Historians of the Roman Empire have long recognised a major flaw in the power structures of the Imperial Period. The Roman Empire was especially, perhaps uniquely, subject to the vicissitudes of its all-powerful Emperors. The traditional historians of the Empire, especially the British politician-cum-classicist Edward Gibbon, have expended much energy and ink to define who was a ‘good’ Emperor, and who was a ‘bad’ Emperor. During what Gibbon considered the long, drawn-out, ‘decline and fall’ of the Roman Empire (which he took as the title of his monumental book), he charted a decline in the quality of Emperors. While, according to his view, there had been aberrations in the earlier period, such as Caligula or Nero, Gibbon saw the general quality of the holders of the Imperial Purple as decreasing over time. There was, however, a short period in which this trend was bucked: what Gibbon called the ‘Five Good Emperors’. These monarchs were lauded by Eighteenth Century AD classicists as fitting the model of the Platonic philosopher-king, the idealised educated monarch. These monarchs were chosen by adoption rather than through direct blood inheritance; this was a matter of necessity, not of choice, since none of the first five Emperors of the Nerva-Antonine Dynasty had legitimate male heirs. According to Gibbon, the so-called Adoptive Emperors were selected for their virtues, though in practice there was much political machination behind the choice of successor, and leading courtiers – in many cases, women – played vital roles in ensuring that dying and often very ill rulers picked a favoured successor. Nonetheless, the ‘Five Good Emperors’ – Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius – were lauded for their military successes, their concern for national unity, and the importance of their building works.

For numerous reasons, the Emperor Hadrian is perhaps the most famous of the ‘Five Good Emperors’. His concern for the borders of the Empire is memorialised in his famous wall, built across the north of England from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway, a distance of 117.5 km (73 miles). His remarkable artistic and architectural taste was reflected in his villa at Tivoli, and in the Pantheon in Rome, regarded as one of the most beautiful and architecturally important religious buildings of all time. His remarkable passion for the arts, poetry and music are well-remembered. But at the time of his rule, his approval among at least the elite of the Empire was remarkably low. A favourite of the Empress Plotina, wife of Trajan, Hadrian was propelled to the throne in dubious circumstances upon Trajan’s death. Plotina, a grand-aunt of his wife Vibia Sabina, whom he married in AD 100, and Sabina’s own mother Salonia Matidia, seem to have plotted to install Hadrian on the throne perhaps even without his consent or knowledge. When Trajan was on his deathbed, there was no signed document confirming his successor. When a document was produced claiming Trajan’s wish that Hadrian accede to the throne, it was signed not by the Emperor, but by his wife. According to the Historia Augustae, an anonymous chronicle of the later Emperors, the troops rushed to acclaim Hadrian, for fear that a power vacuum would weaken the Empire (and result in unpaid state wages). But while Hadrian may have had military support, he could never quite count on the senatorial classes, who were dubious of his legitimacy.

Hadrian was the most well-travelled Emperor in Roman history, with a well-attested love of the eastern half of the Empire. But this was not in favour with the elite, who called Hadrian Graeculus, the ‘Greekling’. As a result, he was considered effeminate or somehow non-Roman. In the hypermasculine world of the Roman elite, there was only so much that the patricians could take of their Emperor’s love for the arts and the Emperor’s love for boys. His much-beloved companion Antinous was drowned in the River Nile during one of his many eastern tours in around AD 130, probably on the orders of members of the senatorial class. Hadrian was disinterested, at least sexually, in his wife, Vibia Sabina; she apparently had a number of affairs, including with the historian Suetonius, who was dismissed as one of Hadrian’s private secretaries because he carried on with the Empress in a more informal fashion than court etiquette demanded’ (Historia Augusta 11.3). Hadrian’s disinterest in his wife, and even outright mistreatment, may have contributed to her suicide in AD 136 or AD 137. The Empress’ affairs and Hadrian’s bisexuality may have denigrated his masculinity to some extent in the eyes of his contemporaries, but it was, tragically, one of the Emperor’s best decisions which inspired the most ire from the Roman elite. Trajan had famously expanded the Empire to its greatest-ever extent. Hadrian, however, realised that the Empire was dangerously overstretched, and that the borders were becoming increasingly difficult to police, returned control of the new Roman territories in Mesopotamia, Armenia, Assyria, and Dacia. This was seen at the time as a humiliating defeat, but for modern military historians, this was a shrewd move which probably prolonged the life of the Empire.

Hadrian’s lack of popularity at the time is overshadowed by the more positive assessments of his reign in modern times. This remarkable intaglio is of a very rare type: while intaglios were usually carved from hard stone, difficult to work, but robust enough to resist cracking, this intaglio is made from bicoloured opaque glass, in blue and green. The artist had a lively and accurate hand, rendering the gorgeous details of the Emperor’s face, hair, beard and corona of laurel with exceptional skill. The Emperor looks to his left, wide-eyed and alert, with the robust nose and Grecian curls known from the Emperor’s many portraits in marble. The primary use of intaglio rings was for sealing wax on documents. Where portraits of mortal humans were included in the design, this often served as a calling-card for the owner, allowing us to speculate about the tantalising possibility that this seal belonged to the Emperor or else to a member of his immediate household, and was perhaps lost on one of the Emperor’s many travels to the eastern half of the Empire. Both as a work of art, a historical document, and as a Roman intaglio in-situ in a gold ring casing, this is an exceptional work. While glass is considered in modern times to be a poor substitute for precious stones, often being used as a replacement where stones would be too expensive, the technical skill required to manufacture glass in Roman times made it a far more valuable material, comparable in cost to rock crystal and other semi-precious hardstones. This, then, would not have been a cheap ring at the time, and this further indicates the upper class origins of this piece. The glass remains in remarkable condition, except a single crack across the equator of the piece, bisecting the two colours of the glass.