Temple of Olympian Zeus
Snow sees Hadrian’s commitments to the cities of the Empire in the monumental constructions of Cyrene in Libya and Sagalassos in Greece built to enforce Roman cultural domination. Hadrian found solace is his close companionship with Antinous and his spiritual heartland of Athens, where he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries and built the Temple of Olympian Zeus visited by Snow, in Greece. Snow visits the remote Mons Claudianus in Egypt where Hadrian quarried the great granite columns for his most impressive monument the Pantheon. Hadrian decrees the construction of Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem exiling the resident Jews.