Emperor Hadrian is the most complicated and fascinating of any emperor I have ever studied. He is probably best known to a modern audience through Marguerite Yourcenar’s revered
Memoirs of Hadrian
, which puts a positive spin on most of his actions and portrays him as a saintly philosopher-king. Our perceptions now are more flawed and confusing, and yet it was a line of Yourcenar’s that inspired my whole vision of Hadrian as he appears here:
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
. Hadrian wasn’t a good man, but I think he tried to be one for the sake of his Empire, his Bithynian boy, and whatever stubborn friends like Vix who managed to remain at his side throughout his extraordinary life.

IMPERIAL FAMILY

*Publius Aelius HADRIAN, Emperor of Rome

*Empress Vibia SABINA, his wife

*Pompeia PLOTINA, his adoptive mother, widow of former Emperor Trajan

*Lucius Julius Ursus SERVIANUS, his brother-in-law

*Gnaeus PEDANIUS Fuscus Salinator, Servianus’s grandson

ROMAN SENATORS AND THEIR FAMILIES

*TITUS Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus, nicknamed Pius

*Annia Galeria FAUSTINA, his wife

*ANNIA Galeria Faustina the Younger, their daughter

*Aurelia Fadilla, their daughter

*MARCUS Catilius Severus, a young cousin

*LUCIUS Ceionius, Roman aristocrat and dilettante

*Ceionia Fabia, daughter of Lucius Ceionius

*Lucius, son of Lucius Ceionius

ROMAN SOLDIERS AND THEIR FAMILIES

Vercingetorix (VIX), tribune in the Praetorian Guard, former officer of the Tenth Fidelis

MIRAH, his wife

Dinah and Chaya, their daughters

*ANTINOUS, their adopted son

*Simon ben Cosiba, Mirah’s uncle

Arius the Barbarian, Vix’s father, former gladiator

Thea, Vix’s mother, former Imperial mistress

Boil, a Praetorian guard

Africanus, an officer of the Tenth Fidelis

*Septicius Clarus, Praetorian Prefect

*Marcius Turbo, Praetorian Prefect

*Julius Ursus Severus, legionary commander

ROMAN CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS

*Julia Balbilla, Greek heiress and attendant to Empress Sabina

*Galeria Lysistrata (formerly Ennia), housekeeper to Titus and Faustina

*Suetonius, Hadrian’s secretary and former archivist

*denotes historical figure

Acknowledgments to my wonderful team of beta readers: my mother, Kelly Quinn, for her incisive editing; fellow historical novelist and marathoner Stephanie Thornton for her insights on the agonies Annia would have suffered during her half-marathon sprint; and most of all to brilliant duo Stephanie Dray and Sophie Perinot, who told me the book needed the viewpoint of the beautiful and doomed Antinous—how right you were.

Further acknowledgments to Anthony Everitt’s brilliant
Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome
(my bible and security blanket); to my team at Berkley, including wonderful editor Jackie Cantor; my agent, Kevan Lyon; and the memory of my former agent, Pam Strickler, to whom this book is dedicated.

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