This chapter offers a fresh look at, and a new interpretation of, the change from incineration to inhumation in the second century CE. Recent scholarship has either given up on the issue or reduced it to a change of fashion. Yet why did it become a ‘fashion’ to inhume the dead? I first look at evidence for inhumation over the course of the first centuries BCE and CE and demonstrate that inhumation never went out of use entirely in elite circles and had already become increasingly popular during the later first and early second century CE, owing to the fact that inhumation was considered to be an old Roman practice linked to the kings and some of the most respected Roman gentes. Reviewing literary and material evidence for imperial burial and deification ceremonies, I then argue that Hadrian played an instrumental part in changing the emperors’ form of burial, thus also promoting inhumation in Roman society more widely. In contrast to previous suggestions, I argue that it was not his philhellenism that instigated the change, but his desire to join a growing elite minority in linking himself to Roman tradition.