Hadrian’s back yard. Photo from Wikimedia Commons

In his youth, the Roman Emperor Hadrian was a spoilt rich kid. His dad was something big in the city and Hadrian was lucky enough to marry into the royal family. By the time he became emperor of Rome in 117, he was already a playboy and perpetual tourist, spending his time travelling around the empire in his private jet (This simply cannot true – Editor). Hadrian enjoyed playing brutal contact sports, and built up an intimidating physique. He was very aggressive on the sports field, often barging into his opponents, which led to his nickname ‘The Large Hadrian Collider‘ (Can you fact check these last two sentences please? – Editor).

Hadrian was also xenophobic – which is not only my best opportunity to use a word beginning with ‘x’, it also means that he didn’t much fancy having to share his land – which he’d stolen – with bagpipe players, people who wore kilts or those who ate deep fried Mars bars – in other words, the Scots (That’s quite rude. Several of my friends are Scottish – Editor).

Hadrian hated the Scots so much that in 122 he had a very big wall built across his back garden to keep them out. ‘They’re not stealing any apples from my trees,’ he vowed. But this was not really a very fruitful idea. All that blood, sweat and tears spent erecting a large barrier did no good for anyone except the emperor. Those who were kept out got very mad and did everything they possibly could to get over it, around it or through it (which they did); those who paid for the wall questioned the huge cost of construction; those who built it were on zero hours contracts and many were injured by flying haggises; and the border guards who had to staff the wall resented having to stand out in all weather, freezing their buns off and soaked through to the skin; all of this was just to satisfy the ill-informed, mad-cap policies of a dictator. This kind of xenophobia and huge waste of public money to build a wall simply wouldn’t happen today (Oh yeah? – Editor).

The moral of this story is that you should build bridges instead of walls. You’ll never be able to keep people out by restricting their freedom of movement. People are social and have a deep need to be together, so walls are stupid ideas. Once you build a wall you have to maintain it. If you don’t it will fall down, and while it’s up, Banksy and his mates will draw all over it. So you need to put even more effort in to maintaining it than you did in building it in the first place. That’s why Hadrian’s Wall eventually crashed to the ground in 1989, and people from both sides crossed over, embraced each other, and got very very drunk together (I think you’re confusing this with the Berlin Wall. I’m calling a halt to this post – Editor).

Next time: 22: Montezuma’s terrible revenge

Previous posts in the #TwistedTropes series
1. Pavlov’s drooling dog
2. Chekhov’s smoking gun
3. Occam’s bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora’s closed box
6. Frankenstein’s well-meaning monster
7. Thor’s lost hammer
8. Noah’s character ark
9. Hobson’s multiple choice
10. Fibonacci’s annoying sequence
11. Plato’s empty cave
12. Dante’s lukewarm inferno
13. Sod’s unlucky law
14. Aladdin’s miserly lamp
15. Batman’s tangled cape
16. Cupid’s bent arrow
17. Fermat’s dodgy last theorem
18. Moore’s obsolete law
19. Lucifer’s idiotic fall
20. Adam’s poisoned apple

Hadrian’s busted wall by Steve Wheeler was written in Berlin, Germany and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.