Greece: The Arch of Hadrian

The arch is easy to miss the first time, if you are walking south from the Acropolis toward the Olympieion and your eyes are pulled upward to the columns - the sixteen surviving Corinthian columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, enormous and honey-coloured against the Attic sky, the kind of thing that stops you on a pavement without permission. The arch is smaller, quieter, set on what was once the boundary between two cities. It is made of Pentelic marble, the same stone as the Parthenon. It is approximately 18 metres high, single-bayed, carved in the Roman style but placed in a Greek city by an emperor who loved Greece more, perhaps, than he loved Rome. It has been standing in roughly its present condition for about nineteen centuries. You can walk through it.

Hadrian built it, or had it built, around 131-132 CE. He was in Athens, as he was in Athens often - this was an emperor who travelled extensively and who had a particular attachment to Greek culture, Greek philosophy, and the city he considered the intellectual centre of the world. He had been financing the completion of the Olympieion, a temple to Olympian Zeus that had been under construction on and off for nearly seven hundred years. He was building Hadrianopolis, a new district east of the old city. The arch marked the threshold: on its western face, an inscription reads "This is Athens, the former city of Theseus." On its eastern face: "This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus." He was, in other words, naming the new city after himself. The old city acknowledged; the new city proclaimed. The arch as boundary marker, and as monument to the man who drew the boundary.

This is the entry in the series that requires holding two things in the mind at once. There is the arch itself - beautiful, well-made, still standing, the product of a genuine philhellene's affection for Athens. And there is what was happening in those same years, in the eastern province of Judaea, under the same emperor's authority: a revolt, a suppression, a renaming, and a ban. The man who gave the Greeks a new city, inscribed in marble on its threshold, was simultaneously taking a city from the Jews and writing their name off the map.

The emperor who built everything

Hadrian reigned from 117 to 138 CE and is classed among the Five Good Emperors - the sequence of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, whose reigns are often described as the high-water mark of the Roman Empire's political stability. The designation is ancient and a little idealised, but it captures something real about the period: these were rulers whose authority was secure enough that they could govern without the cycles of terror that had marked the reigns of Domitian or Caligula, and who used that security productively.

Hadrian was, among Roman emperors, unusually invested in building. The Pantheon in Rome - one of the best-preserved buildings of classical antiquity, its concrete dome still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world - was completed under his reign. He built Hadrian's Wall across northern Britain, the most extensively surviving Roman frontier work in Europe. He built his own mausoleum, now the Castel Sant'Angelo, on the banks of the Tiber. He completed the Olympieion in Athens and built extensively across Greece, Asia Minor, and North Africa. The empire under Hadrian was, in physical terms, more extensively marked by the work of a single emperor than perhaps any other period in Roman history.

He was also a traveller in a way that was unusual for a Roman emperor. He spent less than half his reign in Rome. He went to Gaul, Britain, Germany, Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, North Africa. He inspected the frontiers. He attended religious ceremonies in the provinces. He knew the empire in a way that a sedentary emperor could not. He had, as a result, a detailed personal acquaintance with the problems of the eastern provinces - and with the Jewish population concentrated in those provinces, in Judaea, in the diaspora cities, in Egypt and Syria and Asia Minor, in the million or so people who constituted the largest non-Roman ethnic community in the empire.

What Hadrian thought about the Jews, and what calculations he made about their governance, is not entirely clear from the surviving sources. What is clear is that in 132 CE, something went badly wrong.

The revolt: 132-135 CE

Simon bar Kokhba - his name means "son of a star," a messianic title applied to him by Rabbi Akiva, who saw in him the fulfilment of the verse in Numbers: "A star shall come forth from Jacob" - led what was, in its first phase, an astonishingly successful uprising. The revolt broke out in 132 CE, the precise triggers debated by historians: Roman plans to build a pagan city on the ruins of Jerusalem, a ban on circumcision under Hadrian's general ban on castration, accumulated grievances following the First Jewish-Roman War and the destruction of the Temple sixty years earlier. Possibly all of these. Possibly the simple intractability of a province that Rome had never fully pacified.

In its early months, Bar Kokhba's forces achieved what no Jewish army had managed since 70 CE: they drove the Romans out and established control over a significant portion of the province. Coins were minted - among the most evocative objects that survive from the period - stamped with the palm tree and the lulav, inscribed "Year 1 of the redemption of Israel" and, in subsequent issues, "For the freedom of Jerusalem." The revolt declared a state. It dated its coins. It had a functioning administration. Bar Kokhba's letters, found in the Cave of Letters in the Nahal Hever in 1960-61, show him issuing orders, requisitioning supplies, managing logistics. He signed them Shimon bar Kosiba - his actual name, bar Kokhba the title the tradition assigned him.

Hadrian's response, once the scale of the uprising became clear, was to commit serious military resources. The general Sextus Julius Severus was recalled from Britain, where he had been managing Hadrian's Wall, and sent to Judaea with significant reinforcements. What followed was a systematic campaign of reduction - not a pitched battle but the methodical elimination of stronghold after stronghold, the cutting of supply lines, the destruction of villages that had supported the revolt. Ancient sources give the casualty figures in the hundreds of thousands, which historians treat with scepticism given the tendencies of ancient military writing to inflate, but the scale of destruction was real: the physical and demographic record of Jewish settlement in the Judaean hills shows a severe rupture in precisely this period.

The last stronghold was Betar - ancient Battir, near Jerusalem. It fell in 135 CE. By traditional reckoning, it fell on the ninth of Av - Tisha B'Av - the same date as the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar and the Second Temple by Titus, a convergence that the tradition treats as more than coincidence. Bar Kokhba was killed. Rabbi Akiva, who had supported the revolt and had declared Bar Kokhba the messianic king, was executed by the Romans - according to tradition, flayed alive. The revolt was over. Judaea was being remade.

The renaming

What Hadrian did after Betar fell was not merely the suppression of a revolt. It was an administrative and symbolic restructuring that aimed at something more permanent: the erasure of the Jewish connection to the province from the official record of the empire.

The province of Judaea was renamed. The new name was Syria Palaestina - Syria Palestine - a designation that combined the existing province of Syria to the north with a Latinised form of "Philistia," the territory of the ancient coastal people whom the Hebrew Bible calls the Philistines. The Philistines had been gone as a distinct political entity for many centuries; their name, in this usage, was an archaeological borrowing deployed specifically to replace the Jewish name on the map. Exactly when Hadrian issued this renaming is disputed in the scholarship - some evidence suggests it may have preceded the revolt rather than followed it - but its effect was to remove "Judaea" from the administrative record.

Jerusalem was renamed. The old name - Yerushalayim in Hebrew, Hierosolyma in Greek - was replaced with Aelia Capitolina. "Aelius" was Hadrian's family name (his full name was Publius Aelius Hadrianus); "Capitolina" referred to the Capitoline Triad, the three gods - Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva - who presided over Rome's most important temple on the Capitoline Hill. A temple to Jupiter was built on or near the site of the Temple Mount. Hadrian built the new city on a Roman grid, with colonnaded streets, a forum, and the standard infrastructure of a Roman colonial town. Coins were minted showing the new city's name. The administrative record called it Aelia Capitolina. The old name was not to be used.

And Jews were banned from entering it. The ban is attested by multiple ancient sources - Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, and Eusebius, writing in the fourth, both describe Jews being forbidden from the city. The one exception was Tisha B'Av: once a year, on the anniversary of the Temple's destruction, Jews were permitted - in some accounts, permitted for a fee - to enter the city and mourn at the ruins. They came to lament the place they had been forbidden from inhabiting. The permission to grieve was the measure of the prohibition.

The arch and the city: the same hand, the same year

Hold the two things together now. In Athens in 131-132 CE, Hadrian is completing the Olympieion - the great temple of Zeus that had been unfinished for seven centuries - and building the arch that marks the threshold of his new city. The arch's eastern inscription reads: "This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus." He is naming the new city after himself, in marble, in a city he loves. He is giving the Athenians a gift: his patronage, his building programme, his name attached to a new district of a great and ancient city.

In Judaea in the same years, the revolt breaks out, is suppressed, and the province is remade. Jerusalem - Yerushalayim, Hierosolyma, the city whose name appears throughout the Hebrew Bible as the axis of sacred geography - is renamed Aelia Capitolina. The city of Hadrian. And not of the Jews.

The parallel in the inscriptions is not accidental - it is structural, the characteristic gesture of Roman imperial urbanism, which built new foundations and named them after emperors as a matter of routine. Hadrian gave this treatment to the Greeks as a compliment: here is a new city of Hadrian. He gave it to the Jews as an erasure: here is no longer a Jewish city. The same formula; opposite intentions; opposite effects. To the Greeks, the arch in Athens is a boundary marker of patronage. To the Jews, the renaming of Jerusalem is a boundary drawn against them.

Both inscriptions are still legible, in some form. The Athens inscription survives on the arch itself, weathered but readable. The "Aelia Capitolina" inscription survives on coins held in museum collections, in the pages of ancient historians, in the name that the Roman administrative record used for Jerusalem for roughly two centuries before the name Yerushalayim returned to official use - under Constantine, in the fourth century, when the empire converted and the Christian significance of the city made its biblical name useful again. The Jewish community never stopped using the old name. Not in prayer, not in literature, not in the liturgy, not in the letters that circulated between the diaspora communities and the communities still in the land. The official record said Aelia Capitolina. The community said Jerusalem. The stone outlasted the renaming.

Rabbi Akiva and the weight of the choice

Among the losses of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the death of Rabbi Akiva requires particular attention, not because it was unique in a period of mass killing but because of what Akiva had staked on the revolt's outcome.

Akiva ben Joseph was, by the time of the revolt, already one of the most important rabbinic figures of his generation - a central interpreter of Jewish law, a contributor to the discussions that would eventually be compiled into the Mishnah, a teacher whose students shaped the next generation of rabbinic culture. He was not a young man. He was, by the various accountings in the tradition, somewhere between sixty and eighty years old when the revolt broke out. And he supported it. More than supported it: he declared Bar Kokhba to be the messiah, citing the verse in Numbers about the star coming forth from Jacob. He was not the only rabbi to do so, but he was the most authoritative. His endorsement was the most consequential.

His colleagues were not all persuaded. The Talmud records a sardonic response from Rabbi Yochanan ben Torta: "Akiva, grass will grow in your cheeks and still the son of David will not have come." The exchange captures the tension in the rabbinic world about what Bar Kokhba was and what he represented. Akiva saw a messianic liberator. Others saw a man leading the community toward catastrophe. Both were looking at the same figure. Only one reading proved correct about the immediate outcome.

Akiva was arrested by the Romans after the revolt's suppression and, according to the tradition, executed by being flayed - the iron combs drawn across his skin. The account in the Talmud records that he died reciting the Shema, the declaration of God's unity: "Hear O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is One." He prolonged the final word - echad, one - until his soul departed. The tradition records that the angels protested to God: "This is Torah, and this is its reward?" And God replied: "Be silent. Such is the divine decree." The death of Akiva is among the most discussed and most painful moments in the history of Jewish martyrology. He died for a revolt he had endorsed, in a province whose name was being erased, in a period when the community was trying to work out what survival meant now.

What the community kept

The renaming of Jerusalem lasted, in official Roman usage, for roughly two hundred years. Constantine's conversion and his mother Helena's identification of Christian holy sites in Jerusalem in the early fourth century made the biblical name useful to imperial administration again; Aelia Capitolina gives way gradually to Jerusalem in the official record from the 330s CE onward. The province name Syria Palaestina persisted longer, and its shortened form - Palaestina - continued in administrative use through the Byzantine period and beyond, becoming the root of the Arabic Filastin and the English "Palestine." That is a long administrative shadow, but this piece concerns only the historical renaming - its modern political valence is territory that Story and Stone does not enter.

What the Jewish community kept, across both renamings, is the thread that runs through the whole of this series. The community did not accept the Roman name for Jerusalem. The prayer books that circulated through the diaspora prayed for the rebuilding of Jerusalem - Yerushalayim, the Hebrew name, unchanged. The liturgy of the Passover seder concluded, as it concludes today: L'shana haba'ah b'Yerushalayim - "Next year in Jerusalem." Not next year in Aelia Capitolina. Not next year in the city Hadrian built. Jerusalem. The Tisha B'Av liturgy mourned the destruction of Jerusalem and prayed for its restoration. The community was not going to call the city by the name of the man who had forbidden them from entering it.

They came on Tisha B'Av anyway, permitted or tolerated or bribing their way past the prohibition - the ancient sources are not precise on the mechanism - to stand at the ruins and lament. Jerome, writing in the fourth century, describes Jews coming to the ruins on the anniversary of the destruction, paying for the permission to weep, pressing their lips to the stones. Whether the scene is reported or embellished, the underlying fact is the same: the community maintained a relationship with the city despite the ban. The stones of the ruined Temple compound were present. The name was present, in every word of prayer and study. The community sustained both, across the two centuries of Aelia Capitolina, and emerged the other side still calling the city by its old name.

The arch in Athens is still beautiful. Hadrian's building programme is still, in many respects, impressive. He was, by the standards of ancient imperial rulers, an unusually cultivated and thoughtful administrator. None of that changes what happened to Betar, or to Akiva, or to the name of the city. The same emperor. The same years. The arch in Athens says "This is the city of Hadrian." The coins from Aelia Capitolina say "This is the city of Hadrian." One inscription was a gift. One was an erasure. The community that was the subject of the erasure read both, remembered both, and kept the old name until the old name came back.

The object you can walk through

The series has stood in front of objects in glass cases: the Lachish reliefs in the British Museum, the Cyrus Cylinder in Room 52, the Merneptah Stele in Cairo. It has stood under the Arch of Titus on the Via Sacra in Rome, in a place where Jews once refused to walk. This entry is different again: here the object is a Roman arch in a Greek city, and the story it carries is not about Greece at all.

You can walk through the Arch of Hadrian any day. There are no guards, no tickets, no prescribed direction. The Pentelic marble is warm in the Attic light. The Olympieion's surviving columns are visible from it, sixteen of the original one hundred and four, towering against the sky. The inscriptions on the arch's two faces are worn but present. Tourists walk through on their way to the archaeological site. Most do not stop. Most do not know the other inscription - not the one on the arch, but the one on the coins, the one that renamed a city in the same years this arch was finished.

The same emperor. The same marble. The same administrative habit of writing his name on cities and calling it urbanism. In Athens he was a patron; the Greeks received his building programme and gave him a cult - he was formally deified in Athens as the Olympian, a title previously reserved for Zeus. In Judaea he was a catastrophe; the rabbis who shaped post-revolt Judaism, gathering in the academies of Galilee to reconstruct the legal and intellectual life of a people who had lost their city, named him in their literature with one of the contemptuous epithets the tradition reserves for enemies: harasha - the wicked one. The same man. Two communities, two different experiences of what it meant to live in his empire.

The arch in Athens is, objectively, beautiful. Standing under it and looking at the Corinthian pilasters, the proportions, the fine workmanship of the Pentelic marble - it is a graceful thing. There is no requirement to refuse it that. But it is also, for anyone who knows what was happening in Judaea in the years the arch was finished, a kind of evidence - not of the emperor's wickedness, precisely, but of the particular logic of empire, which gives and takes in the same gesture, which inscribes its name on cities in marble, which assumes that renaming is the same as remaking. Aelia Capitolina was built on the ruins of Jerusalem. The arch in Athens is built on the boundary of a city Hadrian gave the Greeks. The stone of both is still standing. The name that outlasted both is Jerusalem.