To Niccolò Machiavelli, Hadrian was one of Rome’s “five good emperors,” who presided over an unrivaled period of prosperity and stability; to Britons, he was the builder of the famous wall that runs the width of England; to Jews, he was the ruler who directed the bloody suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE and the subsequent persecutions, renamed Jerusalem “Aelia Capitolina” (after himself), and erased Judea from the map—dubbing it Syria Palistaena. He also built one of the ancient Levant’s major thoroughfares, a segment of which was recently excavated. The Times of Israel reports:

Archaeologists have uncovered part of an 1,800-year-old Roman road in northern Israel, built in the time of emperor Hadrian, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced.

In a statement, the IAA said the road section, measuring some 8 meters (26 feet) wide and 25 meters (82 feet) long, was found near the village of Rumat al-Heib, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of the city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. It was discovered during development work on a walking trail. The IAA branded the road as “the Highway 6 of the ancient world,” referencing Israel’s major north-to-south highway.

It said the road, which runs through Acre, Sepphoris, and Tiberias, was paved in the 2nd century CE during Hadrian’s reign. The road was completed by his successors and later renovated in the Byzantine period. The Roman empire established several major roads in the area as part of a need to quickly move military forces, mail, and goods, the IAA said in its statement Thursday.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.