An attempt to understand Hadrian through his buildings rests upon the hypothesis that he was himself his own architect, inspired by the ferment of building activity in Rome in Domitian’s and Trajan’s reigns, when he was growing up. The hypothesis is perhaps justified by an inference from an anecdote recorded by Dio Cassius, a Roman senator and consul from Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor, who wrote in Greek a history of Rome from the beginning to A.D. 229. Dio’s story is that once when Trajan was in conference with his architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, Hadrian interrupted, and Apollodorus, angered, said, “Oh, go and design your pumpkins!” We infer that Apollodorus’ reference to “pumpkins” was intended to pour scorn on certain of Hadrian’s designs for vaults, involving pumpkin-like concave segments with re-entrant groins between, such as are still to be seen in Hadrian’s Villa, in the vestibule of the Piazza d’Oro, and in the Serapeum at the end of the Canopus (Fig. 11.1). The same anecdote records that Apollonius so piqued Hadrian, later, by his criticisms of the design of the Emperor’s Temple of Venus and Rome, that Hadrian had him first exiled and then put to death. This is how Hadrian is established as an architect, and a vindictive one at that. Hadrian’s most baroque flights of architectural fancy are to be seen at his villa near Tivoli, where the various complexes of buildings are scattered over an area 1000 yards one way by 500 yards the other. The buildings, which far outdid Nero’s Golden House in extent and grandeur, include palaces, large and small, for manic and for depressive moods (plan [Fig. 11.2] A,G,R,S,T,U,V,W), guest-quarters (B), a pavilion (C), dining rooms (D,E,K), baths (F,O,P), a library (the apsed building to the right of G), porticoes (H,J), pools (between H and J, and northwest of X), slave quarters (J,N), a stadium (L), many cryptoporticoes (for example, M), firemen’s barracks (between A and M), a palaestra or wrestling ground (Q), and a vaulted temple of Serapis (X). Excavation, and the carrying off of statues, with which Roman museums are crammed, began as early as 1535, and continues to the present. It has been followed by reconstruction (Fig. 11.3) and general tidying up: the Italian authorities report the clearing away of 13,200 pounds of briers! [Illustration: FIG. 11.1 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa. Serapeum at Canopus, showing “pumpkin” vaults. (Piranesi)] [Illustration: FIG. 11.2 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa. (H. Kähler, _Hadrian und seine Villa bei Tivoli_, Pl. 1)] [Illustration: FIG. 11.3 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, model. The round building (left center) is the Teatro Marittimo; the Piazza d’Oro is at the upper left; the Canopus, with colonnade, pool, and Serapeum, is near the center of the upper right quadrant. (MPI)]