La lettera di Adriano ad Alicarnasso e la cultura storico-antiquaria in età adrianea. Riflessioni sull’iscrizione AE 2012, 1550

The epigraphical fragment from a letter of the Emperor Hadrian to Halikarnassos in Caria has been published in 2012 (AE 2012, 1550). The authors offer some reflections about the chronology, the surviving contents and the cultural frame of this interesting, still incomplete, document. The analysis of Hadrian’s imperial titulature enables to state that the letter has been written between 128 and 135 AD, as a response to a petition from Halikarnassos. The city is presumed to have been damaged in 128 AD by an earthquake, which would have affected also Rhodes, Astypalaia and other coastal places of province Asia. Hadrian would have granted public financing for the reconstruction of Halikarnassos at the request of a local intermediary, whose name is lost. It is supposed that this man may be eventuallyidentified with the scholar Aelius Dionysios from Halikarnassos, an Atticist rhetorician and historian of the age of Hadrian. In the same time is analysed the historical and antiquarian culture of those intellectuals whom Hadrian selected such as equestrian procurators and secretaries ab epistulis, first of all the famous Suetonius.