Roman holiday: when emperor Hadrian became a tourist of ancient Egypt

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No tourist, however, visited Egypt in greater style – or, I suspect, with a larger retinue of support staff – than the emperor Hadrian in AD 130. And no imperial party left quite such a lasting mark of their visit. In fact, you can still see the poems commemorating this trip, written by one of the emperor’s aristocratic fellow-travellers – a woman by the name of Julia Balbilla (more on her later). They are carved into the leg of an ancient Egyptian statue, just outside modern Luxor (ancient Thebes).

It might seem like a rather upmarket version of ‘Balbilla (and Hadrian) was here’. But these poems not only document a tourist experience; they shine a light onto one of those hidden women of the Roman world. Balbilla was not an ‘ordinary’ woman, but one of wealth, glamorous connections, and talent. All the same, she usually slips below the radar of modern historians.

Hadrian's imperial inspection

Hadrian’s Egyptian cruise was only one part of a much longer journey for the emperor and his entourage. He was the most travelled of all the Roman rulers – and sightseeing, in our sense of the word, was no doubt only one side of the story. He was, after all, also inspecting ‘his’ empire and visiting the far-flung troops. By the time they reached Egypt, the imperial party had already been on the road (or at sea) for two years, taking in Sicily, north Africa, Greece and Gaza – in what was more a mammoth royal ‘progress’, or a court on the move, than a quick vacation.

There must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of troops, bodyguards and administrators accompanying the Egyptian excursion, travelling on any number of boats, or following on land. (Some surviving ancient papyri record local worries about how on earth they were going to cater for this influx of officials and hangers-on, all needing billeting and feeding.) At the centre of this vast entourage were members of Hadrian’s intimate circle.

The holiday from hell?

His wife, Sabina, was one of them. Julia Balbilla was another, a celebrity of the Roman international ‘jet set’. The most notorious – and tragic – of them was the emperor’s young boyfriend, Antinoos. In Roman terms, a married man also having a relationship with a young man was not so unusual. But there was something a bit edgier here. Antinoos drowned in mysterious circumstances in the Nile in early October 130. The question of ‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’ has never been resolved.

For those in this inner circle, the death of Hadrian’s boyfriend must have blighted the trip (was it ‘the holiday from hell’?). It is all too easy to imagine the atmosphere on the boats: the party tiptoeing around the grieving emperor, who was busy planning memorials to his lost love, and even starting the process of turning him into a god. You might well have thought that they would have called the whole cruise off. But they pressed on south. That was probably because Egypt’s most celebrated tourist high-spot still lay ahead.

Hadrian’s party had already visited the Great Pyramid. What they were even keener to see was the statue on which the verses of Julia Balbilla would soon be inscribed: one of the so-called ‘Colossi of Memnon’.

This 18-metre-high edifice has a long and intriguing history. It was originally constructed around 1350 BC, one of a matching pair representing the pharaoh Amenhotep III. This made it a venerable antique, almost 1,500 years old, by the time Hadrian came to visit. But, by then, its name had been changed and it had been credited with miraculous new characteristics. In a wholesale reinterpretation, the colossus was no longer Pharaoh Amenhotep. It was now believed to represent the mythical Greek hero Memnon, a fighter in the Trojan war, the son of the goddess of the dawn.

The singing statue

And what is more, it was said sometimes to make a singing noise first thing in the morning, as if greeting its mother. One explanation for this is a natural one. At some point in the first century BC, the top of the statue had been damaged, allowing water to penetrate the stone. As the temperature rose in the morning, the drying out of the water in the cracks of the sculpture might have made a hissing – or a singing – noise.

Another explanation suggests that it was more of a scam. At least one ancient writer thought there might have been some boys around the back faking the sound of singing on makeshift musical instruments, to cash in on the tourist trade. Whichever is true, the statue eventually stopped singing. Either the ‘boys around the back’ found better ways to make money. Or (if you follow the natural explanation), a well-meaning repair of the statue blocked up the cracks, prevented the water getting in, and so stopped the singing.

But for several hundred years the singing statue was the biggest attraction in Egypt. Visitors turned up at dawn hoping that Memnon would perform for them. He couldn’t be relied upon, but it was thought a wonderful sign of good luck if he did. Some of those who got lucky had their visit commemorated with an inscription carved into the statue’s leg (presumably they paid local craftsmen to do the actual carving – at, I imagine, a hefty price).

In one of the earliest examples, around AD 20, a Roman by the name of Servius Clemens simply recorded in Latin that he “heard the voice of Memnon and gave thanks”. Two centuries later, in one of the latest inscriptions, a philosopher called Falernus gave a more flowery account in Greek verse of his own experiences. “When he saw his mother, Dawn, dressed in her saffron robe,” the statue “made a sound sweeter than clear speech.”

The ‘Colossus of Memnon’ was almost 1,500 years old, by the time Hadrian came to visit. But, by then, it had been credited with miraculous new characteristics... it was said sometimes to make a singing noise first thing in the morning, as if greeting its mother

It is among this group of 107 inscriptions that we find the four verses, again written in Greek, by Julia Balbilla – as well as a few lines composed by the empress Sabina herself. From these we can reconstruct what happened on the imperial visit in November AD 130. When Balbilla and Sabina first showed up at the statue, it stayed resolutely silent. In her poem entitled ‘When on the first day we did not hear Memnon’, Balbilla made the best of what might have been a PR disaster, suggesting that Memnon had only remained silent “so that lovely Sabina would come back again”. Indeed, they did go back. Then, probably on the next day, as another poem happily records, “I Balbilla heard the divine voice of Memnon”.

In a poem headed ‘When the emperor Hadrian heard Memnon’, Balbilla records a successful visit by Hadrian himself, most likely on his own. “Seeing Hadrian the ruler of the world,” she writes, “Memnon greeted him as well as he could, before he had even greeted the rays of the sun.” In other words, Memnon appeared to prefer Hadrian over his own mother. And the statue went on to speak to the emperor twice more, making it “clear to everyone that the gods love him”.

So, after a rocky start, the visit must finally have seemed like a triumph. In the more than 50 lines of Balbilla’s verses, however, we learn about more than the royal party’s encounter with the singing statue. Although we have little information about Balbilla from almost any other source, we can extract a surprising amount about her life and her world-view from the poems.

Balbilla was the descendant on her father’s side of the royal family of the eastern kingdom of Commagene, and on her mother’s side of a Roman governor of the province of Egypt – and is at pains to highlight this elite ancestry within her poetry. She stresses that one grandfather, Antiochus, had been a king and that the other had been a prestigious scholar. She even calls her father and mother ‘king’ and ‘queen’, despite the fact that the effective rule of the royal house of Commagene had ended when her grandfather was ousted by the Roman emperor Vespasian.

Poetic skill and antiquarian learning

There is a pride, almost a pushiness, in how Balbilla vaunts her rank. And she makes no secret of her own scholarship. Her poems feature learned and slightly pretentious references to byways of ancient myth and history. She spends four lines on the deeds of the Persian king Kambyses, who in the sixth century BC had apparently tried to demolish the statue but paid the price with his life – so providing the foil for Balbilla’s piety towards Memnon.

Balbilla’s verses are composed in a style and language that mimics the first Greek female poet, Sappho, who lived around 600 BC on the island of Lesbos. It is almost as if a poet today were to compose perfectly in the manner of Geoffrey Chaucer: a boast of poetic skill, rhetorical sophistication and antiquarian learning.

But there was perhaps even more to it than that. By adopting Sappho’s language, Balbilla was reminding her readers of the very beginning of the tradition of female poetry in which she proudly followed. And, by writing up their visits to the statue in that language, she was maybe also hinting at a closeness between herself and the empress Sabina. For Sappho was also famous for her erotic friendships with young women whom she celebrated in her poetry. (Our term ‘Lesbian’ comes from the name of Sappho’s island.)

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All this adds vividly to our picture of Hadrian’s tourist party. We can only guess at the precise relationship between Sabina and Balbilla. How close a match it was for that between Hadrian and Antinoos, no one can know. But Balbilla was certainly not some kind of junior companion on the trip, almost a lady-in-waiting to the empress. Her poems give the lie to that, parading her literary skill, scholarly expertise and her royal blood.

My hunch is that she felt her own ancestry far outclassed that of the Roman emperor. Hadrian was new to power; he had been adopted by his predecessor, Trajan, from outside the circles of royalty – from a family of no inherited distinction. The blue-blooded Balbilla came from generations of a royal dynasty, which traced its lineage through king after king, back to a right-hand man of Alexander the Great.

And, thanks to her grandfather’s service as governor of the province, as well as her own learned study, she probably knew a lot more about Egypt than Hadrian did. Beyond the encounter with Memnon, those were precisely the points she was trying to rub in over the course of her extraordinary poems.

This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine