Hadrian had finally, in 138, selected as…
138 CE
Hadrian had finally, in 138, selected as his successor a member of a Gallo-Roman family, the fifty-two-year-old Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus, who had served ably as proconsul in Asia.
At Hadrian’s direction, Antoninus had adopted his wife’s nephews, seventeen-year-old Marcus Annius Aurelius Verus and eight-year-old Lucius Ceionius Commodus Verus.
The sixty-two-year-old emperor dies at his villa in Baiaea few months later on July 10, and is buried in the impressive mausoleum he had constructed (a building later transformed into a papal fortress, the present Castel Sant'Angelo).
On Hadrian's death, the Senate, which had been stripped of power during his reign, refuses to deify him.
Some speak of declaring him a tyrant, thereby canceling his acts.
On Antoninus’s investiture as emperor, one of his first acts is to persuade the Senate to grant divine honors to Hadrian, thereby almost certainly earning his sobriquet “Pius.” Two other reasons for this title are that he would support his aged father-in-law with his hand at Senate meetings, and that he had saved those men that Hadrian, during his period of ill-health, had condemned to death.
According to Aurelius Victor (Epitome, XV, 4), and Appian (Praef., 7), Antoninus receives some Indian, Bactrian (Kushan) and Hyrcanian ambassadors, as well as embassies from various nations nearer the heart of empire.