A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Sabina, Julia
SABINA, JULIA,
Grand-niece and heiress of Trajan, and wife of Adrian, Emperor of Rome, is celebrated for her private as well as her public virtues Adrian had married Sabina chiefly through the favour of the Empress Plotina; he never loved her, and treated her with the greatest asperity; and the empress was so irritated by his unkindness, that she boasted in his presence that she had disdained to make him a father, lest his children should be more odious and tyrannical than he himself was. The behaviour of Sabina at last so exasperated Adrian, that he poisoned her, or, according to some, obliged her to destroy herself. Divine honours were paid to her memory. She died about 138, after she had been married to Adrian thirty-eight years. It is difficult to assign any motive less unworthy than the base passion of envy for the cruel treatment Sabina endured from her husband. Adrian did not feel flattered by the means which had placed him on the greatest throne in the world. He owed it to Plotina—a woman; and though he was never ungrateful to her, yet Sabina, the niece of Trajan, was really, in birth, above him; and he never forgave her for this superiority. To implicate her in some plot or crime, seemed his first desire. He set spies about her to watch her conduct, and even had the meanness to intercept and read all her letters. After the death of her aunt Plotina, he overwhelmed Sabina with his contempt and calumny. One of the historians of his reign says that he engaged "les personnes de sa cour à lui faire éprouver les plus sanglantes mortifications, et la maltraita tellement qu'elle finit par se donner la mort." And this wretch was one of the best emperors who governed Rome! That the soul of the woman had not thus lost its love of the good and the true, is proven in this sad history of Sabina; with all his scrutiny, the vindictive Adrian could never find cause of accusation against her. She was murdered, not executed.