Ahve, and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host, Matt Smith, and with me as always is Dr.

Rianna Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode L-I-I-I-Hadrian the little Greek.

The Emperor Trajan is now dead, and Rome finds itself left with some pretty big shoes to fill.

Into them steps his adopted son, Hadrian, the coming of a new emperor, will always be met with interesting times.

But first a quick word on sources and what we're left with when talking about Hadrian.

Here's Rianna Evans. And what we're left with when talking about Hadrian.

He's Rianna Evans.

Oh dear. Well, when we get to Hadrian, it all drops off a bit, really.

When we get to Hadrian, of course, we don't have Suetonius anymore. But we have a kind of Suetonius stand in.

We have the writers of the Augustin history, which is usually known as the Historia Augusta and what this is is biographies written

people argue about this but probably in the fourth century CE by a variety of different people and the one of

Hadrian we think was written by Ilius Spartanus. It doesn't really like him

very much but at least we're back with biography.

We also have Diocacius, always have Diocacius.

By this point we only have Diocasius in epitome, which means that the original Diocassius has been lost, but he's been summarized

by a man called Zifelinas.

So book 69 of Diocassius is the Hadrian as Emperor book. Yeah, okay.

There was apparently an autobiography.

The Historia Augusta mentions this right at the beginning.

Hadrian himself relates in his autobiography that his forefathers came from Hadria, giving Hadrian his name,

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