and the necessary frontier fortresses, in the most effective condition. With military men of all ranks he had constant familiar intercourse, visiting them in their sickness, and manifesting on all occasions a cordial concern for their welfare. In sobriety, simplicity, activity, and hardihood, he was the model of a Roman soldier. He encouraged military exercises by his presence and even participation, as well as by rewards. Under him, merit alone was the road to promotion. While he caused discipline to be rigidly enforced, he was not only held in profound respect, but sincerely beloved, by the whole army. His bearing towards his subjects in general was easy and courteous, and, though dignified, entirely free from official stateliness. In his intercourse with his friends, he was familiar and genial. All who enjoyed his acquaintance, he visited whenever they were sick, comforted in their sorrows, and counseled and aided in their difficulties. He highly delighted in the society of persons distinguished for attainments in literature, science, or the fine arts; and was himself an adept in every department of science then cultivated, an elegant author, and an accomplished artist. Numerous instances of his clemency have been recorded, and on the occasion of every public calamity, whether famine, epidemic, or earthquake, his humanity and munificence were conspicuous.
In 120 he began his travels throughout the empire, and for seventeen years continued, with little interruption, to traverse the provinces, leaving in every one of them, but particularly in Greece, and especially at Athens, enduring monuments of his public spirit. The public work of Adrian, most familiar to British readers, is the line of fortification he caused to be executed between the Tyne and the Solway Frith. Adrian is said to have read, with attention, the dissertations presented to him by Quadratus and Aristides, in defence of the Christian religion; and to have issued, in consequence, an edict in favour of the Christians, then exposed to outbursts of popular fanaticism. The only war of much importance in which the empire was engaged during the reign of Adrian, was the Jewish. The establishment of a Roman colony at Jerusalem, drove the Jews to desperation. They rose in general insurrection, headed by Barcochebas, a pretended Messiah. A war of three years, in which neither party gave or expected quarter, terminated in the destruction of a large proportion of the Jews remaining in Palestine. In 135, Adrian declared L. Ceionius Commodus his heir and successor; and, on the death of Commodus, in 138, adopted Titus Antoninus, and made him adopt M. Annius Verus, afterwards Marcus Aurelius. The latter event, which took place in February, 138, was soon followed by the death of the empress Sabina. Adrian himself died at Baiæ on the 10th July of the same year, after a lingering and painful illness, that had soured his temper, and reduced him to a state of mind approaching derangement. Antoninus is said to have met with great difficulty in persuading the senate to grant his deceased adoptive father the honours and titles usually conferred on the emperors after their death. Our remaining space only permits a glance at the principal imputations cast on the memory of Adrian. Writers expatiate on Adrian's confidence in various sorts of divination, as if the wisest of the heathens did not inculcate divination as a religious duty. The natural, not to say scientific, curiosity, arising from Adrian's keen intellect and ardent imagination, has been represented sometimes as a distemper and sometimes as a crime. In reference to one charge, unfit for discussion, all that seems necessary to be said is, that it applies perhaps with equal certainty to all his predecessors, and to many of the most lauded of heathen worthies—an appalling fact, which strikingly illustrates the vanity of mere heathen refinement, and the need of Christianity to purify and exalt human society. In regard to Adrian's adoption of Ceionius Commodus, it ought to be remembered, that, though represented as luxurious, Commodus possessed a cultivated understanding, was an accomplished scholar, and an able writer both in prose and verse, and that, during his command in Pannonia, he acquitted himself with credit, displaying both administrative capacity and military skill. Even Adrian's settlement of the succession, by selecting Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius, though approved by all good patriots, was censured by many, and produced, in various quarters, bitter disappointment and treasonable intrigues. Adrian's great desire was to avoid appointing a successor who would sacrifice the national happiness to a passion for war and conquest, and to find one that would cordially pursue his own favourite policy of peace and reform. Various other statements of the flippant and far from veracious Spartian and Dion Cassius, imputing to Adrian capricious cruelty or heartless ingratitude, might be easily disproved by obvious inferences from other statements of the same unsatisfactory historian. That Adrian was a man of vast capacity, that the empire was never more prosperous than during his reign, and that his life and policy merit a more sifting investigation than they have hitherto obtained, are truths incontestable.—E. M.
ADRIAN of Tyre, a professor of eloquence in the second century, pupil and successor of Herodes Atticus. Marcus Aurelius, who had studied under him at Athens, induced him to remove to Rome, where he died in the reign of Commodus, whose secretary he had been.
ADRIAN, a Greek writer of the 5th century, author of "An Introduction to Sacred Scripture," the text of which was reprinted in London, 1602, in the 9th volume of the "Critici Sacri."
ADRIAN, a churchman of the eighth century, born in Africa, who was abbot of the monastery, near Naples, called Monasterium Nisidanum. He was offered the archbishopric of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian in 667, but declined that dignity, to which Theodore of Tarsus was then raised. The pope, however, sent Adrian along with Theodore, that he might be his guide in the journey to England, and also, it has been supposed, that he might watch over the interests of the orthodox faith, against any encroachments which Theodore, who was of the Greek communion, might seek to make. The travellers left Rome together in May, 668, and a year later Theodore arrived at his destination. Adrian did not reach England so soon, being detained on the way by Ebrinus, who then ruled over a part of Gaul, on the suspicion that he had been sent by the Greek emperor to stir up troubles against the kingdom of the Franks. When at last the suspicion was proved to be groundless, and Adrian was permitted to cross to England, he was at once, according to the Instructions of the pope, made abbot of the monastery of St. Peter (afterwards called St. Austin's) at Canterbury, over which he presided for nearly forty years. Bede, who states these facts, tells us also that Adrian was not only a distinguished theologian, but well versed in all branches of secular learning, and that he and Theodore instructed great numbers of pupils in science and literature, as well as in sacred truth. The memory of their labours was long preserved in England, and it is supposed that King Alfred refers to the period in which they lived, when, writing in the ninth century, he contrasts the state of learning among his subjects, with the advantages and acquirements of an earlier and a wiser age.—J. B.
ADRIAN; the name borne by six popes:—
Adrian I., son of Theodore, a Roman citizen of rank, succeeded Stephen III. in 772. Desiderius, king of the Lombards, having invaded those provinces which Pepin, king of the Franks, had annexed to the Roman see, Adrian implored the protection of Charlemagne, who forthwith entered Italy at the head of a powerful army, vanquished Desiderius, put an end to the Lombard kingdom, ratified Pepin's donation, and added further grants, retaining, however, the sovereignty, and received from Adrian the highest honours he could bestow. Adrian now turned his attention to ecclesiastical affairs, and, in particular, to the fierce and sanguinary iconoclastic contest that had long been agitating the East. He gave his adhesion to the council, held in 787 at Nice, which condemned the views of the iconoclasts; and, subsequently, he expressed his approval of the council of Frankfort, convoked in 794 by Charlemagne, to denounce the proceedings of the recent Eastern council. Adrian defended himself against the charge of inconsistency, by alleging that the tenor of the canons lately enacted at Nice, had, through ambiguity of expression and other causes, been misapprehended in the West, and that the supposed discrepancy between the decisions of the two councils was only apparent. During an inundation at Rome, Adrian displayed great energy and munificence, in furnishing, at his own expense, the inhabitants with necessaries, conveyed throughout the city by boats and other means, and in repairing public damage, and even compensating private losses, when the inundation was over. After a long pontificate of nearly 24 years, he died in December, 795.
Adrian II., a native of Rome, succeeded Nicholas I. in December 867. After twice declining the papal dignity, he accepted it in his 76th year, in compliance with a call from the people, nobility, and clergy of Rome, which received the emperor's concurrence. In defiance of the church's charter, the acts of all successive councils, based on primitive truth and order, as well
