Hadrian (Roman Imperial Biographies)Hadrian's reign (AD 117 138) was a watershed in the history of the Roman Empire. Hadrian abandoned his predecessor Trajan's eastern conquests Mesopotamia and Armenia trimmed down the lands beyond the lower Danube, and constructed new demarcation lines in Germany, North Africa, and most famously Hadrian's Wall in Britain, to delimit the empire. The emperor Hadrian, a strange and baffling figure to his contemporaries, had a many sided personality.