appeared upon the scene, antiquity seemed an illusion. How
ultra-modern he was, this man whom his contemporaries called "a
searcher out of strange things"! These ruins could not by the mere
process of time become venerable, for they were in their very nature
novelties. They were the playthings of a very rich man. There they lie
upon the ground like so many broken toys. They are just such things as
an enormously rich man would make to-day if he had originality enough
to think of them. Why should not Hadrian have a Vale of Tempe and a
Greek theatre and a Valley of Canopus, and ever so many other things
which he had seen in his travels, reproduced on his estate near
Tivoli?

An historian of the Empire says: "The character of Hadrian was in the
highest degree complex, and this presents to the student a series of
apparently unreconciled contrasts which have proved so hard for many
modern historians to resolve. A thorough soldier and yet the
inaugurator of a peace policy, a 'Greekling' as his Roman subjects
called him, and saturated with Hellenic ideas, and yet a lover of
Roman antiquity; a poet and an artist, but with a passion for
business and finance; a voluptuary determined to drain the cup of
human experience and, at the same time, a ruler who labored
strenuously for the well-being of his subjects; such were a few of the
diverse parts which Hadrian played."

It is evident that the difficulty with the historians who find these
unreconciled contrasts is that they try to treat Hadrian as an
"ancient" rather than as a modern. The enormously rich men who are at
present most in the public eye present the same contradictions.
Hadrian was a thorough man of the world. There was nothing venerable
about him, though much that was interesting and admirable.