Plotina lived at Rome for four years after the death of her husband. The first year was, as we shall see, one of great anxiety and trial. There was much discontent at Hadrian’s accession, and before long his reign was stained by the execution of four of the most distinguished nobles. Matidia died in the following year, and it was known to all Rome that Sabina lived unhappily with Hadrian. It is said that Plotina continued to have an active share in the administration of the Empire, though she must now have been in, or near, her seventh decade of life. Dio places her death in the year 121. Hadrian was in Gaul at the time, and the luxuriance of his mourning gave encouragement to the libellers. He went into deep mourning, breathed a passionate grief in a beautiful poem, and ordered the building of a temple for the cult of the divinity which he conferred on her. In Nîmes, where he was staying at the time when her death was announced, he raised the superb mausoleum which kept her name for ages in the mind of Europe. It is both pleasant and legitimate to believe that there was neither rhetorical display nor the memory of an irregular love in the princely mourning of Hadrian over the death of his patroness. Apart from his own indebtedness to her, the world owed her much. She had been at least a most worthy and helpful companion of a great Emperor, a type of womanhood to which the eyes of Roman matrons might happily be directed. On the day when her inanimate frame was borne from the palace to the funeral pile, men could repeat that she had in truth left that home of temptation as she had entered it. The saner and sunnier life of the vast Empire was, in part, her monument.[12] CHAPTER IX SABINA, THE WIFE OF HADRIAN We are already familiar with the extraction and the training of the next Empress of Rome. Sabina was the elder daughter of Trajan’s niece Matidia, and came of the sound and sober stock of the Spanish provincials. We first meet her in the little settlement on the Rhine, where she lived with her widowed mother and grandmother, in Trajan’s house, during the reign of Galba and Nerva. She was in her early teens, a grave and modest child, easily directed by the three sedate ladies of the house. Very shortly after the accession of Trajan, a charming young officer burst into the camp to offer his congratulations. He had a romantic story to tell, how a jealous brother-in-law had bribed his servants to break down the chariot on the way, and he had crossed the great forests on foot to greet his guardian and cousin. It was the future Emperor, and her future husband, Hadrian.