History

After touring the province of Bithynia, where Hadrian may have first encountered Antinous (see here), the Emperor crossed the Sea of Marmara to Thrace. Accompanying him was the renowned sophist and teacher of rhetoric, Antonius Polemon. Polemon chronicled this journey in his Physiognomica, a physiognomy treatise later preserved in a 14th-century Arabic translation. In his writings, Polemon recalls, “I was a companion of the great King, and on the journey from Thrace to Asia, this fellow joined himself to the troops and ships which were escorting the King. We passed by many towns and came to the sea”. The itinerary and date of the visits recorded by Polemon remain in obscurity, but the passage fits Hadrian’s journey of AD 124.

Polemon, about ten years younger than Hadrian, came from a distinguished Ionian family with a history dating back to the Late Republic. The family came from Laodicea on the Lycus, on the borders of Phrygia and Caria, and produced significant figures in successive generations, including kings in Pontus and Thrace, ambassadors, and at least one poet. Family members were well-known to the citizens of Asia, the emperors, and the Roman aristocrats. Trajan granted Polemon the privilege of unrestricted travel, a favour later extended by Hadrian. The sophist then became an ambassador to Hadrian and served on many missions for the Emperor.

Polemon’s considerable wealth and prestige played a significant role in the “Greek Renaissance” of the 2nd century AD. His patronage and support of intellectual and cultural endeavours were instrumental in this revival, leaving a lasting legacy on the era. Polemon spent much of his life in Smyrna, and when Hadrian’s favour shifted towards Ephesus, Polemon convinced him to focus on Smyrna instead. As a result, Hadrian granted ten million drachmas to the city, which were used to build a corn market, a gymnasium, and a temple. An inscription from Smyrna lists what the city received from Hadrian due to Polemon’s influence. Perhaps the most significant testament to his influence was his delivery of the panegyric speech at the inauguration of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens in AD 132.

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The details of the journey in Thrace are unclear and can only be speculated upon (Birley, 1997). Aside from the account of his founding of Hadrianopolis, there are no literary records of his activities there. Even the commemorative coins, represented by two sestertii of the adventus and exercitus types minted later in Hadrian’s reign, do not provide any clues. However, inscriptions indicate some Imperial activity in the province.

The Thracian kingdom, established in the 5th century BC in the eastern region of the Balkan Peninsula, was annexed to the Roman Empire in AD 46 under Claudius after the death of the Odrysian client king Rhoemetalkes III. Following Thrace’s integration into the Roman Empire, colonies were established. The first, Colonia Claudia Aprensis (Aprus), was founded by Claudius on the Via Egnatia, and the second, Colonia Flavia Pacis Deultensium (Deultum), was established by veterans of Legio VIII Augusta on the Black Sea under Vespasian. The province’s initial capital was Perinthus, located on the Via Egnatia on the north shore of the Sea of Marmara, where the Roman governor resided.

After the second Dacian War, probably around AD 107, Trajan made significant administrative changes in Thrace and elevated it to the status of a province with a governor of praetorian rank (legatus Augusti pro praetore). The provincial reorganisation under Trajan resulted in newly founded cities organised as Greek poleis, including Nicopolis ad Istrum and Trajanopolis, Augusta Traiana, Plotinopolis, and Marcianopolis, named after the Emperor and his family. A military camp was established in Cabyle, where a cohort was stationed from the 2nd to the 3rd centuries AD (AE 1991, 1402). Urbanisation started predominantly in the 2nd century AD, transforming the old Thracian elements into well-planned towns with smaller trading centres (emporia) focused on commerce, crafts, and agricultural products along main roads. Additionally, immigrants from Asia Minor also contributed to the growth of urban communities.

Thrace, located between the western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire, served as a bridge between Europe and Asia. Two important roads, the Via Egnatia and the Via Militaris (or Via Diagonalis), played crucial roles in connecting Thrace to other regions. The older 2nd-century BC Via Egnatia cut across the southern part of Thrace, while the Via Militaris, built in the 1st century AD, ran diagonally from Byzantium (later Constantinople) to Singidunum (Belgrade), serving as the primary military road linking the legionary bases of the Middle Danube. These were the two main routes that Hadrian would have likely travelled during his tour of East Thrace.

Other lengthy roads run parallel to both sides of the Via Militaris. In AD 124, Hadrian repaired the road from Augusta Traiana through Cabyle to Anchialus and Mesambria on the Black Sea to the north. The Emperor also paved roads along the Black Sea to Tomis.

While in the province, Hadrian refounded and renamed Orestias, present-day Edirne, Hadrianopolis (Birley, 1997). The Emperor, who delineated the extent of its new walls on an existing Greek settlement site, developed the city and adorned it with monuments. The author of the Vita Heliogabali mentions the event, saying that Hadrian renamed the city after he received an oracle, and adds a strange anecdote about Hadrian’s madness: “As for this city of Oresta, Hadrian after he had begun to suffer from madness, ordered that it should be called after his own name — also acting in obedience to a divine response, for he had been told to steal into the house or into the name of some madman.” (HA Elagabalus 7.8).

The Greek city of Orestias is believed to have been established on an earlier Thracian settlement called Uskudama (“water town”), the first Odrysian capital. According to legend, Orestias was founded by Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The myth claims that Orestes established the city of Orestias at the location where he cleansed himself after killing his father. This foundation myth was preserved until late antiquity and is depicted on the reverse of a bronze coin issued under Gordian, showing Orestes, his sister Iphigeneia, his cousin Pylades and three reclining river gods at their feet (RPC VII.2, 666). During his visit, Hadrian expanded the town, constructed a large castrum, and renamed it Hadrianopolis (Greek: Αδριανούπολις).

Orestias was chosen as the future Hadrianopolis for several reasons. It had a strategic location on the Via Militaris and was situated at the confluence of three rivers, the Tonsus (modern Tundzha), Arpessos (modern Arda) and Hebros (modern Evros/Maritsa) and rivers. The Hebros, the longest river in Thrace, was navigable by flat-bottomed barges and connected Hadrianopolis with the Via Egnatia and the Aegean coast via the harbour city of Ainos (modern Enez), opposite the island of Samothrace (Herodotus, Historia book VII, 58-59). This allowed Hadrianopolis access to the Aegean Sea, which was crucial for its development. It enabled the city to engage in maritime trade without entirely relying on land routes for transportation and delivery of goods. River transportation to the inland regions was the most affordable and efficient method.

All three rivers are depicted as reclining river gods in a rare coin type minted in Hadrianopolis (RPC IV.1, 10601). On other types, only the main river god Hebrus is portrayed (RPC IV.1, 10606), or lying at the feet of an enthroned and turreted city goddess of Hadrianopolis (RPC IV.1, 9297). On the reverse of the coins, the name of Hadrianopolis (ΑΔΡΙΑΝΟΠΟΛΕΙΤΩΝ) appears as the legend. The surrounding area of Hadrianopolis was also ideal for agriculture. The region’s fertile soil resulted in its inhabitants rising to a high degree of prosperity. They carried on extensive commerce and were distinguished for their manufactures, especially of arms.

Hadrian oversaw the construction of a large castrum near the Tonsus River. It was surrounded by a six-metre-high defensive wall and had a layout resembling a typical Roman fortress with circular towers at the corners and gates and square turrets along the sides. The castrum measured approximately 600m x 700m, covering an area of about 400,000 square metres. Inside was a regular grid of streets intersecting at right angles, and two main avenues, Cardo Maximus and Decumanus Maximus, divided the area into four parts. Evliya Çelebi, an Ottoman explorer who travelled through the territory of the Ottoman Empire and neighbouring lands during the empire’s cultural zenith, visited the city in 1653 and mentioned in his travel book called the Seyahatnâme (“Book of Travel”) that Hadrian’s castrum was square, had four round towers, another twelve smaller rectangular shaped towers between the main towers and nine gates, and was surrounded by a ditch full of water. The city’s main gate is depicted on coins minted during Gordianus III’s reign (RPC VII.2, 695).

The Byzantines maintained the castrum walls and added a second line of fortifications with new bastions on the four corners. Only one of the four defensive towers, the so-called Macedonian Tower, has been preserved today. The structure, about 16 m high on a round base, was built in stonework masonry with brick bands. It was transformed into a clock tower in 1886.

Only a very small part of the Castrum wall exists today, with traces of the fortification walls about 150 metres long. Excavations between 1999 and 2003 uncovered ovens used for ceramic production in the 1st century AD and structures believed to have been used as grain warehouses. Numerous tombs dating to the Roman and Byzantine periods were also found on the exterior of the Castrum walls. One of the steles depicts a family who lived in Hadrianopolis.

Hadrianopolis was to become famous for the scene of a battle between Constantine and Licinius in 323 and the defeat of Valens by the Goths in 378. Modern destructive development has left practically nothing of the ancient city. Throughout the ages, the city maintained its importance thanks to its location at the intersection of commercial rivers and significant roads. During the Ottoman Empire, the city was used as a major base camp for military expeditions towards Europe. Above all, the city acted as the capital of the Ottoman Empire for approximately a hundred years.

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Hadrian’s tour of Thrace certainly included a visit to Perinthus (modern-day Ereğlisi). Perinthus was the headquarters of the provincial governor and Thrace’s administrative capital, located along the coast of Thracian Propontis (Sea of Marmara) on the Via Egnatia. A new legate, Quintus Tineius Rufus, had just arrived (AD 124-128), perhaps installed by Hadrian in person. Originally founded as a Samian colony around 602 BC, Perinthus was an important port city with two natural harbours and soon became a place of great trade. The eastern harbour was used for commercial purposes, while the western harbour served military functions. After the annexation of Thrace in AD 46, the Roman fleet named Classis Perinthia was established and stationed at Perinthus. This fleet was responsible for the Propontis and the Straits.

Perinthus was built along the slope of a hill on a small peninsula. Excavation works, which began in 2022, are uncovering the ancient coastal city, which covers an area 1.5 kilometres long and 500 metres wide. This includes unearthing the theatre on the southeast slope of the Acropolis overlooking the sea, which is believed to be the largest in the Thrace region and measures 140 by 110 metres (approximately the size of the Ephesus theatre). Although the seats have vanished after centuries of looting, the excavation trenches reveal traces of the steps between the seating rows and the stage building (see here). Other prominent monuments of Perinthus comprise city walls, a bath complex, and a stadium. Despite the limited remains of the stadium, located at the feet of the Acropolis between the port and the theatre, its overall dimensions are estimated to have been 240 x 69 m.

The importance of Perinthus in the Roman period is well-attested in literary sources and inscriptions. One Hadrianic inscription is of particular importance. It is a dedication by one Larcia Gepaipyris, who honoured Hadrian as Zeus Olympios and Eleutherios (this appellation is unique for Thrace) and his wife Sabina as New Demeter (Perinthos-Herakleia 37). The inscription, an architrave fragment, is dated to AD 131-138 (after the Olympios appellation given to the Emperor) and mentions an unknown building lavishly decorated and filled with imperial statues, probably a temple dedicated to Hadrian and Sabina (Sayar, 1998) or possibly just the city’s theatre (Seure, 1898). The nature of the building remains unclear, but it may belong to a type of sanctuary, such as the Olympieion in Athens (Topalilov, 2020).

The inscription was found in the 19th century, reused as spolia in a Byzantine church located on the southwestern slope of the Acropolis. Although fragmentary, the text is translated as follows (Raycheva, 2015; Topalilov, 2020):

‘To the Emperor Caesar, the son of the deified Trajan, Traianus Hadrianus Augustus, Zeus Olympios and Eleutherios and Sabina Augusta, the New Demeter (under the government of Publius… the praetorian legate of the emperor), Larcia Gepaipyris, daughter of Larcius Asiaticus, on the orders of and wholly at the expense of her father erected and consecrated (the sanctuary with the imperial cult image) and other statues that are erected in it.’

The construction of the building, initiated by Larcia Gepaipyris’ father, Larcius Asiaticus, is thought to be associated with Hadrian’s second visit to the city in the autumn of 131. The worship of Hadrian and Sabina may also be linked to the imperial decision to include Perinthus in the Panhellenic League. The Panhellenion was established in Athens around AD 131/132 during Hadrian’s third visit to Athens, which he reached from Thrace.

However, the temple’s construction was not linked with the granting of neokoria (temple warden) to the city by Hadrian. It was not until the time of the Severans that we find the first clear evidence of imperial temples in Perinthus. The city was honoured with the title neokoros twice, first by Septimius Severus and his sons Caracalla and Geta, then by Elagabalus. This is evident from the city coins and inscriptions. Several festivals linked to the neokoros status held by the city took place in the stadium. This title strongly indicated the city’s prominence in the region, as Perinthus was the only other city in Thrace with this neokoros status. From the end of the 3rd century AD, Perinthos was renamed Herakleia because the Perinthians regarded Heracles (Hercules) as the founder of their city.

Perinthus produced various types of coins from the reigns of Claudius to Gallienus. Some coins bear the image of Hadrian (see here) and Sabina (see here) with Heracles, the founder, on the reverse. Typically, the city’s name is displayed on the back of the coin, and from AD 107 onward, the governor’s name is also included. Maecilius Nepos is mentioned on the coins of Hadrian minted in AD 117/19 (see here).

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Another Thracian city that minted coins of Hadrian and Sabina was Bizye (modern-day Vize), on the road between Byzantium and Hadrianopolis. The minting of the city’s bronze coinage began under Hadrian. Most of the coin types show Bizye’s fortifications on the reverse. The names of the governors Maecilius Nepos and Quintus Tineius Rufus are shown on the reverse of some coins minted under Hadrian. The Roman fortifications of Bizye are still visible northwest of the town and are known today as the Vize Fortress. The fortress is believed to have been built originally in 72-76 BC and revived during the reign of Justinian I.

Coela on the Thracian Chersonesus (Gallipoli Peninsula) also started minting coins during Hadrian’s reign. Hadrian converted the port city into a municipium, a privilege rarely seen in the East. Aelia was added to its name (AE 1924, 82), as seen on the coins with the Latin inscription AEL MVNICIPI COELANO (see here). The origins of Coela are obscure, but the town is known to have been the headquarters of the imperial administration. It likely contained a substantial number of imperial civil servants who, along with their families, would have been Roman citizens. Coela also organised athletic games, known as the Hadrianeia, in honour of the Emperor, likely to commemorate his visit.

It has been suggested that Hadrian may have travelled as far north as the Danube during his tour. While W. Weber, a German historian, argued that the Emperor visited the Moesian frontier and Pannonia, A. Birley believes this to be unlikely. After leaving Thrace, the imperial party crossed the Propontis and returned to Asia Minor with Antonius Polemo, this time to the province of Asia. Cyzicus was to be Hadrian’s first and perhaps most important stop.

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References & sources:

• Birley A.R. (1997), Hadrian The Restless Emperor, London, Roman Imperial Biographies
• Boatwright, M.T. (2000), Hadrian and the Cities of the Roman Empire, Princeton
• Yukdirim, Ş. (2021), Hadrianopolis, The City at the Intersection of the Rivers, Studies on EDİRNE from Prehistory to Republic, Trakya Üniversitesi Yayın No: 269
• Miszczak, I. (2021) Edirne: Gateway to the Balkans. ASLAN Publishing House
• Topalilov, I. (2020), On the Perinthos-Heraklea 37, Studia Antiqua et Archaeologica 26(1): 59–68 (link)
• Raycheva, M. (2015), The Imperial Cult in Perinthos, Archaeologia Bulgarica ХІХ, 2 (2015), 23-3 (link)

Related

Founding a new country is no easy task. Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother, Leicester, learned this lesson the hard way 60 years ago, on July 4, 1964. While towns across the United States held Independence Day parades, and Alabama Governor George Wallace gave a speech denouncing the Voting Rights Act, Leicester (also known as “Les”) boarded a bamboo raft moored on a sandbank six miles off the coast of Jamaica. He raised a flag, an upside-down yellow triangle on a blue background, to announce the founding of New Atlantis. Later, to alleviate diplomatic tensions, he insisted that his 6-by-12-foot floating nation would be “a peaceful power and would pose no threat to Jamaica.”

The U.S.’s founders had groused about tyranny and taxation without representation. But Leicester had his own reasons for establishing a new country—in this case, a micronation, an independent entity that lacks recognition by the international community. As a sports fisherman, he wanted to help protect the Caribbean’s fisheries. In 1962, he’d chartered the International Marine Research Society, a group that previously existed only on paper. New Atlantan revenues could support marine research and even construction of an aquarium on Jamaica. Further, he regarded New Atlantis as a suitably audacious experiment in democracy, as well as a potentially profitable enterprise—and a chance to have fun.

Born on April 1, 1915, Leicester was a large, spirited man with a zany streak. His conversation, according to the Washington Post, was “soft and fast and funny.” He was 16 years younger than his famous brother, Ernest, the author of such classics as For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. The siblings’ mother, Grace Hall, had a brief career as an opera singer before her marriage to Clarence Hemingway, a doctor. Clarence died by suicide in 1928, after his health began to fail and his Florida real estate investments soured.

Like Ernest, the big brother he idolized, Leicester was an adventurer. As a teenager, he built a boat, which he and a friend sailed from Alabama, through storms, to join Ernest in Key West, Florida. When Leicester arrived, his brother said, “She looks awfully good for anything built by a Hemingway.”

During World War II, Leicester worked as a reporter and photographer with the Stars and Stripes newspaper, developing a daredevil reputation as he documented the conflict’s devastation. By the end of the decade, he had settled in Florida. Prior to the founding of New Atlantis, he and his second wife, Doris, lived on a 50-foot-long naval launch boat with their two young daughters, Anne and Hilary.

Hilary, who is now an artist, says the nation-building idea originated from her father’s childhood reading of National Geographic articles about underwater reefs that might eventually become islands. Further impetus arrived in the early 1950s, when Leicester aided a Jamaican government fishing survey, charting the waters off its coast.

The idea of creating an island first came to Leicester “as a wonderful book,” he told Philately and Numismatics in 1965. “The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be more fun to carry it out than just to fictionalize it.” He wouldn’t just create an island, but rather a country, with himself as “first president and founder and fall guy,” as he wrote in a letter that same year.

Leicester gained the financial means to carry out his vision in 1962, when his book My Brother, Ernest Hemingway was serialized in Playboy magazine, one year after Ernest killed himself with a shotgun. Leicester had long been a professional writer, too. His output included The Sound of the Trumpet, a 1953 novel based on his World War II experiences, which earned mixed reviews from critics.

Leicester’s biography of his brother (whom he called “Papa,” while Ernest, in turn, called him “Baron”) was his most popular book; its proceeds gave him the resources and time needed to ferry old railroad wheels and axles, car engine blocks, cables, and industrial scrap from Jamaica out to a three-mile-long sand plateau. Dumping these loads overboard, Leicester created what Hilary calls not only an “environmental disaster zone” but also a foundation for mooring a raft.

Building New Atlantis helped Leicester step out from the shadow of his older brother. But he isn’t the only overlooked figure in this tale: The oft-neglected U.S. president Millard Fillmore also played a role in the micronation’s founding. A man who recognized the importance of guano (seabird droppings used as a natural fertilizer for crops), Fillmore paved the way for what became the Guano Islands Act of 1856. At the time, solidified deposits of guano measuring up to 200 feet deep coated undisturbed sea islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Fillmore believed this valuable resource, commonly nicknamed “white gold,” shouldn’t go to just anybody.

Historian Paul Finkelman, author of a 2011 biography of Fillmore, says the president “did not want to invade Cuba or Mexico, but [he] did have a notion of the United States expanding into the space between California and Asia.” Unfortunately for Fillmore’s reputation, though he pushed for the act, it was his successor, Franklin Pierce, who made it official. The law Pierce signed, Finkelman explains, “essentially says Americans could claim any uninhabited islands containing guano, and the United States government would protect their claims.”

How Ernest Hemingway’s Brother Started His Own Country

A little over a century later, Leicester asserted that the Guano Islands Act made his raft a legitimate island deserving of U.S. protection. But Harry Hobbs, a legal scholar at the University of Technology Sydney who has written extensively about micronations and sovereignty efforts, contradicts this version of events. “Leicester said he found some guano on his raft,” Hobbs says. “This was after he had brought it there.” Finkelman, for his part, points out, “A raft is not an island.”

Technicalities aside, Leicester relied on the 1856 law to claim the northern half of the raft in the U.S.’s name. He dubbed the raft’s southern half the sovereign republic of New Atlantis, reasoning that the sandbank was more than three miles from Jamaica’s shore, placing it in international waters. (Subsequent laws have pushed the border between a coastline and international waters to at least 12 but in some cases as far as 200 nautical miles.)

Reluctant to lose his U.S. citizenship, Leicester declared himself an honorary citizen of New Atlantis, eligible to hold office but not to vote. To fill out the country’s ranks, Leicester recruited a small group of British nationals, who were allowed to hold dual citizenship. These new citizens included the Jamaican-based British socialite Lady Pamela Bird and the U.S. manager of the Cunard Line, Sidney Jones. No one actually lived on the raft. All one could do on board, Leicester admitted to the New York Times in 1965, was “walk around on it and salute the flag, all of which we do periodically.” He hoped to enlarge the makeshift island so he could “maybe entertain some people for lunch.”

Precedent for a micronation such as New Atlantis was meager. While numerous utopian colonies had cropped up and faded in the 19th century, the golden age of micronations only began after World War II. New Atlantis was among the first of these entities. As Hobbs says, “Prior to World War I, there were small principalities and duchies scattered around, as well as free cities, but after World War II particularly, it was the state or nothing. And this is where the idea of creating a micronation to exist within the state system had appeal.”

Hobbs separates these micronation attempts from postwar nationalist secession movements and anticolonial struggles. Micronations ran the gamut from utopian communes to libertarian breakaway republics to an Australian kingdom dedicated to gay and lesbian rights. Pirate radio stations and gambling operations were also common offshore but inevitably faced rapid government repression.

Regarding all such micronations, Hobbs says, “They had no legal basis. Your only way to legally be a nation is to be recognized by other nations, and that just wasn’t going to happen. No one was going to give someone like Leicester a seat on the United Nations.”

With the help of New York City public relations expert Edward K. Moss, Leicester made a determined if lighthearted effort at joining the world’s nation-states. The collection of New Atlantis memorabilia housed at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center includes a copy of the micronation’s constitution, which borrows liberally from the seven main articles of the U.S. Constitution. Also featured, on stationary from the Mimosa Lodge in Kingston, Jamaica, are Leicester’s hastily scrawled notes for the first session of the Congress of New Atlantis, dated February 2, 1965, at 5:30 a.m.

Among Leicester’s early morning jottings: “Draft statutes frowning on murder, kidnapping, rape, robbery and double parking on main thoroughfares during business hours.” The notes also confirm Leicester’s decision to reject taxation and forbid gambling. He outlined lofty goals, such as “formal requests to other governments for provisional diplomatic recognition in near future, with Republic of N.A. using every resource to build permanent land above water on N.A. bank.”

Later that day, New Atlantis’ citizens adopted the constitution and elected Leicester president. Other newly appointed officials included Bird as vice president, Peter Patterson as keeper of the great seal and former U.S. President Harry Truman as presidential adviser.

To encourage the moral character of New Atlantans, Leicester introduced a monetary unit called the scruple. One scruple equaled 100 New Atlantan centes, or 50 U.S. cents. Instead of minting coins, the New Atlantans turned to materials found at sea. These included a shark’s tooth (100 centes), a fishhook (50 centes) and bit of a broken barrel stave (10 centes). “What the hell,” Leicester wrote in a letter. “We made [the money,] and we stand by it. It’s legal.”

New Atlantan postage stamps, as in many a small nation, served as a prime source of revenue. They were a polished production. One of the micronation’s first stamps, priced at 60 centes, featured Winston Churchill, described as “world statesman of XX century.” New Atlantis also printed a 50-cente stamp honoring U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey and a 100-cente stamp praising President Lyndon B. Johnson as “protector of the entire free world.” Other stamps paid tribute to the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, whose World War II campaigns both Ernest and Leicester had chronicled as journalists.

The U.S. government offered New Atlantis some sideways recognition. When Leicester requested permission from the Treasury Department to print stamps and mint coins, Assistant General Counsel George Reeves responded, “It is my opinion that this department would have no objection to the plans you have proposed as you describe them.”

“I have no intention of discouraging legitimate operations by the republic,” Reeves added, but he cautioned Leicester against making stamps or coins that could be mistaken for those of the U.S. or another legitimate country. After Leicester sent sample stamps to the White House, a Johnson staffer returned a letter of thanks addressed to “Leicester Hemingway, Acting President, Republic of New Atlantis.”

Between New Atlantis’ founding and the formal adoption of its government, the raft, presumably rebuilt, had more than tripled in area, to 8 by 30 feet. But Leicester had even greater expansion plans. The raft floated above a sand plateau, 50 feet below the surface, in water otherwise about 1,000 feet deep. In September 1964, Leicester told the New York Herald Tribune that he planned to sink “several surplus Navy concrete hulled vessels” on the bank. This would put the tops of the ships above the ocean surface. He would then “cart over several Jamaican hills he had bought to fill in around the sunken hulls.” The New York Times reported that Leicester’s goal was to make the island half a mile long, big enough to “accommodate a lighthouse, short-wave radio station, customs house and post office.”

The New Atlantans parlayed with cruise ship lines to make mail stops at the raft. They also sought to aid local fishing. Leicester hoped to convince the U.S. and Jamaican governments to keep passing boats from inadvertently cutting the lines attached to local fishers’ large sunken fish traps. New Atlantis would also profit from the area’s reputation for fishing. In addition to stamp sales (with proceeds benefiting the marine research society), Leicester planned to sell a Sea Turtle Cookery Book bound in sharkskin and a small newspaper titled the Times of New Atlantis.

Problems plagued the effort from the beginning. Leicester reported that local fishers had swiped at least two of New Atlantis’ flags, while storms wiped out several iterations of the raft. The Jamaican government regarded New Atlantis with benevolence, with one spokesman dubbing Leicester a “decent, well-meaning soul.” But no nations officially recognized the country, and even Leicester acknowledged that the Universal Postal Union would likely not admit New Atlantis and make its stamps functional. When yet another tropical storm destroyed the latest raft in 1966, news from New Atlantis ceased.

As Hilary recalls, “When my dad got his last royalty check for the biography, my mom said, ‘We’re buying a house, so my kids have an address.’” The family purchased a home on an island in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Though Leicester theorized to a friend that a sandbar sheltered by a reef in international waters would be an ideal spot for yet another island nation, he begrudgingly moved on to new projects. He churned out articles about the sporting life; hawked a tourist hotel in the Virgin Islands; performed other public relations work; and developed several book manuscripts, including one about the moon’s positive effect on human sexual activity. Leicester also had a paid column in the Miami Herald covering the Basque sport of jai alai.

But his happy place was Bimini, the island in the Bahamas where Ernest had lived in the 1930s and taken on all types of challengers in boxing matches. In the mid-1970s, from his base in Miami, Leicester flew out to Bimini on a propeller plane once a week. He also published the Bimini Out Island News, a newsletter with “all the fishing news that’s fit to print.”

Leicester became intrigued with the underwater search for evidence of the “real” Atlantis, even theorizing that a secluded spring in Bimini may have been the fabled Fountain of Youth. But Bimini’s healing springs could not restore his own health. In 1982, after several surgical procedures to treat Type 2 diabetes, doctors told Leicester his legs would need to be amputated. On September 13, 1982, like his brother and father before him, Leicester shot himself with a handgun, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson borrowed from a neighbor. His father had killed himself with the same type of weapon 54 years earlier.

Though it vanished beneath the sea, Leicester’s dream of a country that offered “a brand new chance for all the little guys in the world,” as he told the Washington Post in 1965, sent out ripples. Media coverage of New Atlantis inspired Japanese writer Hisashi Inoue, who published his novel Kirikirijin a year before Leicester’s suicide. In this political satire, a novelist travels to the rural village of Kirikiri, which has seceded from Japan and declared itself a sovereign nation. The book was a sensation, and in quick order, some 200 small villages in Japan declared themselves micronations, primarily to encourage tourism.

As Hilary says, “The whole thing was remarkable. We may imagine building an island, but my dad took it one step further and wanted to build a nation. There’s some appeal there. With all that’s going on these days, wouldn’t it be nice to have a country to escape to?” She hesitates, then adds, “But with climate change, I’m not going to hop on a raft when there are 200-mile-per-hour hurricanes blowing.”

On the 60th anniversary of New Atlantis’ founding, Leicester’s actions are open to interpretation. Was the micronation a quixotic experiment in democracy or an elaborate improv comedy sketch? Either way, says Hilary of the republic’s demise, “It’s kind of poetic. New Atlantis, like the original Atlantis, sank into the waves.”

Happy 1948th birthday, Hadrian!

This year, I decided to cook Cato the Elder’s recipe for Libum (sweet cheesecake) as Hadrian’s birthday cake.

Libum (original recipe from LacusCurtius):

Bray 2 pounds of cheese thoroughly in a mortar; when it is thoroughly macerated, add 1 pound of wheat flour, or, if you wish the cake to be more dainty, ½ pound of fine flour, and mix thoroughly with the cheese. Add 1 egg, and work the whole well. Pat out a loaf, place on leaves, and bake slowly on a warm hearth under a crock.

Modern recipe (serves 2)

• 180-200g plain, all-purpose flour
• 225g ricotta cheese
• 1 egg, beaten
• bay leaves
• 1/2 cup clear honey

Sift the flour into a bowl. Beat the cheese until it’s soft and stir it into the flour along with the egg.  Form a soft dough and divide into 4. Mold each one into a bun and place them on a greased baking tray with a fresh bay leaf underneath. Heat the oven to 190°C/380°F and bake for 35-40 minutes until golden brown. Warm the honey and place the warm cakes in it so that they absorb it. Allow to stand 30 minutes before serving.

In celebration of Hadrian’s birthday, I also opened a bottle of Conditum Paradoxum. This spiced and sweet Roman wine is today produced in Germany (you can buy it from der-Roemer-shop here) and is made according to a recipe from Apicius. Conditum was so prized by the Romans that it is the very first recipe in Apicius’s cookbook ‘De re coquinaria’.

One thousand nine hundred years ago, Hadrian probably celebrated his 48th birthday in Nicomedia (Bithynia). After sailing along the southern Black Sea coast, possibly visiting the Pontic towns of Amisus, Sinope and Amastris (read here), Hadrian is thought to have spent the winter of AD 123/4 in Nicomedia before touring Asia Minor. During his stay in the Bithynian province, the Emperor probably visited several major cities, including Heraclea Pontica, Claudiopolis (former Bythinium), Prusias ad Hypium and Nicaea. During one of these visits, Hadrian met Antinous. He was to take the young Greek boy with him on his many travels as a cherished lover and companion (most likely from AD 128).

Nicomedia and Nicaea were only just recovering from the damage caused by a catastrophic earthquake. Hadrian took special care of the Bithynian province. He contributed to the reconstruction of both cities, as suggested by the new set of coins celebrating Hadrian as Restitutor Nicomediae (restorer of Nicomedia) and the long dedications above the eastern and northern city gates of Nicaea.

“To the emperor king Trajan Hadrian Augustus, son of the god Trajan Particus, grandson of the god Nerva, he who bears upon himself the authority of the people’s sovereignty, Nikaia, descended from the line of Dionysos and Herakles, the first (city) of Bithynia and Pontus, metropolis by the decrees of the emperors and the sacred Roman senate, offers the most pious Neokoros of the Augusti”. (IK Iznik 29)

The #Hadrian1900 blog post about Hadrian’s stay in Bithynia in early AD 124 will be published soon!

Related

In 1904, a widow named Elizabeth Peck had her portrait taken at a studio in a small Iowa town. The photographer sold the negatives to Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey, a company that avoided liquor taxes for years by falsely advertising its product as medicinal. Duffy’s ads claimed the fantastical: that it cured everything from influenza to consumption, that it was endorsed by clergymen, that it could help you live until the age of 106. The portrait of Peck ended up in one of these dubious ads, published in newspapers across the country alongside what appeared to be her unqualified praise: “After years of constant use of your Pure Malt Whiskey, both by myself and as given to patients in my capacity as nurse, I have no hesitation in recommending it.”

Duffy’s lies were numerous. Peck (misleadingly identified as “Mrs. A. Schuman”) was not a nurse, and she had not spent years constantly slinging back malt beverages. In fact, she fully abstained from alcohol. Peck never consented to the ad.

The camera’s first great age—which began in 1888 when George Eastman debuted the Kodak—is full of stories like this one. Beyond the wonders of a quickly developing art form and technology lay widespread lack of control over one’s own image, perverse incentives to make a quick buck, and generalized fear at the prospect of humiliation and the invasion of privacy.

Prior to 1888, cameras often existed in a realm of mystical unknowability. In one famed story from the early days of photography, a man asks for a picture of his recently buried wife, not understanding that someone must be present in order to be photographed. The French writer Honoré de Balzac confessed to fearing that each time a daguerreotype was taken of him, a layer of his skin would be peeled off. Early cameras required a level of technical mastery that evoked mystery—a scientific instrument understood only by professionals.

All of that changed when Eastman invented flexible roll film and debuted the first Kodak camera. Instead of developing their own pictures, customers could mail their devices to the Kodak factory and have their rolls of film developed, printed, and replaced. “You press the button,” Kodak ads promised, “we do the rest.” This leap from obscure science to streamlined service forever transformed the nature of looking and being looked at.

By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices and persuaded nearly a third of the United States’ population to take up photography. Kodak’s record-setting yearly ad spending—$750,000 by the end of the 19th century (roughly $28 million in today’s dollars)—and the rapture of a technology that scratched a timeless itch facilitated the onset of a new kind of mass exposure.

“The impulse to peer into others’ affairs—an age-old feature of village life—had never actually subsided,” writes historian Sarah E. Igo in The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America. Photography became such a phenomenon that “Kodak fiends,” a phrase used to describe those seduced by the devilish pleasures of photography, entered the vernacular.

No one quite knew what to make of or how to control the fiendishness, and privacy was further unspooled by money-making schemes just as ferociously inventive as the new technology.

The same year Kodak cameras hit the marketplace, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that Anthony Comstock—the anti-obscenity crusader after whom the 1873 Comstock Act is named—had arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures that placed “the heads of innocent women on the undraped bodies of other females.” In 1890, a mugshot photographer for the New York Police Department was fired for selling copies of the mugshots to arrestees themselves—an arrangement the New York Times described as a “lucrative business.” Boundless fascination with photographs created a bustling economy. People bought and collected random photographs from dry goods stores, general junk shops, vending machines and even cigarette packs. Demand was so robust that amateurs were just as able to sell to this market as professionals.

The ubiquity of advertising by the end of the 19th century only intensified this demand. “As the growth in productive capacity outpaced the needs of the population, commercial entrepreneurs became obsessed with creating demand for consumer products,” writes historian Samantha Barbas in Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America. “The key agent in this project was advertising.”

By 1900, photography began to replace earlier image-making methods as the ad technology of choice. Photos of women were especially desirable, given their association with respectability and the belief that a pretty face could sell anything. But dominant values around modesty, avoiding indulgence and anti-consumerism meant that most people had no desire to be featured in an advertisement. Commercial modeling and stock photos did not yet exist. Faced with few choices, advertisers resorted to backdoor purchases. In an arrangement Barbas dubs “the crisis of the ‘circulating portrait,’” advertisers began buying portraits from photographers without the permission of the photos’ subjects—as was the case with Peck, temperate widow turned whiskey hound by the magic and obfuscation of advertising.

It wasn’t just ordinary people who found themselves newly exposed. Mass photography was an equalizer twice over: Nearly anybody could use a camera, and nearly anybody might be violated by one. To their grave displeasure, even the elite were unable to assert control over the frenzy. The New York Times reported that President Theodore Roosevelt was “known to exhibit impatience on discovering designs to Kodak him”; the same column mentioned that Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt horsewhipped a man he alleged took a picture of him without permission.

Though newspapers across the country cautioned Americans to “beware the Kodak,” as the cameras were “deadly weapons” and “deadly little boxes,” many were also primary facilitators of the craze. The perfection of halftone printing coincided with the rise of the Kodak and allowed for the mass circulation of images. Newly empowered, newspapers regularly published paparazzi pictures of famous people taken without their knowledge, paying twice as much for them as they did for consensual photos taken in a studio.

Lawmakers and judges responded to the crisis clumsily. Suing for libel was usually the only remedy available to the overexposed. But libel law did not protect against your likeness being taken or used without your permission unless the violation was also defamatory in some way. Though results were middling, one failed lawsuit gained enough notoriety to channel cross-class feelings of exposure into action. A teenage girl named Abigail Roberson noticed her face on a neighbor’s bag of flour, only to learn that the Franklin Mills Flour Company had used her likeness in an ad that had been plastered 25,000 times all over her hometown.

After suffering intense shock and being temporarily bedridden, she sued. In 1902, the New York Court of Appeals rejected her claims and held that the right to privacy did not exist in common law. It based its decision in part on the assertion that the image was not libelous; Chief Justice Alton B. Parker wrote that the photo was “a very good one” that others might even regard as a “compliment to their beauty.” The humiliation, the lack of control over her own image, the unwanted fame—none of that amounted to any sort of actionable claim.

Public outcry at the decision reached a fever pitch, and newspapers filled their pages with editorial indignation. In its first legislative session following the court’s decision and the ensuing outrage, the New York state legislature made history by adopting a narrow “right to privacy,” which prohibited the use of someone’s likeness in advertising or trade without their written consent. Soon after, the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first to recognize this category of privacy claim. Eventually, just about every state court in the country followed Georgia’s lead. The early uses and abuses of the Kodak helped cobble together a right that centered on profiting from the exploitation of someone’s likeness, rather than the exploitation itself.

Not long after asserting that no right to privacy exists in common law, and while campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for president, Parker told the Associated Press, “I reserve the right to put my hands in my pockets and assume comfortable attitudes without being everlastingly afraid that I shall be snapped by some fellow with a camera.” Roberson publicly took him to task over his hypocrisy, writing, “I take this opportunity to remind you that you have no such right.” She was correct then, and she still would be today. The question of whether anyone has the right to be free from exposure and its many humiliations lingers, intensified but unresolved. The law—that reactive, slow thing—never quite catches up to technology, whether it’s been given one year or 100.

This essay is from History News Network, a University of Richmond project dedicated to new interpretations of the past. Read more and subscribe to HNN’s newsletter here.

Inspired by impending summer picnics, Christmas lunch comas and the imitable Carrie Bradshaw, we couldn’t help but wonder: why did the ancient Greeks and Romans eat while lying down?

Lying Down = Social Standing

Health is (Also) Wealth

The English medical practitioner John Bulwer wrote a treatise in 1644 that argued humans were natural ‘Arithmeticians’, capable of both performing arithmetic and divining the underlying laws that govern mathematics. This innate ability with numbers was not an accident, he argued, but rather an integral part of God’s plan for humanity: ‘That divine Philosopher doth draw the line of man’s understanding from this computing faculty of his soul, affirming that therefore he excels all creatures in wisdom, because he can account.’ According to this view, numeracy – a person’s knowledge of and ability to work with numbers – derived from the human soul and was the foundation of humankind’s dominion over the world. The Christian God made humans to be universally numerate, with the exception only of ‘idiots and half-souled men’, who lacked some essential quality inherent in the rest of humanity.

The people of late medieval and early modern England were, in fact, almost universally numerate; judges used the inability to perform basic mathematical tasks such as counting up 20 pence as a standard to prove mental incompetency. Anecdotal evidence demonstrates that, since children were raised in a numerate culture, they naturally learned to associate number words with quantities and began to add small quantities using mental, verbal or finger-based arithmetic strategies without much, if any, formal school instruction. Finger-counting, in particular, was seen as the reason the English number words have a base of ten. As Bulwer explained, God gave humans ten fingers as part of his numerical plan for humanity and the cosmos: fingers were ‘those numbers that were born with us and cast up in our Hand from our mother’s womb, by Him who made all things in number, weight & measure’.

Beyond this point, however, numeracy could vary dramatically as people used a variety of different object-based and written symbols for numbers in their day-to-day lives. Many object-based systems were idiosyncratic, created to meet the needs of an individual urban shopkeeper or rural farmer, but two of these systems were widely used by the English population and government: tally sticks and counting boards. The former involved a wooden stick, notched to indicate quantities, then split in half to record a credit-and-debt transaction. The latter was a system used for performing arithmetical operations and was particularly useful for its ability to simultaneously calculate with the mixed base-ten, base-12, and base-20 English currency. These served the needs of both the literate and illiterate, but those who could write also had the ability to use the three written symbolic systems: written number words (one, two, three), the ancient Roman numerals (i, ii, iii) and the relatively new and increasingly popular Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3).

By the 16th and 17th centuries literacy rates were on the rise in England and new printing presses made it easier and faster to produce books for the increasingly literate population. This included books introducing Arabic numeral arithmetic, which as a written system of arithmetic was better suited to being taught through printed textbooks than the older, object-based system of counting boards. Textbooks were also a relatively affordable way to acquire arithmetical knowledge: a new textbook could be had for between two and four shillings in the 17th century and used textbooks might be as cheap as sixpence. These textbooks could be used alone or as a supplement to in-person tutoring and were often passed down through a family’s children into the next generation. While Arabic numerals were less flexible than individual, idiosyncratic systems, commercial pressures incentivised elites and the middling sort to acquire this increasingly popular written form of numeracy.

At the turn of the 18th century Arabic numerals and arithmetic were fast on their way to becoming the dominant symbolic system and the new standard for judging a person’s ability with numbers. In 1701 Scottish polymath John Arbuthnot equated this narrowed form of numeracy with civilisation itself and declared it would ruin the economy ‘were the easy practice of [Arabic numeral] Arithmetick abolished [and] Merchants and Tradesmen oblig’d to make use of no other than the Roman way of notation by Letters’. However, despite the increasing pressure for people to abandon older forms of numeracy, object-based symbols continued to be used by the illiterate. Even those who had adopted Arabic numerals would use other forms of numeracy when they were more convenient, traditional, or served some other non-mathematical purpose. In a shining example of government inertia, the Exchequer only decided to phase out tally sticks in 1783 but delayed implementation until the sinecure holders who profited from them had retired, which did not come until 1826. The attempt to burn the now-obsolete tally sticks accidentally burned down Parliament in 1834.

Modern numeracy has changed significantly from late medieval and early modern numeracy, but there are still echoes of the past. Today it is assessed by a person’s knowledge of Arabic-numeral based mathematics, but these symbols have not completely eliminated older forms of numeracy. People still use spoken and written number words, children learn to count with the assistance of their fingers, and the current king is Charles III not Charles 3. The minimum standard for an acceptable knowledge of numbers has increased to include what were once advanced topics, but we still assume a universal basic numeracy. No one can easily navigate the English-speaking world without understanding the numbers that make up addresses, phone numbers, the time of day and day of the month. And while it is cognitive scientists – rather than preachers and divines – who assure us that numeracy is an inborn part of the human mind, the inherent belief that humans are natural arithmeticians remains.

Jessica Marie Otis is Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University and author of By the Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2024).