Carlos F.
Noreña Hadrian's Feminine Virtues
The virtues of the Roman emperor articulated a wide range of ideals and values and stood near the forefront of the emperor's public image.Most of the core virtues that defined the 'good' emperor (e.g. aequitas, liberalitas, pietas and virtus) have been the subjects of detailed studies.This paper focuses instead upon two anomalous and ephemeral imperial virtues, pudicitia and patientia, officially advertised as virtues of the emperor Hadrian.Both pudicitia and patientia were marked as feminine qualities (so the paper argues) and therefore lay outside the normal parameters of imperial ideology.The primary purpose of this paper, then, is to elucidate the historical and discursive contexts that account for the elevation of pudicitia and patientia to the status of imperial virtues under Hadrian.
The paper begins with an examination of the virtues pudicitia and patientia themselves.Numerous literary and epigraphic texts show that both virtues ñ when actively held up as positive ideals ñ were regularly attached to women.In men, by contrast, pudicitia was more or less neutral, while patientia was considered effeminate and condemned as a negative quality.
From this analysis the paper turns to the official proclamation of pudicitia and patientia as Hadrianic virtues.The main evidence comes from imperial coins that depict personifications of Pudicitia (e.g. RIC 135) and Patientia (RIC 365) on the reverse along with the portrait and titulature of Hadrian himself on the obverse.Numismatists have adduced topical explanations for the sudden appearance of these types, but this paper argues that Hadrian's public assertion of his own pudicitia and patientia can only be understood within the context of three larger and interrelated developments characteristic of the early second century AD: (i) the increasing prominence of the imperial women in the Roman emperor's own public image, (ii) the new emphasis on human qualities as constituent elements of the 'good' emperor, and (iii) the emergence of new discourses about identity and power and the corresponding shift in valuations of 'public' and 'private'.
Drawing on the findings of this study, the paper concludes with a brief discussion of the complex relationship between the official values of an absolute monarchy and those of the society in which it was embedded
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