Empress Pompeia Plotina is another matter. I have probably been very unfair to Trajan’s wife, whom history records as a perfectly pleasant and conventional woman who did not meddle much in Imperial politics. But Trajan’s deathbed adoption of Hadrian was definitely a fishy affair, and a persistent rumor circulated at the time that Plotina had masterminded the whole thing. She had always made a pet out of Trajan’s ward Hadrian; she pushed his marriage to Sabina to tie him to the Imperial family, and she made no secret of her hopes that he would succeed her husband. Trajan awarded Hadrian considerable honors, but their relations were never very warm, and we don’t know if Trajan ever planned for Hadrian to succeed him. He did propose sending the Senate a short list of candidates (though Titus, as a rising but young politician, would probably not have been on it) and he may have had his freedman Phaedimus write one up. But Plotina wrote a decree of adoption for Hadrian instead and signed it for her husband while he lay dying. Plotina’s elaborate pretense that Trajan was still alive so she could fake a deathbed adoption of Hadrian may sound like bad farce, but it’s another persistent rumor that comes down to us through the ages from Plotina’s contemporaries. I may have wronged Plotina by implying that she was either a madwoman or a thief—but ancient sources record that Trajan on his deathbed believed he might have been poisoned by someone in his inner circle, and that his secretary freedman Phaedimus died suddenly on the same day of Hadrian’s acclamation, as if someone wanted to silence him.