Memoirs of Hadrian

In Rome they were enlarging my mausoleum, since Decrianus had cleverly redrawn the plans; they are still at work upon it, even now. The idea for those circular galleries came from Egypt, and likewise the ramps descending to underground chambers; I had conceived of a colossal tomb to be reserved not for myself alone, or for my immediate successors, but as the eventual resting-place of future emperors for centuries to come; princes yet to be born have thus their places already marked in this palace of death. I saw also to the ornamentation of the cenotaph erected on the Field of Mars in memory of Antinous; a barge from Alexandria had discharged its loads of sphinxes and obelisks for this work. A new project long occupied me, and has not ceased to do so, namely, the construction of the Odeon, a model library provided with halls for courses and lectures to serve as a center of Greek culture in Rome. I made it less splendid than the new library at Ephesus, built three or four years before, and gave it less grace and elegance than the library of Athens, but I intend to make this foundation a close second to, if not the equal of, the Museum of Alexandria; its further development will rest with you. In working upon it I often think of the library established by Plotina in Trajan’s Forum, with that noble inscription placed by her order over its door: Dispensary to the Soul.

The Villa was near enough completion to have my collections transported to it, my musical instruments and the several thousand books purchased here and there in the course of my travels. I gave a series of banquets where everything was assembled with care, both the menu for the repasts and the somewhat restricted list of my guests. My goal was to have all in harmony with the calm beauty of these gardens and these halls, to have fruits as exquisite as the music, and the sequence of courses as perfect as the chasing on the silver plates. For the first time I took an interest in the choice of foods, giving orders that the oysters must come from Lucrinus and the crayfish be taken from the rivers of Gaul. My dislike of the combined pomposity and negligence which too often characterize an emperor’s table led me to rule that all viands be shown to me before they were presented to any of my guests, even to the least of them. I insisted upon verifying the accounts of cooks and caterers myself; there were times when I recalled that my grandfather had been miserly.

Neither the small Greek theater of the Villa, nor the Latin theater, hardly larger, had been completed, but I had a few plays produced in them nevertheless, tragedies, pantomimes, musical dramas, and old local farces. I delighted above all in the subtle gymnastics of the dance, and discovered a weakness for women with castanets, who reminded me of the region of Gades and the first spectacles which I had attended as a child. I liked that brittle sound, those uplifted arms, the furling and unfurling of veils, the dancer who changed now from woman to cloud, and then to bird, who became sometimes the ship and sometimes the wave. For one of these creatures I even took a fancy, though briefly enough. Nor had the kennels and studs been neglected in my absence; I came back to the rough coats of the hounds, the silken horses, the fair pack of the pages. I arranged a few hunting parties in Umbria, on the shore of Lake Trasimene, or nearer Rome, in the Alban woods.

Pleasure had regained its place in my life; my secretary Onesimus served me as purveyor. He knew when to avoid certain resemblances, or when, just the reverse, it was better to seek them out. But such a hurried and half attentive lover was hardly loved in return. Now and then I met with a being finer and gentler than the rest, someone worth hearing talk, and perhaps worth seeing again. Those happy chances were rare, though I may have been to blame. Ordinarily I did no more than appease (or deceive) my hunger. At other times my indifference to such games was like that of an old man.

In my wakeful hours I took to pacing the corridors of the Villa, proceeding from room to room, sometimes disturbing a mason at work as he laid a mosaic. I would examine, in passing, a Satyr of Praxiteles and then would pause before the effigies of the beloved dead. Each room had its own, and each portico. Sheltering the flame of my lamp with my hand, I would lightly touch that breast of stone. Such encounters served to complicate the memory’s task; I had to put aside like a curtain the pallor of the marble to go back, in so far as possible, from those motionless contours to the living form, from the hard texture of Paros or Pentelikon to the flesh itself. Again I would resume my round; the statue, once interrogated, would relapse into darkness; a few steps away my lamp would reveal another image; these great white figures differed little from ghosts. I reflected bitterly upon those magic passes whereby the Egyptian priests had drawn the soul of the dead youth into the wooden effigies which they use in their rites; I had done like them; I had cast a spell over stones which, in their turn, had spellbound me; nevermore should I escape from their cold and silence, henceforth closer to me than the warmth and voices of the living; it was with resentment that I gazed upon that dangerous countenance and its elusive smile. Still, a few hours later, once more abed, I would decide to order another statue from Papias of Aphrodisias; I would insist upon a more exact modeling of the cheeks, just where they hollow almost insensibly under the temples, and a gentler inclination of the head toward the shoulder; I would have the garlands of vine leaves or the clusters of precious stones give way to the glory of the unadorned hair. I took care to have the weight of these bas-reliefs and these busts reduced by drilling out the inside, thus leaving them easier to transport. The best likenesses among them have accompanied me everywhere; it no longer matters to me whether they are good works of art or not.

In appearance my life was reasonable; I applied myself more steadily than ever to my task as emperor, exerting more discrimination, perhaps, if less ardor than before. I had somewhat lost my zest for new ideas and new contacts, and that flexibility of mind which used once to help me enter into another’s thought, and to learn from it while I judged it. My curiosity, wherein I could formerly trace the mainspring of my thinking and one of the bases of my method, was now aroused only over futile details: I opened letters addressed to my friends, to their indignation; such a glimpse into their loves and domestic quarrels amused me for the moment. But an element of suspicion was mingled therein: for a few days I was even prey to the dread of being poisoned, that horrible fear which I had previously beheld in the eyes of the ailing Trajan, and which a ruler dare not avow, since it would seem grotesque so long as unjustified by the event. Such an obsession may seem surprising in one who was already deep in meditation upon death, but I do not pretend to be more consistent than others. When confronted by the least stupidity or the commonest petty contriving I was seized with inward fury and wild impatience (nor did I exempt myself from my own disgust). For example, Juvenal, in one of his Satires, was bold enough to attack the actor Paris, whom I liked. I was tired of that pompous, tirading poet; I had little relish for his coarse disdain of the Orient and Greece, or for his affected delight in the so-called simplicity of our forefathers; his mixture of detailed descriptions of vice with virtuous declamation titillates the reader’s senses without shaking him from his hypocrisy. As a man of letters, however, he was entitled to certain consideration; I had him summoned to Tibur to tell him myself of his sentence to exile. This scorner of the luxuries and pleasures of Rome would be able hereafter to study provincial life and manners at first hand; his insults to the handsome Paris had drawn the curtain on his own act.

Favorinus, towards that same time, settled into his comfortable exile in Chios (where I should have rather liked to dwell myself), whence his biting voice came no longer to my ears. At about this period, too, I ordered a wisdom vendor chased ignominiously from a banquet hall, an ill-washed Cynic who complained of dying of hunger, as if that breed merited anything else. I took great pleasure in seeing the prater packed off, bent double by fear, midst the barking of dogs and the mocking laughter of the pages. Literary and philosophical riff-raff no longer impressed me.

The least setback in political affairs exasperated me just as did the slightest inequality in a pavement at the Villa, or the smallest dripping of wax on the marble surface of a table, the merest defect of an object which one would wish to keep free of imperfections and stains. A report from Arrian, recently appointed governor of Cappadocia, cautioned me against Pharasmanes, who was continuing in his small kingdom along the Caspian Sea to play that double game which had cost us dear under Trajan. This petty prince was slyly pushing hordes of barbarian Alani toward our frontiers; his quarrels with Armenia endangered peace in the Orient. When summoned to Rome he refused to come, just as he had already refused to attend the conference at Samosata four years before. By way of excuse he sent me a present of three hundred robes of gold, royal garments which I ordered worn in the arena by criminals loosed to wild beasts. That rash gesture solaced me like the action of one who scratches himself nearly raw.

I had a secretary, a very mediocre fellow, whom I retained because he knew all the routines of the chancellery, but who provoked me by his stubborn, snarling self-sufficiency: he refused to try new methods, and had a mania for arguing endlessly over trivial details. This fool irritated me one day more than usual; I raised my hand to slap him; unhappily, I was holding a style, which blinded his right eye. I shall never forget that howl of pain, that arm awkwardly bent to ward off the blow, that convulsed visage from which the blood spurted. I had Hermogenes sent for at once, to give the first care, and the oculist Capito was then consulted. But in vain; the eye was gone. Some days later the man resumed his work, a bandage across his face. I sent for him and asked him humbly to fix the amount of compensation which was his due. He replied with a wry smile that he asked of me only one thing, another right eye. He ended, however, by accepting a pension. I have kept him in my service; his presence serves me as a warning, and a punishment, perhaps. I had not wished to injure the wretch. But I had not desired, either, that a boy who loved me should die in his twentieth year.

Jewish affairs were going from bad to worse. The work of construction was continuing in Jerusalem, in spite of the violent opposition of Zealot groups. A certain number of errors had been committed, not irreparable in themselves but immediately seized upon by fomentors of trouble for their own advantage. The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace, unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for centuries by a superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts), mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel. The festivals of the Jewish New Year, celebrated with a din of trumpets and rams’ horns, give rise every year to brawling and bloodshed; our authorities accordingly forbade the public reading of a certain legendary account devoted to the exploits of a Jewish heroine who was said to have become, under an assumed name, the concubine of a king of Persia, and to have instigated a savage massacre of the enemies of her despised and persecuted race. The rabbis managed to read at night what the governor Tineus Rufus forbade them to read by day; that barbarous story, wherein Persians and Jews rivaled each other in atrocities, roused the nationalistic fervor of the Zealots to frenzy. Finally, this same Tineus Rufus, a man of good judgment in other respects and not uninterested in Israel’s traditions and fables, decided to extend to the Jewish practice of circumcision the same severe penalties of the law which I had recently promulgated against castration (and which was aimed especially at cruelties perpetrated upon young slaves for the sake of exorbitant gain or debauch). He hoped thus to obliterate one of the marks whereby Israel claims to distinguish itself from the rest of human kind. I took the less notice of the danger of that measure, when I received word of it, in that many wealthy and enlightened Jews whom one meets in Alexandria and in Rome have ceased to submit their children to a practice which makes them ridiculous in the public baths and gymnasiums; and they even arrange to conceal the evidence on themselves. I was unaware of the extent to which these banker collectors of myrrhine vases differed from the true Israel.

As I said, nothing in all that was beyond repair, but the hatred, the mutual contempt, and the rancor were so. In principle, Judaism has its place among the religions of the empire; in practice, Israel has refused for centuries to be one people among many others, with one god among the gods. The most primitive Dacians know that their Zalmoxis is called Jupiter in Rome; the Phoenician Baal of Mount Casius has been readily identified with the Father who holds Victory in his hand, and of whom Wisdom is born; the Egyptians, though so proud of their myths some thousands of years old, are willing to see in Osiris a Bacchus with funeral attributes; harsh Mithra admits himself brother to Apollo. No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of the divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of the Deity, who contains all; no other god has inspired his worshipers with disdain and hatred for those who pray at different altars. I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like the others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand. The clergy of the ancient city were scandalized by the opening of schools where Greek literature was taught; the rabbi Joshua, a pleasant, learned man with whom I had frequently conversed in Athens, but who was trying to excuse himself to his people for his foreign culture and his relations with us, now ordered his disciples not to take up such profane studies unless they could find an hour which was neither day nor night, since Jewish law must be studied night and day. Ismael, an important member of the Sanhedrin, who supposedly adhered to the side of Rome, let his nephew Ben-Dama die rather than accept the services of the Greek surgeon sent to him by Tineus Rufus. While here in Tibur means were still being sought to conciliate differences without appearing to yield to demands of fanatics, affairs in the East took a turn for the worse; a Zealot revolt triumphed in Jerusalem.

An adventurer born of the very dregs of the people, a fellow named Simon who entitled himself Bar-Kochba, Son of the Star, played the part of firebrand or incendiary mirror in that revolt. I could judge this Simon only by hearsay; I have seen him but once face-to-face, the day a centurion brought me his severed head. Yet I am disposed to grant him that degree of genius which must always be present in one who rises so fast and so high in human affairs; such ascendancy is not gained without at least some crude skill. The Jews of the moderate party were the first to accuse this supposed Son of the Star of deceit and imposture; I believe rather that his untrained mind was of the type which is taken in by its own lies, and that guile in his case went hand in hand with fanaticism. He paraded as the hero whom the Jewish people had awaited for centuries in order to gratify their ambitions and their hate; this demagogue proclaimed himself Messiah and King of Israel. The aged Akiba, in a foolish state of exaltation, led the adventurer through the streets of Jerusalem, holding his horse by the bridle; the high priest Eleazar rededicated the temple, said to be denied from the time that uncircumcised visitors had crossed its threshold. Stacks of arms hidden underground for nearly twenty years were distributed to the rebels by agents of the Son of the Star; they also had recourse to weapons formerly rejected for our ordnance as defective (and purposely constructed thus by Jewish workers in our arsenals over a period of years). Zealot groups attacked isolated Roman garrisons and massacred our soldiers with refinements of cruelty which recalled the worst memories of the Jewish revolt under Trajan; Jerusalem finally fell wholly into the hands of the insurgents, and the new quarters of Aelia Capitolina were set burning like a torch. The first detachments of the Twenty-Second Legion Deiotariana, sent from Egypt with utmost speed under the command of the legate of Syria, Publius Marcellus, were routed by bands ten times their number. The revolt had become war, and war to the bitter end.

Two legions, the Twelfth Fulminata and the Sixth Ferrata, came immediately to reinforce the troops already stationed in Judaea; some months later, Julius Severus took charge of the military operations. He had formerly pacified the mountainous regions of Northern Britain, and brought with him some small contingents of British auxiliaries accustomed to fighting on difficult terrain. Our heavily equipped troops and our officers trained to the square or the phalanx formation of pitched battles were hard put to it to adapt themselves to that war of skirmishes and surprise attacks which, even in open country, retained the techniques of street fighting. Simon, a great man in his way, had divided his followers into hundreds of squadrons

[Hadrian 236a.jpg] Hadrian in Military Dress Bust from Crete, Paris, Louvre

[Hadrian 236bc.jpg] Trophies from the Temple of the Divine Hadrian, Rome Rome, Museum of the Palace of the Conservators

[Hadrian 236d.jpg] Letter of Simon Bar-Kochba Dead Sea Manuscript, Palestine Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem

posted on mountain ridges or placed in ambush in caverns and abandoned quarries, or even hidden in houses of the teeming suburbs of the cities. Severus was quick to grasp that such an elusive enemy could be exterminated, but not conquered; he resigned himself to a war of attrition. The peasants, fired by Simon’s enthusiasm, or terrorized by him, made common cause with the Zealots from the start; each rock became a bastion, each vineyard a trench; each tiny farm had to be starved out, or taken by assault. Jerusalem was not recaptured until the third year, when last efforts to negotiate proved futile; what little of the Jewish city had been spared by the destruction under Titus was now wiped out. Severus closed his eyes for a long time, voluntarily, to the flagrant complicity of the other large cities now become the last fortresses of the enemy; they were later attacked and reconquered in their turn, street by street and ruin by ruin.

In those times of trial my place was with the army, and in Judaea. I had utter confidence in my two lieutenants, but it was all the more fitting, therefore, that I should be present to share responsibility for decisions which, however carried out, promised atrocities to come. At the end of a second summer of campaign I made my preparations for travel, but with bitterness; once more Euphorion packed up my toilet kit, wrought long ago by an artisan of Smyrna and somewhat dented by wear, my case of books and maps, and the ivory statuette of the Imperial Genius with his lamp of silver; I landed at Sidon early in autumn.

The army is the first of my callings; I have never gone back into it without feeling repaid for my constraints there by certain inner compensations; I do not regret having passed the last two active years of my existence in sharing with the legions the harshness and desolation of that Palestine campaign. I had become again the man clad in leather and iron, putting aside all that is not immediate, sustained by the routines of a hard life, though somewhat slower than of old to mount my horse, or to dismount, somewhat more taciturn, perhaps more somber, surrounded as ever (the gods alone know why) by a devotion from the troops which was both religious and fraternal. During this last stay in the army I made an encounter of inestimable value: I took a young tribune named Celer, to whom I was attached, as my aide-de-camp. You know him; he has not left me. I admired that handsome face of a casqued Minerva, but on the whole the senses played as small a part in this affection as they can so long as one is alive. I recommend Celer to you: he has all the qualities to be sought in an officer placed in second rank; his very virtues will always keep him from pushing into first place. Once again, but in circumstances somewhat different from those of other days, I had come upon one of those beings whose destiny is to devote himself, to love, and to serve. Since I have known him Celer has had no thought which was not for my comfort or my security; I lean still upon that firm shoulder.

In the spring of the third year of campaign the army laid siege to the citadel of Bethar, an eagle’s nest where Simon and his partisans held out for nearly a year against the slow tortures of hunger, thirst, and despair, and where the Son of the Star saw his followers perish one by one but still would not surrender. Our army suffered almost as much as the rebels, for the latter, on retiring, had burned the forests, laid waste the fields, slaughtered the cattle, and polluted the wells by throwing our dead therein; these methods from savage times were hideous in a land naturally arid and already consumed to the bone by centuries of folly and fury. The summer was hot and unhealthy; fever and dysentery decimated our troops, but an admirable discipline continued to rule in those legions, forced to inaction and yet obliged to be constantly on the alert; though sick and harassed, they were sustained by a kind of silent rage in which I, too, began to share. My body no longer withstood as well as it once did the fatigues of campaign, the torrid days, the alternately suffocating or chilly nights, the harsh wind, and the gritty dust; I sometimes left the bacon and boiled lentils of the camp mess in my bowl, and went hungry. A bad cough stayed with me well into the summer, nor was I the only one in such case. In my dispatches to the Senate I suppressed the formula which is regulation for the opening of official communications: The emperor and the army are well. The emperor and the army were, on the contrary, dangerously weary. At night, after the last conversation with Severus, the last audience with fugitives from the enemy side, the last courier from Rome, the last message from Publius Marcellus or from Rufus, whose respective tasks were to wipe up outside Jerusalem and to reorganize Gaza, Euphorion would measure my bath water sparingly into a tub of tarred canvas; I would lie down on my bed and try to think.

There is no denying it; that war in Judaea was one of my defeats. The crimes of Simon and the madness of Akiba were not of my making, but I reproached myself for having been blind in Jerusalem, heedless in Alexandria, impatient in Rome. I had not known how to find words which would have prevented, or at least retarded, this outburst of fury in a nation; I had not known in time how to be either supple enough or sufficiently firm. Surely we had no reason to be unduly disturbed, and still less need to despair; the blunder and the reversal had occurred only in our relations with Israel; everywhere else at this critical hour we were reaping the reward of sixteen years of generosity in the Orient. Simon had supposed that he could count on a revolt in the Arab world similar to the uprising which had darkened the last years of Trajan’s reign; even more, he had ventured to bank on Parthian aid. He was mistaken, and that error in calculation was causing his slow death in the besieged citadel of Bethar: the Arab tribes were drawing apart from the Jewish communities; the Parthians remained faithful to the treaties. The synagogues of the great Syrian cities proved undecided or lukewarm, the most ardent among them contenting themselves with sending money in secret to the Zealots; the Jewish population of Alexandria, though naturally so turbulent, remained calm; the abscess in Jewish affairs remained local, confined within the arid region which extends from Jordan to the sea; this ailing finger could safely be cauterized, or amputated. And nevertheless, in a sense, the evil days which had immediately preceded my reign seemed to begin over again. In the past Quietus had burned down Gyrene, executed the dignitaries of Laodicea, and recaptured a ruined Edessa… . The evening courier had just informed me that we had re-established ourselves on the heap of tumbled stones which I called Aelia Capitolina and which the Jews still called Jerusalem; we had burned Ascalon, and had been forced to mass executions of rebels in Gaza. … If sixteen years of rule by a prince so pacifically inclined were to culminate in the Palestine campaign, then the chances for peace in the world looked dim ahead.

I raised myself on my elbow, uneasy on the narrow camp bed. To be sure, there were some Jews who had escaped the Zealot contagion: even in Jerusalem the Pharisees spat on the ground before Akiba, treating that fanatic like an old fool who threw to the wind the solid advantages of the Roman peace, and shouting to him that grass would grow from his mouth before Israel’s victory would be seen on this earth. But I preferred even false prophets to those lovers of order at all costs who, though despising us, counted on us to protect them from Simon’s demands upon their gold (placed for safety with Syrian bankers), and upon their farms in Galilee. I thought of the deserters from his camp who, a few hours back, had been sitting in my tent, humble, conciliatory, servile, but always managing to turn their backs to the image of my Genius. Our best agent, Elias Ben-Abayad, who played the role of informer and spy for Rome, was justly despised by both camps; he was nevertheless the most intelligent man in the group, a liberal mind but a man sick at heart, torn between love for his people and his liking for us and for our culture; he too, however, thought essentially only of Israel. Joshua Ben-Kisma, who preached appeasement, was but a more timid, or more hypocritical Akiba. Even in the rabbi Joshua, who had long been my counselor in Jewish affairs, I had felt irreconcilable differences under that compliance and desire to please, a point where two opposite kinds of thinking meet only to engage in combat. Our territories extended over hundreds of leagues and thousands of stadia beyond that dry, hilly horizon, but the rock of Bethar was our frontier; we could level to dust the massive walls of that citadel where Simon in his frenzy was consummating his suicide, but we could not prevent that race from answering us “No.”

A mosquito hummed over me; Euphorion, who was getting along in years, had failed to close exactly the thin curtains of gauze; books and maps left on the ground rattled in the low wind which crept under the tent wall. Sitting up on my bed, I drew on my boots and groped for my tunic and belt with its dagger, then went out to breathe the night air. I walked through the wide, straight streets of the camp, empty at that late hour, but lighted like city streets; sentries saluted formally as I passed; alongside the barracks which served for hospital I caught the stale stench of the dysenterics. I proceeded towards the earthwork which separated us from the precipice, and from the enemy. A sentinel, perilously outlined by the moon, was making his round with long, even tread; his passage and return was one part of the movement of that immense machine in which I was the pivot; for a moment I was stirred by the spectacle of that solitary form, that brief flame burning in the breast of a man midst a world of dangers. An arrow whistled by, hardly more irksome than the mosquito which had troubled me in my tent; I stood looking out, leaning against the rampart of sandbags.

For some years now people have credited me with strange insight, and with knowledge of divine secrets. But they are mistaken; I have no such power. It is true, however, that during those nights of Bethar some disturbing phantoms passed before my eyes. The perspectives afforded the mind from the height of those barren hills were less majestic than these of the Janiculum, and less golden than those of Cape Sunion; they offered the reverse and the nadir. I admitted that it was indeed vain to hope for an eternity for Athens and for Rome which is accorded neither to objects nor men, and which the wisest among us deny even to the gods. These subtle and complex forms of life, these civilizations comfortably installed in their refinements of ease and of art, the very freedom of mind to seek and to judge, all this depended upon countless rare chances, upon conditions almost impossible to bring about, and none of which could be expected to endure. We should manage to destroy Simon; Arrian would be able to protect Armenia from Alani invasions. But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else, would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.

Natura deficit, fortuna mutatur, deus omnia cernit. Nature fails us, fortune changes, a god beholds all things from on high: I fingered the stone of a ring on which on a day of bitter depression I had had those few sad words engraved. I went deeper in disillusion, and perhaps into blasphemy: I was beginning to find it natural, if not just, that we should perish. Our literature is nearing exhaustion, our arts are falling asleep; Pancrates is not Homer, nor is Arrian a Xenophon; when I have tried to immortalize Antinous in stone no Praxiteles has come to hand. Our sciences have been at a standstill from the times of Aristotle and Archimedes; our technical development is inadequate to the strain of a long war; even our pleasure-lovers grow weary of delight. More civilized ways of living and more liberal thinking in the course of the last century are the work of a very small minority of good minds; the masses remain wholly ignorant, fierce and cruel when they can be so, and in any case limited and selfish; it is safe to wager that they will never change. Our effort has been compromised in advance by too many greedy procurators and publicans, too many suspicious senators, too many brutal centurions. Nor is time granted oftener to empires than to men to learn from past errors. Although a weaver would wish to mend his web or a clever calculator would correct his mistakes, and the artist would try to retouch his masterpiece if still imperfect or slightly damaged, Nature prefers to start again from the very clay, from chaos itself, and this horrible waste is what we term natural order.

I raised my head and moved slightly in order to limber myself. From the top of Simon’s citadel vague gleams reddened the sky, unexplained manifestations of the nocturnal life of the enemy. The wind was blowing from Egypt; a whirl of dust passed by like a specter; the flattened rims of the hills reminded me of the Arabic range in moonlight. I went slowly back, drawing a fold of my cloak over my mouth, provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next day, or to sleep. The collapse of Rome, if it were to come about, would concern my successors; in that eight hundred and forty-seventh year of the Roman era my task consisted of stifling the revolt in Judaea and bringing back from the Orient, without too great loss, an ailing army. In crossing the esplanade I slipped at times on the blood of some rebel executed the evening before. I lay down on my bed without undressing, to be awakened two hours later by the trumpets at dawn.

All my life long I had been on the best of terms with my body; I had implicitly counted upon its docility, and its strength. That close alliance was beginning to dissolve; my body was no longer at one with my will and my mind, and with what after all, however ineptly, I must call my soul; the ready comrade of other days was only a slave sulking at his task. In fact, my body was afraid of me; continually now I was aware of the obscure presence of fear, of a feeling of constriction in my chest which was not yet pain, but the first step toward it. I had long been used to insomnia, but from this time on sleep was worse than vigil; hardly would I doze off before there were frightful awakenings. I was subject to headaches which Hermogenes attributed to the heat of the climate and the helmet’s weight; by evening, after prolonged fatigue, I sank into a chair like one falling; rising to receive Rufus or Severus was an effort for which I had to prepare well in advance; when seated I leaned heavily on the arms of my chair, and my thigh muscles trembled like those of an exhausted runner. The slightest motion became actual labor, and of such labors life was now composed.

An accident almost ridiculous, a mere childish indisposition, brought to light the true malady beneath that appalling fatigue. During a meeting of the general staff I had a nosebleed, but took little notice of it at first; it persisted, however, until time for the evening meal; I awoke at night to find myself drenched in blood. I called Celer, who slept in the next tent, and he in his turn roused Hermogenes, but the horid warm flood went on. With careful hands the young officer wiped away the liquid which smirched my face. At dawn I was seized with retching as are the condemned in Rome who open their veins in their bath. They warmed my chilled body the best they could with the aid of blankets and hot packs; to staunch the blood Hermogenes prescribed snow; it was not to be had in camp; coping with innumerable difficulties Celer had it brought from the summit of Mount Hermon. I learned later that they had despaired of my life, and I myself felt attached to it by no more than the merest thread, as imperceptible as the too rapid pulse which now dismayed my physician. But the sudden, inexplicable hemorrhage came to an end; I got up again and strove to live as before, but did not succeed. When, but poorly restored to health, I had imprudently attempted an evening ride, I received a second warning, more serious than the first. For the space of a second I felt my heartbeats quicken, then slow down, falter, and cease; I seemed to fall like a stone into some black well which is doubtless death. If death it was, it is a mistake to call it silent: I was swept down by cataracts, and deafened like a diver by the roaring of waters. I did not reach bottom, but came to the surface again, choking for breath. All my strength in that moment, which I thought my last, had been concentrated into my hand as I clutched at Celer, who was standing beside me; he later showed me the marks of my fingers upon his shoulder. But that brief agony was, like all bodily experiences, indescribable, and remains the secret of him who has lived through it, whether he would tell it or no. Since that time I have passed similar crises, though never identical, and no doubt one does not go twice (and still live) through that terror and that night. Hermogenes finally diagnosed an initial stage of hydropic heart; there was no choice but to accept the orders given me by this illness, which had suddenly become my master, and to consent to a long period of inaction, if not of rest, limiting the perspectives of my life for a time to the frame of a bed. I was almost ashamed of such an ailment, wholly internal and barely visible, without fever, abscess, or intestinal pain, with its only symptom a somewhat hoarser breathing and a livid mark left by the sandal strap across the swollen foot. An extraordinary silence reigned round my tent; the entire camp of Bethar seemed to have become a sick room.

The aromatic oil which burned below my Genius rendered the close air of this canvas cage heavier still; the pounding of my arteries made me think vaguely of the island of the Titans on the edge of night. At other moments the insufferable noise changed to that of galloping horses thudding down on wet earth; the mind so carefully reined in for nearly fifty years was wandering; the tall body was floating adrift; I resigned myself to be that tired man who absently counted the star-and-diamond pattern of his blanket. I gazed at the white blur of a marble bust in the shadow; a chant in honor of Epona, goddess of horses, which used to be sung by my Spanish nurse, a tall, somber woman who looked like a Fate, came back to me from the depths of more than half a century’s time. The long days, and after them the nights, seemed measured out not by the clepsydra but by the brown drops which Hermogenes counted one by one into a cup of glass.

At evening I mustered my strength to listen to Rufus’ report: the war was nearing its end; Akiba, who had ostensibly retired from public affairs since the outbreak of hostilities, was devoting himself to the teaching of rabbinic law in the small city of Usfa in Galilee; his lecture room had become the center of Zealot resistance; secret messages were transcribed from one cipher to another by the hands of this nonagenarian and transmitted to the partisans of Simon; the fanatic students who surrounded the old man had to be sent off by force to their homes. After long hesitation Rufus decided to ban the study of Jewish law as seditious; a few days later Akiba, who had disregarded that decree, was arrested and put to death. Nine other Doctors of the Law, the heart and soul of the Zealot faction, perished with him. I had approved all these measures by nods of assent. Akiba and his followers died persuaded to the end that they alone were innocent, they alone were just; not one of them dreamed of admitting his share in responsibility for the evils which weighed down his people. They would be enviable if one could envy the blind. I do not deny these ten madmen the title of heroes, but in no case were they sages.

Three months later, from the top of a hill on a cold morning in February, I sat leaning against the trunk of a leafless fig-tree to watch the assault which preceded by only a few hours the capitulation of Bethar. I saw the last defenders of the fortress come out one by one, haggard, emaciated, hideous to view but nevertheless superb, like all that is indomitable. At the end of the same month I had myself borne to the place called Abraham’s Well, where the rebels in the urban centers, taken with weapons in hand, had been assembled to be sold at auction: children sneering defiance, already turned fierce and deformed by implacable convictions, boasting loudly of having brought death to dozens of legionaries; old men immured in somnambulistic dreams; women with fat, heavy bodies and others stern and stately, like the Great Mother of the Oriental cults; all these filed by under the cool scrutiny of the slave merchants; that multitude passed before me like a haze of dust. Joshua Ben-Kisma, leader of the so-called moderates, who had lamentably failed in his role of peacemaker, succumbed at about that time to the last stages of a long illness; he died calling down upon us foreign wars and victory for Parthia. On the other hand, the Christianized Jews, whom we had not disturbed and who harbored resentment against the rest of the Hebrews for having persecuted their prophet, saw in us the instrument of divine wrath. The long series of frenzies and misconceptions was thus continuing.

An inscription placed on the site of Jerusalem forbade the Jews, under pain of death, to re-establish themselves anew upon that heap of rubble; it reproduced word for word the interdict formerly inscribed on the temple door, forbidding entrance to the uncircumcised. One day a year, on the ninth of the month of Ab, the Jews have the right to come to weep in front of a ruined wall. The most devout refused to leave their native land; they settled as well as they could in the regions least devastated by the war. The most fanatical emigrated to Parthian territory; others went to Antioch, to Alexandria, and to Pergamum; the clever ones made for Rome, where they prospered. Judaea was struck from the map and took the name of Palestine by my order. In those four years of war fifty fortresses and more than nine hundred villages and towns had been sacked and destroyed; the enemy had lost nearly six hundred thousand men; battles, endemic fevers, and epidemics had taken nearly ninety thousand of ours. The labors of war were followed immediately by reconstruction in that area; Aelia Capitolina was rebuilt, though on a more modest scale; one has always to begin over again.

I rested for some time in Sidon, where a Greek merchant lent me his house and his gardens. In March those inner courts were already carpeted with roses. I had regained my strength, and was even discovering surprising resources in this body which at first had been prostrated by the violence of the initial attack. But we have understood nothing about illness so long as we have not recognized its odd resemblance to war and to love, its compromises, its feints, its exactions, that strange and unique amalgam produced by the mixture of a temperament and a malady. I was better, but in order to contrive with my body, to impose my wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will, I devoted as much art as I had formerly employed in regulating and enlarging my world, in building the being who I am, and in embellishing my life. I resumed the exercises of the gymnasium, but with moderation; although my physician no longer forbade me the use of a horse, riding was now no more than a means of transport; I had to forego the dangerous jumps of other days. In the course of any work or any pleasure, neither work nor pleasure was now the essential; my first concern was to get through it without fatigue. A recovery which seemed so complete astonished my friends; they tried to believe that the illness had been due merely to excessive efforts in those years of war, and would not recur. I judged otherwise; I recalled the great pines of Bithynia’s forests which the woodsman notches in passing, and which he will return next season to fell. Towards the end of spring I embarked for Italy on a large galley of the fleet, taking with me Celer, now become indispensable, and Diotimus of Gadara, a young Greek of slave origin encountered in Sidon, who had beauty.

The route of return crossed the Archipelago; for the last time in my life, doubtless, I was watching the dolphins leap in that blue sea; with no thought henceforth of seeking for omens I followed the long straight flight of the migrating birds, which sometimes alighted in friendly fashion to rest on the deck of the ship; I drank in the odor of salt and sun on the human skin, the perfume of lentisk and terebinth from the isles where each voyager longs to dwell, but knows in advance that he will not pause. Diotimus read me the poets of his country; he has had that perfect instruction in letters which is often given to young slaves endowed with bodily graces in order to increase further their value; as night fell I would lie in the stern, protected by the purple canopy, listening till darkness came to efface both those lines which describe the tragic incertitude of our life, and those which speak of doves and kisses and garlands of roses. The sea was exhaling its moist, warm breath; the stars mounted one by one to their stations; the ship inclining before the wind made straight for the Occident, where showed the last shreds of red; phosphorescence glittered in the wake which stretched out behind us, soon covered over by the black masses of the waves. I said to myself that only two things of importance awaited me in Rome: one was the choice of my successor, of interest to the whole empire; the other was my death, of concern to me alone.

Rome had prepared me a triumph, which this time I accepted. I no longer protested against these vain but venerable customs; anything which honors man’s effort, even if only for a day, seemed to me salutary in presence of a world so prone to forget. I was celebrating more than the suppression of the Jewish revolt; in a sense more profound, and known to me alone, I had triumphed. I included the name of Arrian in these honors. He had just inflicted a series of defeats on the hordes of the Alani which would throw them back for a long time to come into that obscure center of Asia which they had thought to leave for good; Armenia had been saved; the reader of Xenophon was revealing himself as the emulator of that general, showing that the race of scholars who could also command and fight, if need be, was not extinct. That evening, on returning to my house in Tibur, it was with a weary but tranquil heart that I received from Diotimus’ hands the incense and wine of the daily sacrifice to my Genius.

While still a private citizen I had begun to buy up and unite these lands, spread below the Sabine Halls along clear streams, with the patient tenacity of a peasant who parcel by parcel rounds out his vineyard; later on, between two imperial tours, I had camped in these groves then in prey of architects and masons; a youth imbued with all the superstitions of Asia used often to urge devoutly that the trees be spared. On the return from my longest travel in the Orient I had worked in a kind of frenzy to perfect this immense stage-setting for a play then already three-quarters completed. I was coming back to it this time to end my days as reasonably as possible. Everything here was arranged to facilitate work as well as pleasure: the chancellery, the audience halls, and the court where I judged difficult cases in last appeal all saved me the tiring journeys between Tibur and Rome. I had given each of these edifices names reminiscent of Greece: the Pœcile, the Academy, the Prytaneum. I knew very well that this small valley planted with olive trees was not Tempe, but I was reaching the age when each beauteous place recalls another, fairer still, when each delight is weighted with the memory of past joys. I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire. I had even given the name of Styx to a particularly somber corner of the park, and the name of Elysian Fields to a meadow strewn with anemones, thus preparing myself for that other world where the torments resemble those of this world, but where joys are nebulous, and inferior to our joys. But most important of all, in the heart of this retreat I had built for myself a refuge more private still, an islet of marble at the center of a pool surrounded by colonnades; this gave me a room wholly apart, connected with, or rather, separated from the shore by a turning bridge so light that with one hand I could make it slide in its grooves. Into this summer pavilion I had two or three beloved statues moved, and the small bust of Augustus as a child, which Suetonius had given me in the period when we still were friends; I used to go there at the hour of siesta to sleep or to think, or to read.

My dog would stretch out across the doorway, extending his paws somewhat stiffly now; reflections played on the marble; Diotimus would rest his cheek, to cool himself, against the smooth surface of an urn; my thoughts were on my successor.

I have no children, nor is that a regret. To be sure, in time of weakness and fatigue, when one lacks the courage of one’s convictions, I have sometimes reproached myself for not having taken the precaution to engender a son, to follow me. But such a vain regret rests upon two hypotheses, equally doubtful: first, that a son necessarily continues us, and second, that the strange mixture of good and evil, that mass of minute and odd particularities which make up a person, deserves continuation. I have put my virtues to use as well as I could, and have profited from my vices likewise, but I have no special concern to bequeath myself to anyone. It is not by blood, anyhow, that man’s true continuity is established: Alexander’s direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters. Most men who figure in history have but mediocre offspring, or worse; they seem to exhaust within themselves the resources of a race. A father’s affection is almost always in conflict with the interests of a ruler. Were it otherwise, then an emperor’s son would still have to suffer the drawbacks of a princely education, the worst possible school for a future prince. Happily, in so far as our State has been able to formulate a rule for imperial succession, that rule has been adoption: I see there the wisdom of Rome. I know the dangers of choice, and its possible errors; I am well aware, too, that blindness is not reserved to paternal affections alone; but any decision in which intelligence presides, or where it at least plays a part, will always seem to me infinitely superior to the vague wishes of chance and unthinking nature. The power to the worthiest! It is good and fitting that a man who has proved his competence in handling the affairs of the world should choose his replacement, and that a decision of such grave consequence should be both his last privilege and his last service rendered to the State. But this important choice seemed to me more difficult than ever to make.

I had bitterly reproached Trajan for having evaded the problem for twenty years before he resolved to adopt me, and for having decided the matter only upon his deathbed. But nearly eighteen years had passed since my accession to power and I in my turn, despite the dangers of an adventurous life, had put off till the last my choice of a successor. Hundreds of rumors were circulating, almost all of them false; countless hypotheses had been built up; but what was supposed my secret decision was only my hesitation and my doubt. All around me good functionaries abounded, but not one of them had the necessary breadth of view. Forty years of integrity made Marcius Turbo a likely candidate, my friend and companion of yore and my incomparable prefect of the Praetorian Guard; but he was my age, too old. Julius Severus, an excellent general and a good administrator for Britain, knew little of the complex affairs of the Orient; Arrian had given proof of all the qualities expected of a statesman, but he was Greek, and the time has not yet come to place a Greek emperor over Rome and its prejudices.

Servianus was living still: such longevity looked like deliberate calculation on his part, an obstinate form of waiting. He had waited for sixty years. In Nerva’s time he had been both disappointed and encouraged by the adoption of Trajan; he was hoping for more, but the rise to power of this cousin incessantly occupied with the army seemed at least to assure him a considerable place in the State, perhaps second place. There, too, he was mistaken, for he had obtained only a rather empty share of honors. He waited for that time when he had stationed his slaves to attack me from an ambush in a poplar grove, along the Moselle; the duel-to-the-death begun on that morning between the young man and the man of fifty had gone on for twenty years; he had turned the mind of the sovereign against me, exaggerating my escapades and making the most of my slightest error. Such an enemy is an excellent schoolmaster: Servianus has taught me much, all in all, about prudence. After my accession to power he had had sufficient subtlety to appear to accept the inevitable; he disclaimed all connection with the plot of the four consular conspirators, and I had preferred not to remark the stains on those fingers still visibly soiled. On his side he had limited himself to mere whispered protest, and only in private pronounced my actions outrageous. With support in the Senate from that small but powerful faction of life-long conservatives who were hindering my reforms he had comfortably installed himself in the role of silent critic of my reign. Little by little he had alienated my sister Paulina from me. Their only child was a daughter, married to a certain Salinator, a man of high birth whom I had raised to the consulship, but who had died young of consumption. My niece did not long survive him; their one child, Fuscus, was set against me by this pernicious grandfather.

But the hatred between us kept within certain bounds: I did not begrudge him his part in public functions, though I took care, nevertheless, not to stand beside him in ceremonies where his advanced age would have given him precedence over the emperor. On each return to Rome I agreed, for appearances’ sake, to attend one of those family meals where one keeps on one’s guard; we exchanged letters; his were not without wit. In the long run, however, I had become disgusted with such dreary pretense; the possibility of discarding the mask in every respect is one of the rare advantages which I find in growing old: I had refused to be present at the funeral of Paulina. In the camp of Bethar, in the worst hours of physical distress and discouragement, the supreme bitterness had been to tell myself that Servianus was nearing his goal, and nearing it by my fault; that octogenarian so niggard of his strength would manage to survive an invalid of fifty-seven years; if I should die intestate he would contrive to obtain both the votes of the malcontents and the approval of those who thought that they were remaining faithful to me in electing my brother-in-law; he would profit from our slender kinship to undermine my work. In order to calm my fears I used to say to myself that the empire could find worse masters; Servianus after all was not without qualities; even the dull Fuscus would one day perhaps be worthy to reign. But all the energy which I had left was summoned to refuse this lie, and I wished to live if only to crush that viper. On coming back to Rome I saw much of Lucius again. In former days I had made commitments to him which ordinarily one hardly troubles to fulfill, but which I had kept. It is not true, however, that I had promised him the imperial purple; such things are not done. But for nearly fifteen years I had paid his debts, hushed up his scandals, and answered his letters without delay; delightful letters they were, but they always ended with requests for money for himself, or for advancement for his friends. He was too much mingled with my life for me to exclude him from it had I wished to do so, but I wished nothing of the sort. His conversation was brilliant: this young man whom people judged superficial had read more, and more intelligently, than the writers who make such works their profession. In everything his taste was exquisite, whether for people, objects, manners, or the most exact fashion of scanning a line of Greek verse. In the Senate, where he was considered able, he had made a reputation as an orator: his speeches were at the same time terse and ornate, and served immediately upon utterance as models for the professors of eloquence. I had had him named praetor, and then consul: he had fulfilled these functions well. Some years earlier I had arranged a marriage for him with the daughter of Nigrinus, one of the consular conspirators executed at the beginning of my reign; that union became the emblem of my policy of conciliation. It was but moderately successful: the young woman complained of being neglected, but she had three children by him, one of whom was a son. To her almost continual repining he would reply with frigid politeness that one marries for one’s family’s sake and not for oneself, and that so weighty a contract ill affords with the carefree play of love. His complicated system demanded mistresses for display and willing slaves for sensuous delights. He was killing himself in pursuit of pleasure, but was doing so like an artist who destroys himself in completing a masterpiece: it is not for me to reproach him in that.

I watched him live: my opinion of him was constantly changing, a thing which rarely happens except for those persons to whom we are closely attached; we are satisfied to judge others more in general, and once for all. Sometimes a studied insolence and hardness, or a coldly frivolous remark would disturb me; more often, however, I let myself be carried along by his swift and nimble intelligence; an astute comment seemed suddenly to reveal the future statesman. I spoke of all this to Marcius Turbo, who after his tiring day as Praetorian prefect came every evening to talk over current business and play his game of dice with me; together we re-examined in utmost detail Lucius’ possibilities for suitably fulfilling the career of emperor. My friends were amazed at my scruples; some of them counseled me, with a shrug of the shoulders, to take whatever decision I liked; such people imagine that one bequeaths half the world to someone as one would leave a country house to a friend. I reflected further about it by night: Lucius had hardly reached thirty; what was Caesar at thirty years but a young patrician submerged in debts and sullied by scandal? As in the bad days of Antioch, before my adoption by Trajan, I thought with a pang that nothing is slower than the true birth of a man: I had myself passed my thirtieth year before the Pannonian campaign had opened my eyes to the responsibilities of power; Lucius seemed to me at times more accomplished than I was at that age. I made up my mind abruptly, after a crisis of suffocation graver than the others, which warned me that I had no more time to lose.

I adopted Lucius, who took the name of Aelius Caesar. He was carefree even in his ambition, and though demanding was not grasping, having always been accustomed to obtain everything; he took my decision with casual ease. I had the imprudence to mention that this fair-haired prince would be admirably handsome clad in the purple; the maliciously inclined hastened to assert that I was giving an empire in return for a voluptuous intimacy of earlier days. Such a charge shows no understanding of the way that the mind of a ruler functions (provided that in some degree he merits his post and his title). If like considerations had figured, then Lucius would not have been the only one on whom I could have fixed my choice.

My wife had just died in her residence at the Palatine, which she had preferred to the end to Tibur, and where

[Hadrian 258a.jpg] Coin Struck for Adoption of Aelius Caesar

The Hague, Royal Coin Collection

[Hadrian 258bc.jpg] Aelius Caesar (bronze) London, British Museum

Marcus Aurelius as a Boy Rome, Capitoline Museum

[Hadrian 258d.jpg] Hadrianic Coin with Symbols of Aeternitas The Hague, Royal Coin Collection

she lived surrounded by a small court of friends and Spanish relations, who were all that she cared about. The polite evasions, the proprieties, the feeble efforts towards understanding had gradually terminated between us, and had left exposed only antipathy, irritation, and rancor, and, on her part, hatred. I paid her a visit in the last days; sickness had further soured her morose and acid disposition; that interview was occasion for her for violent recrimination; she gained relief thereby, but was indiscreet in speaking thus before witnesses. She congratulated herself on dying childless: my sons would doubtless have resembled me, she said, and she would have had the save aversion for them as for their father. That avowal, in which such bitterness rankled, is the only proof of love which she has ever given me. My Sabina: I searched for the few passably good memories which are left of someone when we take the trouble to look back for them; I recalled a basket of fruit which she had sent me for my birthday, after a quarrel; while passing by litter through the narrow streets of the town of Tibur and before the small summer house which had once belonged to my motherin-law Matidia, I thought bitterly of some nights of a summer long ago, when I had tried in vain to arouse some amorous feeling for this young bride so harsh and so cold. The death of my wife was less moving for me than the loss of the good Arete, the housekeeper at the Villa, stricken that same winter by fever. Because the illness to which the empress succumbed had been put poorly diagnosed by the physicians, and towards the last caused her cruel intestinal pain, I was accused of having had her poisoned, and that wild rumor was readily believed. It goes without saying that so superfluous a crime had never tempted me.

The death of Sabina perhaps pushed Servianus to risk his all: her influence in Rome had been wholly at his disposal; with her fell one of his most respected supports. And further, he had just entered upon his ninetieth year; like me, he had no more time to lose. For some months now he had tried to draw around him small groups of officers of the Praetorian Guard; sometimes he ventured to exploit the superstitious respect which great age inspires in order to assume imperial authority within his four walls. I had recently reinforced the secret military police, a distasteful institution, I admit, but one which the event proved useful. I knew all about those supposedly secret assemblies, wherein the aged Ursus was teaching the art of conspiracy to his grandson. The nomination of Lucius did not surprise the old man; he had long taken my incertitude on this subject for a well dissimulated decision; but he chose to act at the moment when the legal adoption was still a matter of controversy in Rome. His secretary, Crescens, weary of forty years of faithful service badly repaid, divulged the project, the date and place of attack, and the names of the accomplices. My enemies had not taxed their imagination; they simply copied outright the assault premeditated long before by Quietus and Nigrinus: I was to be struck down during a religious ceremony at the Capitol; my adopted son was to fall with me.

I took my precautions that very night: our enemy had lived only too long; I would leave Lucius a heritage cleansed of dangers. Towards the twelfth hour, on a gray dawn of February, a tribune bearing a sentence of death for Servianus and his grandson presented himself to my brother-in-law; his instructions were to wait in the vestibule until the order which he brought had been executed. Servianus sent for his physician, and all was decently performed. Before dying he expressed the wish that I should expire in the slow torments of incurable illness, without having like him the privilege of brief agony. His prayer has already been granted.

I had not ordered this double execution light-heartedly, but I felt no regret for it thereafter, and still less remorse. An old score had been paid at last; that was all. Age has never seemed to me an excuse for human malevolence; I should even be inclined to consider advanced years as the less excuse for such dangerous ill-will. The sentencing of Akiba and his acolytes had cost me longer hesitation; of the two old men I should still prefer the fanatic to the conspirator. As to Fuscus, however mediocre he might be and however completely his odious grandfather might have alienated him from me, he was the grandson of Paulina. But bonds of blood are truly slight (despite assertions to the contrary) when they are not reinforced by affection; this fact is evident in any family where the least matter of inheritance arises. The youth of Fuscus moved me somewhat more to pity, for he had barely reached eighteen. But interests of State required this conclusion, which the aged Ursus had seemed voluntarily to render inevitable. And from then on I was too near my own death to take time for meditation upon those two endings.

For a few days Marcius Turbo doubled his vigilance; the friends of Servianus could have sought revenge. But nothing came of it, neither attack nor sedition, nor even complaints. I was no longer the newcomer trying to win public opinion after the execution of four men of consular rank; nineteen years of just rule arbitrated in my favor; my enemies were execrated as a group, and the crowd approved me for having rid myself of a traitor. Fuscus was commiserated, but without being judged innocent. The Senate, I well knew, would not pardon me for having once more struck down one of its members, but it kept quiet, and would remain quiet until my death. As formerly, also, an admixture of clemency soon mitigated the dose of severity: not one of the partisans of Servianus was disturbed. The only exception to this rule was the eminent Apollodorus, the malevolent depositary of my brother-in-law’s secrets, who perished with him. That talented man had been the favorite architect of my predecessor; he had piled up the great stone blocks of Trajan’s Column with art. We did not care much for each other: he had of old derided my unskilled amateur paintings, my conscientious still-lifes of pumpkins and gourds; I had on my side, with a young man’s presumption, criticized his works. Later on he had disparaged mine: he knew nothing of the finest period of Greek art; that literal mind reproached me for having filled our temples with colossal statues which, if they were to rise, would batter their brows against the vaults of their sanctuaries. An inane criticism that, and one to hurt Phidias even more than me. But the gods do not rise; they rise neither to warn us nor to protect us, nor to recompense nor to punish. Nor did they rise on that night to save Apollodorus.

By spring the health of Lucius began to cause me rather grave concern. One morning in Tibur we went down from the bath to the palaestra where Celer was exercising with other youths; someone proposed one of those contests where each participant runs bearing his shield and his spear. Lucius managed to excuse himself from the sport, as he usually did, but finally yielded to our friendly raillery; in equipping himself he complained of the weight of the bronze shield; compared with the firm beauty of Celer that slender body seemed frail. After a few strides he fell breathless, and spit blood. The incident had no sequel, and he recovered without difficulty; but I had been alarmed. I should not have been so soon reassured. I resisted these first symptoms of his illness with the stupid confidence of a man who had long been robust, and who had implicit faith in the undepleted reserves of youth and in the capacities of bodies to function as they should. It is true that he was mistaken, too; some light flame sustained him, and his vivacity created the same illusion for him as for us. My best years had been passed in travel and in camp, or on the frontiers; I had known at first hand the values of a rude life, and the salubrious effect of frozen or desert regions. I decided to name Lucius governor of that same Pannonia where I had had my first experience in rule. The situation on that frontier was less critical than formerly; his task would be limited to the peaceful work of civil administration or to routine military inspections. Such difficult country would rouse him from Rome’s easy ways; he would get better acquainted with that immense world which the City governs, and on which she depends. He dreaded those distant climes, and would not understand that life could be enjoyed elsewhere than in Rome. He accepted, however, with the compliance which he always showed when he wished to please me.

Throughout the summer I read with care both his official reports and those more secret communications from Domitius Rogatus, my confidential informant whom I had sent with him as a secretary instructed to watch over him. These accounts satisfied me: Lucius demonstrated in Pannonia that he was capable of the seriousness which I expected of him, but from which he might have relaxed, perhaps, after my death. He even conducted himself rather brilliantly in a series of cavalry skirmishes at the advance posts. In the provinces, as everywhere else, he succeeded in charming everyone around him; his dry and somewhat imperious manner did him no disservice; at least this would not be a case of one of those easy-going princes who is governed by a coterie. But with the very beginning of autumn he caught cold. He was thought to be well again soon, but the cough recurred and the fever persisted, setting in for good. A temporary gain was followed by a sudden relapse the next spring. The bulletins from the physicians appalled me; the public postal service, which I had just established with its relays of horses and carriages over vast territories, seemed to function only in order to bring me news of the invalid more promptly each morning. I could not pardon myself for having been inhumane towards him in the fear of being, or seeming, too indulgent. As soon as he was recovered enough to travel I had him brought back to Italy.

In company with the aged Rufus of Ephesus, a specialist in phthisis, I went to the port of Baiae to await my fragile Aelius Caesar. The climate of Tibur, though better than that of Rome, is nevertheless not mild enough for affected lungs; I had decided to have him spend the late autumn in that safer region. The ship anchored in the middle of the bay; a light tender brought the sick man and his physician ashore. His haggard face seemed thinner still under the fringe of beard with which he had let his cheeks be covered, in the hope of resembling me. But his eyes had kept their hard fire, the gleam of precious stones. His first words to me were to remind me that he had come back only at my command; that his administration had incurred no reproach; that he had obeyed me in everything. He spoke like a schoolboy who justifies the way that he has spent his day. I established him in that villa of Cicero where he had formerly passed a season with me when he was eighteen. He had the elegance never to speak of those times.

The first few days seemed like a victory over the disease; this return to Italy was already a remedy in itself; at that time of year the countryside there was wine-red in hue. But the rains began; a damp wind blew from the strong sea; the old house built in the time of the Republic lacked the more modern comforts of the villa in Tibur; I watched Lucius dispiritedly warming his slender fingers, laden with rings, over the brazier. Hermogenes had returned but a short time before from the Orient, where I had sent him to refurnish and augment his provision of medicaments; he tried on Lucius the effects of a mud impregnated with powerful minerals salts; these applications were reputed to cure everything. But they were of no more help to his lungs than to my arteries.

Illness exposed the worst aspects of that hard and frivolous nature: his wife paid him a visit; as always, their interview ended in bitter words; she did not come back again. His son was brought to see him, a beautiful child of seven, laughing and gay, and just at the toothless age; Lucius beheld him without interest. He asked eagerly for political news from Rome, but more as a gambler would than a statesman. Such levity, however, was a form of courage on his part; he would awaken from long afternoons of pain or torpor to throw his whole being into one of those sparkling conversations of his former days; that face wet with sweat still knew how to smile; the emaciated body rose with grace to receive the physician. He would be to the end the prince formed of ivory and gold.

At night, unable to sleep, I would take up my station in the invalid’s room; Celer, who disliked Lucius, but who is too loyal not to serve with care those dear to me, consented to share my vigil; from the covers came the sound of rattled breathing. A feeling of bitterness swept over me, deep as the sea: he had never loved me; our relations had quickly become those of the spendthrift son and the indulgent father; that life had run out without ever having known great hopes or serious thoughts and ardent passions; he had squandered his years as a prodigal scatters gold coin. I had leaned for support upon a ruined wall: I thought with anger of the enormous sums expended for his adoption, three hundred million sesterces distributed to the soldiers. In a sense, my good fortune had followed me, though sadly: I had satisfied my old desire to give Lucius all that can be given, but the State would not suffer for it now; I should not risk being dishonored by that choice. In the very depths of my being I was even fearing that he might get better; if by chance he should drag on some years still, I could not leave the empire to such a shade.

Without ever asking questions he seemed to penetrate my thoughts on this point; his eyes followed anxiously my slightest motion. I had named him consul for the second time; he worried because he could not fulfill the functions of that office; the dread of displeasing me aggravated his condition. Tu Marcellus eris. … I repeated to myself Virgil’s lines devoted to the nephew of Augustus, likewise designated to rule, and whom death stopped short on the way. Manibus date lilia plenis… . Purpureos spargam flores… . The lover of flowers would receive only futile funeral wreaths from me.

He believed that he was better, and wished to return to Rome. The physicians, who no longer disputed among themselves except as to the length of time left him to live, counseled me to do whatever he liked; I took him back by short stages to the Villa. His formal presentation to the Senate as heir to the empire was to take place during the session which would follow almost immediately upon the New Year. According to custom, he was supposed on that occasion to address to me a speech of thanks; this piece of eloquence had preoccupied him for months, and together we had smoothed over its difficult passages. He was working at it on the morning of the first of January, when he was suddenly taken with hemorrhage; he grew faint, and leaned against the back of his chair, closing his eyes. Death was no more than dizziness for this light creature. It was New Year’s Day: in order not to interrupt the public and private festivities, I restricted immediate proclamation of the news of his passing; it was not announced officially until the following day. He was buried quietly on his family estate. The evening before that ceremony the Senate sent a delegation to me bearing its condolences, and offering the honors of divinization to Lucius, to which he was entitled as the emperor’s adopted son. But I refused: this whole affair had already cost only too much to the State. I confined myself to having some funeral chapels constructed for him, and statues erected here and there in different places where he had lived: this poor Lucius was not a god.

This time each moment counted. But I had had ample leisure for reflection at the invalid’s bedside; my plans were made. In the Senate I had remarked a certain Antoninus, a man of about fifty, of a provincial family distantly related to that of Plotina. He had impressed me by the deferent but tender care with which he surrounded his father-in-law, an old man partially paralyzed, who sat beside him. I read through his records; this honest man had proved himself in every post that he had held an irreproachable official. My choice fell on him. The more I frequent Antoninus the more my esteem for him tends to change into profound respect. This simple man possesses a virtue which I had thought little about up to this time, even when I happened to practice it, namely, kindness. He is not devoid of the modest faults of a sage: in applying his intelligence to the meticulous accomplishment of daily tasks he concerns himself more with the present than the future; his experience of life is limited by his very virtues; his travel has been confined to certain official missions, though these have been well fulfilled. He is little versed in the arts. He yields only unwillingly to innovation; the provinces, for example, will never represent for him the immense possibilities for development that they have always signified for me; he will continue rather than expand my work, but he will continue it well; in him the State will have an honest servitor and a good master.

But the space of one generation seemed to me but a small thing when the problem was to safeguard the security of the world; I wanted if possible to prolong further this line created by prudent adoption, and to prepare for the empire one more relay on the road of time. Upon each return to Rome I had never failed to visit my old friends, the Verus family, Spanish like me, and among the most liberal members of the upper magistracy. I have known you from your cradle, young Annius Verus, who by my provision now call yourself Marcus Aurelius. During one of the most glorious years of my life, in the period which is marked for me by the erection of the Pantheon, I had you elected, out of friendship for your family, to the sacred college of the Arval Brethren, over which the emperor presides, and which devoutly perpetuates our ancient Roman religious customs. I held you by the hand during the sacrifice which took place that year on the bank of the Tiber, and with tender amusement watched your childish face (you were only five years old at the time), frightened by the cries of the immolated swine, but trying bravely to imitate the dignified demeanor of your elders. I concerned myself with the education of this almost too sober little boy, helping your father to choose the best masters for you. Verus, the Most Veracious: I used so to play on your name; you are perhaps the only being who has never lied to me.

I have seen you read with passion the writings of the philosophers, and clothe yourself in harsh wool, sleeping on the bare floor and forcing your somewhat frail body to all the mortifications of the Stoics. There is some excess in all that, but excess is a virtue at the age of seventeen. I sometimes wonder on what reef that wisdom will founder, for one always founders: will it be a wife, or a son too greatly beloved, one of those legitimate snares (to sum it up in a word) where overscrupulous, pure hearts are caught? Or will it be more simply age, illness, fatigue, or the disillusion which says to us that if all is vain, then virtue is, too? I can imagine in place of your candid, boyish countenance your weary visage as an older man. I am aware that your severity, so carefully acquired, has beneath it some sweetness, and some weakness, perhaps; I divine in you the presence of a genius which is not necessarily that of the statesman; the world will doubtless be forever the better off, however, for having once seen such qualities operating in conjunction with supreme authority. I have arranged the essentials for your adoption by Antoninus; under the new name by which you will one day be designated in the list of emperors you are now and henceforth my grandson. I believe that I may be giving mankind the only chance it will ever have to realize Plato’s dream, to see a philosopher pure of heart ruling over his fellow men.

You have accepted these honors only with reluctance; your rank obliges you to live in court; Tibur, this place where to the very end I am assembling whatever pleasures life has, disturbs you for your young virtue. I watch you wandering gravely under these rose-covered alleys, and smile to see you drawn towards the fair human objects who cross your path; you hesitate tenderly between Veronica and Theodores, but quickly renounce them both in favor of that chaste phantom, austerity. You have not concealed from me your melancholy disdain for these shortlived splendors, nor for this court, which will disperse after my death. You scarcely care for me; your filial affection goes more toward Antoninus; in me you discern a kind of wisdom which is contrary to what your masters teach you, and in my abandonment to the life of the senses you see a mode of life opposed to the severity of your own, but which nevertheless is parallel to it. Never mind: it is not necessary that you understand me. There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is not bad that they should alternate.

Eight days after the death of Lucius, I had myself taken by litter to the Senate; I asked permission to enter thus into the council chamber, and to remain lying against my pile of cushions as I gave my address. Speaking tires me: I requested the senators to form a close circle around me, in order not to be obliged to force my voice. I pronounced Lucius’ eulogy; these few lines took the place on that session’s program of the discourse which he was to have given on that same day. Thereafter I announced my decision: I nominated Antoninus, and named you also. I had counted upon completely unanimous adherence, and obtained it. I expressed a last wish, which was acceded to like the others: I asked that Antoninus should also adopt Lucius’ son, who will in this way become your brother; you two will govern together, and I rely upon you as the elder to look after his welfare. I want the State to conserve something of Lucius.

On returning home, for the first time in many a day I was tempted to smile. I had played my game singularly well. The followers of Servianus, conservatives hostile to my administration, had not capitulated; all the courtesies which I had paid to this great and ancient, but outworn, senatorial body were no compensation to them for the two or three blows which I had dealt them. They would undoubtedly take advantage of the moment of my death to try to annul my acts. But my worst enemies would not dare to reject their most upright representative, nor the son of one of their most respected members as well. My public duty was done: I could now return to Tibur, going back into that retreat which is called illness, to experiment with my suffering, to taste fully what delights are left to me, and to resume in peace my interrupted dialogue with a shade. My imperial heritage was safe in the hands of the devoted Antoninus and the grave Marcus Aurelius; Lucius himself would survive in his son. All that was not too badly arranged.

PATIENTIA

Arrian wrote me thus:

I have completed the circumnavigation of the Black Sea, in conformity with the orders received. We ended the circuit at Sinope, whose inhabitants are still grateful to you for the vast work of enlarging and repairing the port, brought successfully to conclusion under your supervision some years back… . By the way, they have erected a statue in your honor which is not fine enough, nor a good enough likeness; pray send them another, in white marble… . At Sinope it was not without emotion that I looked down on that same sea from the hilltops whence our Xenophon first beheld it of old, and whence you yourself contemplated it not so long ago… .

I have inspected the coastal garrisons: their commandants merit the highest praise for excellent discipline, for use of latest methods in training, and for the quality of their engineering… . Wherever the coasts are wild and still rather little known I have had new soundings taken, and have rectified, where necessary, the indications of earlier navigators… .

We have skirted Colchis. Knowing how interested you are in what the ancient poets recount, I questioned the inhabitants about Medea’s enchantments and the exploits of Jason. But they seemed not to know of these stories… .

On the northern shore of that inhospitable sea we touched upon a small island of great import in legend, the isle of Achilles. As you know, Thetis is supposed to have brought her son to be reared on this islet shrouded in mist; each evening she would rise from the depths of the sea and would come to talk with her child on the strand. Nowadays the place is uninhabited; only a few goats graze there. It has a temple to Achilles. Terns, gulls, and petrels, all hinds of sea birds frequent this sanctuary, and its porch is cooled by the continual fanning of their wings still moist from the sea. But this isle of Achilles is also, as it should be, the isle of Patroclus, and the innumerable votive offerings which decorate the temple walls are dedicated sometimes to Achilles and sometimes to his friend, for of course whoever loves Achilles cherishes and venerates Patroclus’ memory. Achilles himself appears in dream to the navigators who visit these parts: he protects them and warns them of the sea’s dangers, as Castor and Pollux do elsewhere. And the shade of Patroclus appears at Achilles’ side.

I report these things to you because I think them worthy to be known, and because those who told them to me have experienced them themselves, or have learned them from credible witnesses… . Achilles sometimes seems to me the greatest of men in his courage, his fortitude, his learning and intelligence coupled with bodily skill, and his ardent love for his young companion. And nothing in him seems to me nobler than the despair which made him despise life and long for death when he had lost his beloved.

I laid down the voluminous report of the governor of Armenia Minor, admiral of the expeditionary fleet. As always Arrian has worked well. But this time he is doing more than that: he offers me a gift which I need if I am to die in peace; he sends me a picture of my life as I should have wished it to be. Arrian knows that what counts is something which will not figure in official biographies and which is not written on tombs; he knows also that the passing of time only adds one more bewilderment to grief. As seen by him the adventure of my existence takes on meaning and achieves a form, as in a poem; that unique affection frees itself from remorse, impatience, and vain obsessions as from so much smoke, or so much dust; sorrow is decanted and despair runs pure. Arrian opens to me the vast empyrean of heroes and friends, judging me not too unworthy of it. My hidden study built at the center of a pool in the Villa is not internal enough as a refuge; I drag this body there, grown old, and suffer there. My past life, to be sure, affords me certain retreats where I escape from at least some part of my present afflictions: the snowy plain along the Danube, the gardens of Nicomedia, Claudiopolis turned gold in the harvest of flowering saffron, Athens (no matter what street), an oasis where water lilies ripple above the ooze, the Syrian desert by starlight on the return from Osroës’ camp. But these beloved places are too often associated with premises which have led to some error, some disappointment, some repulse known to me alone: in my bad moments all my roads to success seem only to lead to Egypt, to a sick room in Baiae, or to Palestine. And worse still, the fatigue of my body transmits itself to my memories: recollection of the stairways of the Acropolis is almost insupportable to a man who pants as he mounts the garden steps; the thought of July sun on the drill-field of Lambaesis overwhelms me as if I were now exposing my head there bare. Arrian offers me something better. Here in Tibur, in the full heat of May, I listen for the waves’ slow complaint on the beach of the isle of Achilles; I breathe there in cool, pure air; I wander effortlessly over the temple terrace bathed in the fresh sea spray; I catch sight of Patroclus… . That place which I shall never see is becoming my secret abode, my innermost haven. I shall doubtless be there at the moment of my death.

In former years I had given the philosopher Euphrates permission for suicide. Nothing seemed simpler: a man has the right to decide how long he may usefully live. I did not then know that death can become an object of blind ardor, of a hunger like that of love. I had not foreseen those nights when I should be wrapping my baldric around my dagger in order to force myself to think twice before drawing it. Arrian alone has penetrated the secret of this unsung battle against emptiness, barrenness, fatigue, and the disgust for existing which brings on a craving for death. There is no getting over it: the old fever has prostrated me more than once; I would shudder to feel it coming on, like a sick man aware of an approaching attack. Everything served me as means to postpone the hour of the nightly struggle: work, conversations wildly prolonged until dawn, caresses, my books. An emperor is not supposed to take his own life unless he is forced to do so for reasons of State; even Mark Antony had the excuse of a lost battle. And my strict Arrian would think less highly of this despair brought with me from Egypt had I not triumphed over it. My own legislation forbade soldiers that voluntary death which I accorded to sages; I felt no freer to desert than any other legionary. But I know what it is to fondle the harsh fibres of a rope or the edge of a knife.

Gradually I turned my dread desire into a rampart against itself: the fact that the possibility of suicide was ever present helped me to bear life with less impatience, just as a sedative potion within hand’s reach serves to calm a man afflicted with insomnia. By some inner contradiction this obsession with death ceased only after the first symptoms of illness came to distract me from that one thought; I began to interest myself anew in this life which was leaving me; in Sidon’s gardens I wanted intensely to enjoy my body for some years more.

One desires to die, but not to suffocate; sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack. I kept sly watch upon myself: that dull chest pain, was it only a passing discomfort, the result of a meal absorbed too fast, or was I to expect from the enemy an assault which this time would not be repulsed? I no longer entered the Senate without saying to myself that the door had perhaps closed behind me as finally as if I had been awaited, like Caesar, by fifty conspirators armed with knives. During the suppers at Tibur I feared to distress my guests by the discourtesy of a sudden and final departure; I was afraid to die in my bath, or in the embrace of young arms. Functions which formerly were easy to perform or even agreeable, become humiliating now that they have become more laborious; one wearies of the silver vase handed each morning to be examined by the physician. The principal ailment brings with it a whole train of secondary afflictions: my hearing is less acute than before; even yesterday I was forced to ask Phlegon to repeat a whole sentence; no crime would have cost me more shame.

The months which followed the adoption of Antoninus were bad indeed: the stay in Baiae and the return to Rome, with the negotiations accompanying it, overtaxed what strength I had left. The obsession with death again took hold of me, but this time the reasons were plain to see, and could be told; my worst enemy would have had no cause to smile over my despair. There was nothing now to restrain me: people would have understood that the emperor, withdrawn to his country house after having arranged all matters of State, had taken the necessary measures to facilitate his ending. But the solicitude of my friends amounts to constant surveillance: every invalid is a prisoner. I no longer have the force which it would take to drive the dagger in at the exact place, marked at one time with red ink under my left breast; I should only have added to the present ills a repulsive mixture of bandages and bloody sponges, and surgeons discussing at the foot of my bed. To prepare a suicide I needed to take the same precautions as would an assassin to plan his crime.

I thought first of my huntsman, Mastor, the handsome, half-savage Sarmatian who had followed me for years like a devoted wolf-dog. He was sometimes entrusted to keep watch by night at my door. I took advantage of a moment’s solitude to call him in and explain what I wanted of him: at first he did not understand. Then my meaning dawned; the barbarian face under the fair shaggy hair contracted with terror. He believes me immortal: morning and evening he sees physicians enter my room and hears me groan at each punction without his faith being shaken thereby; for him it was as if the master of the gods, thinking to tempt him, had descended from Olympus to entreat of him a death-blow. He tore away the sword which I had seized from him, and fled howling. That night he was found in the depths of the park, uttering strange gibberish in his native jargon. They calmed this terrified creature as well as they could; no one spoke to me again of the incident. But the next morning I noticed that Celer had exchanged the metal style on the writing table within reach of my bed for a reed pen.

I sought a better ally. I had complete confidence in Iollas, a young physician from Alexandria whom Hermogenes had chosen last summer as his substitute during his absence. We often talked together, for I liked to build up hypotheses with him on the nature and origin of things, and took pleasure in his intelligence, both daring and dreamy, and in the dark fire of those deep-set eyes. I knew that in Alexandria he had found in the palace archives the formulae for extraordinarily subtle poisons compounded long ago by Cleopatra’s chemists. An excuse came for me to get rid of Hermogenes for several hours: he had to examine candidates for the chair of medicine which I had just founded at the Odeon; there was thus the chance for a secret talk with Iollas. He understood me at once; he pitied me; he could but admit that I was right. But his Hippocratic oath forbade him to dispense a nocent drug to a patient, under any pretext whatsoever; he refused, standing fast in his professional honor. I insisted; I made absolute demand; I employed every means to try to draw his pity, or to corrupt him; he will be the last man whom I shall have implored. Finally won over, he promised me to go and seek the dose of poison. I awaited him in vain until evening. Late in the night I learned with horror that he had just been found dead in his laboratory, with a glass phial in his hands. That heart clean of all compromise had found this means of abiding by his oath while denying me nothing.

The next day Antoninus was announced; this true friend could barely hold back his tears. The idea that a man whom he had come to love and to venerate as a father suffered enough to seek out death was to him insupportable; it seemed to him that he must have failed in his obligations as a good son. He promised me to add his efforts to those of my entourage in order to nurse me and relieve my pain, to make my life smooth and easy to the last, even to cure me perhaps. He depended upon me to continue the longest time possible in guiding and instructing him; he felt himself responsible towards the whole empire for the remainder of my days.

I know what these pathetic protestations and naďve promises are worth; nevertheless I derive some relief and comfort from them. Antoninus’ simple words have convinced me; I am regaining possession of myself before I die. The death of Iollas, faithful to his duty as physician, exhorts me to conform, to the end, to the proprieties of my profession as emperor. Patientia: yesterday I saw Domitius Rogatus, now become procurator of the mint and entrusted with a new issue of coins; I have chosen for it this legend, which will be my last watchword. My death had seemed to me the most personal of my decisions, my supreme redoubt as a free man; I was mistaken. The faith of millions of Mastors must not be shaken, nor other Iollases put to so sore a trial. I have realized that suicide would appear to signify indifference, or ingratitude perhaps, to the little group of devoted friends who surround me; I do not wish to bequeath to them the hideous picture of a man racked by pain who cannot endure one torture more.

Other considerations came slowly to mind during the night which followed Iollas’ death; life has given me much, or at least I have known how to obtain a great deal from it; in this moment as in the time of my felicity, but for wholly opposite reasons, it seems to me that existence has nothing more to offer: I am not sure, however, that I have not something more to learn from it. I shall listen for its secret instructions to the end. All my life long I have trusted in the wisdom of my body; I have tried to distinguish between and enjoy the varied sensations which this friend has provided me: I no longer refuse the death agony prepared for me, this ending slowly elaborated within my arteries and inherited perhaps from some ancestor, or born of my temperament, formed little by little from each of my actions throughout my life. The time of impatience has passed; at the point where I now am, despair would be in as bad taste as hope itself. I have ceased to hurry my death.

There is still much to be done. My estates in Africa, inherited from my motherin-law, Matidia, must be turned into models of agricultural development; the peasants of Borysthenes, the village established in Thrace in memory of a good horse, are entitled to aid after a severe winter; on the contrary, subsidies should not be granted to the rich cultivators of the Nile Valley, who are ever ready to take advantage of the emperor’s solicitude. Julius Vestinus, prefect of Education, sends me his report on the opening of public grammar schools. I have just completed the revision of Palmyra’s commercial code: it takes everything into account, from the entrance fees for caravans to the tax set for prostitutes. At the moment, we are assembling a congress of physicians and magistrates to determine the utmost duration of a pregnancy, thus putting an end to interminable legal squabbles. Cases of bigamy are increasing in number in the veterans’ settlements; I am doing my best to persuade these men not to make wrong use of the new laws which permit them to marry, and I counsel them to abstain prudently from taking more than one wife at a time! In Athens a Pantheon is in process of construction on the model of the Pantheon in Rome; I am composing the inscription to be placed on its walls, and shall enumerate therein (as examples and commitments for the future) my services to the Greek cities and to barbarian peoples; the services rendered to Rome are matters of course.

The struggle goes on against brutal misuse of judiciary power: I have had to reprimand the governor of Cilicia who took it into his head to execute under torture the cattle thieves in his province, as if simple death were not enough to punish a man and dispose of him. Both the State and the municipalities were abusing their power to condemn men to forced labor in order to procure workers at no cost; I have prohibited that practice not only with regard to free men but for forced labor of slaves as well; it is important, however, to watch sharply lest this detestable system re-establish itself under other names. In certain parts of the territory of ancient Carthage child sacrifice still prevails, so means must be devised to forbid the priests of Baal the pleasure of feeding their fires. In Asia Minor the rights of heirs of the Seleucids have been shamefully disregarded by our civil tribunals, ever prejudiced against the former kings; I have repaired that long-standing injustice. In Greece the trial of Herod Atticus still goes on. Phlegon’s dispatch box, with his erasers of pumice stone and his sticks of red wax, will be with me to the end.

As in the days of my felicity, people believe me to be a god; they continue to give me that appellation even though they are offering sacrifices to the heavens for the restoration

[Hadrian 284a.jpg] Inscription in Honor of Hadrian as Archon of Athens Athens, Theatre of Dionysus

[Hadrian 284bc.jpg] Hadrian’s Address to the Troops at Lambaesis Algiers, Stéphane Gsell Museum

Inscription of Fraternity of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium Rome, National Museum

[Hadrian 284d.jpg] Hieroglyphic Insert Recording Funeral Ceremonies of Antinous Rome, Obelisk of the Pincio

of the Imperial Health. I have already told you the reasons for which such a belief, salutary for them, seems to me not absurd. A blind old woman has come on foot from Pannonia, having undertaken that exhausting journey in order to ask me to touch her eyes; she has recovered her sight under my hands, as her fervor had led her to expect; her faith in the emperor-god explains this miracle. Other prodigies have occurred, and invalids say that they have seen me in their dreams, as the pilgrims to Epidaurus have visions of Ćsculapius; they claim that they have awakened cured, or at least improved. I do not smile at the contrast between my powers as a thaumaturge and my own illness; I accept these new privileges with gravity. The old blind woman who made her way to the emperor from the depths of a barbarian province has become for me what the slave of Tarragona had formerly been, namely, a symbol of the populations of the empire whom I have both ruled and served. Their immense confidence repays me for twenty years of work which was itself congenial to me.

Phlegon has recently read me verses of a Jew of Alexandria who also attributes to me superhuman powers; without irony I welcomed that description of an elderly prince who is seen going back and forth over all the roads of the earth, descending to the treasures of the mines, reawakening the generative forces of the soil, and everywhere establishing peace and prosperity; the initiate who has restored the shrines of all races, the connoisseur in magic arts, the seer who raised a youth to the heavens. I shall have been better understood by this enthusiastic Jew than by many a senator and proconsul; this adversary now won over looks upon me almost as does Arrian; I am amazed to have become for people just what I sought to be, after all, and I marvel that this success is made up of so little.

Old age and death, as they approach, begin to add their majesty to this prestige; men step reverently from my path; they no longer compare me, as they once did, to serene and radiant Zeus, but to Mars Gradivus, god of long campaigns and austere discipline, or to grave Numa, inspired by the gods. Of late this pale, drawn visage, these fixed eyes and this tall body held straight by force of will, suggest to them Pluto, god of shades. Only a few intimates, a few tried and cherished friends, escape such dread contagion of respect. The young lawyer Fronto, this future magistrate who will doubtless be one of the good servants of your reign, came to discuss with me an address of mine to be made in the Senate; his voice was trembling, and I read in his face that same reverence mingled with fear. The tranquil joys of human friendship are no longer for me; men adore and venerate me far too much to love me.

A happy fate not unlike that of certain gardeners has been allotted me: everything that I have tried to implant in the human imagination has taken root there. The cult of Antinous seemed like the wildest of my enterprises, the overflow of a grief which concerned me alone. But our epoch is avid for gods; it prefers the most ardent deities, and the most sorrowful, those who mingle with the wine of life a bitter honey from beyond the grave. At Delphi the youth has become the Hermes who guards the threshold, master of the dark passages leading to the shades. Eleusis, where his age and status as a stranger formerly prevented him from being initiated with me, now makes of him the young Bacchus of the Mysteries, prince of those border regions which lie between the senses and the soul. His ancestral Arcadia associates him with Pan and Diana, woodland divinities; the peasants of Tibur identify him with the gentle Aristaeus, king of the bees. In Asia his worshippers liken him to their tender gods devoured by summer heat or broken by autumn storms. Far away, on the edge of barbarian lands, the companion of my hunts and travels has assumed the aspect of the Thracian Horseman, that mysterious figure seen riding through the copses by moonlight and carrying away souls of the dead in the folds of his cloak.

All of that could be merely an excrescence of the official cult, a form of public flattery or the adulation of priests greedy for subsidies. But the young face is escaping from me to respond to the aspirations of simpler hearts: by one of those shifts of balance inherent in the nature of things that somber but exquisite youth has taken his place in popular devotion as the support of the weak and the poor, and the comforter of dead children. His image on the coins of Bithynia, that profile of the youth of fifteen with floating locks and delighted, truthful smile (which he kept for so short a time), is hung at the neck of new-born infants to serve as an amulet; it is nailed up likewise in village cemeteries on the small tombs. In recent years, when I used to think of my own death, like a pilot unmindful of himself but trembling for the ship’s passengers and cargo, I would tell myself bitterly that this remembrance would founder with me; that young being so carefully embalmed in the depths of my memory seemed obliged thus to perish for a second time. That fear, though justifiable, has been in part allayed; I have compensated for this premature death as well as I could; an image, a reflection, some feeble echo will survive for at least a few centuries. Little more can be done in matters of immortality.

I have again seen Fidus Aquila, governor of Antinoöpolis, as he passed on his way to his new post at Sarmizegethusa. He has described to me the annual rites celebrated now on the banks of the Nile in honor of the dead god, to which pilgrims come by thousands from the regions of the North and the South, with offerings of beer and of grain, and with prayers; every third year anniversary games are held in Antinoöpolis as well as in Alexandria, and in Mantinea and my beloved Athens. These triennial festivities will recur this autumn, but I do not hope to last out until this ninth return of the month of Athyr. It is the more important, therefore, that each detail of such solemnities be determined in advance. The oracle of the dead youth functions inside the secret chamber of the ancient Egyptian temple restored by my care; its priests distribute daily some hundreds of responses already prepared for all those questions which human hope or anguish may pose. I have incurred reproach for having composed several of these answers myself. I did not intend, in so doing, to be lacking in respect towards my god, or in compassion for the soldier’s wife who asks if her husband will come back alive from a garrison in Palestine, for the invalid hungering for comfort, for some merchant whose ships ride the waves of the Red Sea, for a couple who desire a son; at the most I was continuing in this way the games of logogriphs and versified charades at which we used sometimes to play together. Likewise there was comment because here in the Villa, around that chapel of Canopus where his cult is celebrated in Egyptian fashion, I have encouraged the establishment of various pleasure pavilions like those of the suburb of Alexandria which bears that name, and have offered their facilities and distractions to my guests, sometimes participating in them myself. He had grown used to that kind of thing. And then, one does not enclose oneself for years in a unique thought without reintroducing into it, little by little, all the mere routines of a life.

I have done all they say to do. I have waited, and sometimes I have prayed. Audivi voces divinas… . The lightheaded Julia Balbilla believed that she heard the mysterious voice of Memnon at dawn; I have listened for the

[Hadrian 288a.jpg] Antinous of Antonianos of Aphrodisias Rome, Osio Collection

[Hadrian 288bc.jpg] Marlborough Gem, Antinous (cast) Rome, Sangiorgio Collection

Marlborough Gem, Antinous (sardonyx) Rome, Sangiorgio Collection

[Hadrian 288d.jpg] Coin of Antinous as Bacchus Coin of Tion, Asia Minor

night’s faintest sounds. I have used the unctions of oil and essence of roses which attract the shades; I have set out the bowl of milk, the handful of salt, the drop of blood, supports of their former existence. I have lain down on the marble pavement of the small sanctuary; the light of the stars made its way through the openings of the wall, producing reflections here and there, strange, pale gleams. I have recalled to myself the orders whispered by the priests in the ear of the dead, and the itinerary written on the tomb: And he will recognize the way… . And the guardians of the threshold will let him pass… . And he will come and go around those who love him for millions of days… . Sometimes, after long intervals, I have thought to feel the slight stir of an approach, a touch as light as the contact of eyelashes and warm as the hollow of a hand. And the shade of Patroclus appears at Achilles’ side. … I shall never know if that warmth, that sweetness, did not emanate simply from deep within me, the last efforts of a man struggling against solitude and the cold of night. But the question, which arises also in the presence of our living loves, has ceased to interest me now; it matters little to me whether the phantoms whom I evoke come from the limbo of my memory or from that of another world. My soul, if I possess one, is made of the same substance as are the specters; this body with swollen hands and livid nails, this sorry mass almost half-dissolved, this sack of ills, of desires and dreams, is hardly more solid or consistent than a shade. I differ from the dead only in my faculty to suffocate some moments longer; in one sense their existence seems to me more assured than my own. Antinous and Plotina are at least as real as myself.

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is no longer what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. Death’s approach re-establishes between us a kind of close complicity: the living beings who surround me, my devoted if sometimes importunate servitors, will never know how little the world interests the two of us now. I think with disgust of those doleful symbols of the Egyptian tombs: the hard scarab, the rigid mummy, the frog which signifies eternal parturition. To believe the priests, I have left you at the place where the separate elements of a person tear apart like a worn garment under strain, at that sinister crossroads between what was and what will be, and what exists eternally. It is conceivable, after all, that such notions are right, and that death is made up of the same confused, shifting matter as life. But none of these theories of immortality inspire me with confidence; the system of retributions and punishments makes little impression upon a judge well aware of the difficulties of judging. On the other hand, the opposite solution seems to me also too simple, the neat reduction to nothingness, the hollow void where Epicurus’ disdainful laughter resounds.

I try now to observe my own ending: this series of experiments conducted upon myself continues the long study begun in Satyrus’ clinic. So far the modifications are as external as those to which time and inclement weather subject any edifice, leaving its architecture and basic material unaltered; I sometimes think that through the crevices I see and touch upon the indestructible foundation, the rock eternal. I am what I always was; I am dying without essential change. At first view the robust child of the gardens in Spain and the ambitious officer regaining his tent and shaking the snowflakes from his shoulders seem both as thoroughly obliterated as I shall be when I shall have gone through the funeral fire; but they are still there; I am inseparable from those parts of myself. The man who howled his grief upon a dead body has not ceased to wail in some corner of my being, in spite of the superhuman, or perhaps subhuman calm into which I am entering already; the voyager immured within the ever sedentary invalid is curious about death because it spells departure. That force which once was I seems still capable of actuating several more lives, or of raising up whole worlds. If by miracle some centuries were suddenly to be added to the few days now left to me I would do the same things over again, even to committing the same errors; I would frequent the same Olympian heights and even the same Infernos. Such a conclusion is an excellent argument in favor of the utility of death, but at the same time it inspires certain doubts as to death’s total efficacity.

In certain periods of my life I have noted down my dreams; I have discussed their significance with priests and philosophers, and with astrologers. That faculty for dreaming, though deadened for many years, has been restored to me in the course of these months of agony; the incidents of my waking hours seem less real, and sometimes less irksome, than those of dream. If this larval and spectral world, where the platitudinous and the absurd swarm in even greater abundance than on earth, affords us some notion of the state of the soul when separated from the body, then I shall doubtless pass my eternity in regretting the exquisite control which our senses now provide, and the adjusted perspectives offered by human reason.

And nevertheless I sink back with a certain relief into those insubstantial regions of dream; there I possess for a moment some secrets which soon escape me again; there I drink at the sacred springs. The other day I was in the oasis of Ammon, on the afternoon of the lion hunt. I was in high spirits; everything went as in the time of my former vigor: the wounded lion collapsed to the ground, then rose again; I pressed forward to strike the final blow. But this time my rearing horse threw me; the horrible, bleeding mass of the beast rolled over me, and claws tore at my chest; I came to myself in my room in Tibur, crying out for aid. More recently still I have seen my father, though I think of him rather seldom. He was lying on his sick bed in a room of our house in Italica, where I ceased to dwell soon after his death. On his table he had a phial full of a sedative potion which I begged him to give me. I awoke before he had time to reply. It surprises me that most men are so fearful of ghosts when they are so ready to speak to the dead in their dreams.

Presages are also increasing: from now on everything seems like an intimation and a sign. I have just dropped and broken a precious stone set in a ring; my profile had been carved thereon by a Greek artist. The augurs shake their heads gravely, but my regret is for that pure masterpiece. I have come to speak of myself, at times, in the past tense: in the Senate, while discussing certain events which had taken place after the death of Lucius, I have caught myself more than once mentioning those circumstances, by a slip of the tongue, as if they had occurred after my own death. A few months ago, on my birthday, as I was mounting the steps of the Capitol by litter, I found myself face to face with a man in mourning; furthermore, he was weeping, and I saw my good Chabrias turn pale. At that period I still went about and was able to continue performing in person my duties as high pontiff and as Arval Brother, and to celebrate myself the ancient rites of this Roman religion which, in the end, I prefer to most of the foreign cults. I was standing one day before the altar, ready to light the flame; I was offering the gods a sacrifice for Antoninus. Suddenly the fold of my toga covering my brow slipped and fell to my shoulder, leaving me bareheaded; thus I passed from the rank of sacrificer to that of victim. Verily, it is my turn.

My patience is bearing fruit; I suffer less, and life has become almost sweet again. I have ceased to quarrel with physicians; their foolish remedies have killed me, but their presumption and hypocritical pedantry are work of our making: if we were not so afraid of pain they would tell fewer lies. Strength fails me now for the angers of old; I know from a reliable source that Platorius Nepos, for whom I have had great affection, has taken advantage of my confidence; I have not tried to confound him with the evidence, nor have I ordered a punishment. The future of the world no longer disturbs me; I do not try still to calculate, with anguish, how long or how short a time the Roman peace will endure; I leave that to the gods. Not that I have acquired more confidence in their justice, which is not our justice, or more faith in human wisdom; the contrary is true. Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man’s periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods of war; the words humanity, liberty, and justice will here and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and other pediments will arise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.

If ever the barbarians gain possession of the world they will be forced to adopt some of our methods; they will end by resembling us. Chabrias fears that the pastophor of Mithra or the bishop of Christ may implant himself one day in Rome, replacing the high pontiff. If by ill fate that day should come, my successor officiating in the vatical fields along the Tiber will already have ceased to be merely the chief of a gang, or of a band of sectarians, and will have become in his turn one of the universal figures of authority. He will inherit our palaces and our archives, and will differ from rulers like us less than one might suppose. I accept with calm these vicissitudes of Rome eternal.

The medicaments have no effect on me now; my limbs are more swollen than ever, and I sleep sitting up instead of reclining. One advantage of death will be to lie down again on a bed. It is now my turn to console Antoninus. I remind him that death has long seemed to me the most fitting solution of my own problem; as always, my wishes are finally being fulfilled, but in a slower and more indirect way than I had expected. I can be glad that illness has left me lucid to the end, and I rejoice to have escaped the trials of old age, with its hardening and stiffening, its aridity and cruel absence of desire. If my calculations are exact, my mother died at about the age which I am today; my life has already been half again as long as that of my father, who died at forty. Everything is prepared: the eagle entrusted with bearing the emperor’s soul to the gods is held in reserve for the funeral ceremony. My mausoleum, on top of which they are just now planting the cypresses, designed to form a black pyramid high in the sky, will be completed about in time to receive the ashes while yet still warm. I have requested Antoninus to see that Sabina is transported there later on; at her death I did not have divine honors conferred upon her, as was after all her due; it would not be bad to have that neglect repaired. And I would like the remains of Aelius Caesar to be placed at my side.

They have brought me to Baiae; in this July heat the journey has been an ordeal, but I breathe better near the sea. On the shore the waves make their murmur of rustling silk and whispered caress. I can still enjoy the pale rose light of the long evenings. But I hold these tablets now only to occupy my hands, which in spite of me agitate. I have sent for Antoninus; a courier dispatched at full speed has left for Rome. Sound of the hoofs of Borysthenes, gallop of the Thracian Rider… .

The little group of intimates presses round my bed. Chabrias moves me to pity: tears ill become the wrinkles of age. Celer’s handsome face is, as always, strangely calm; he applies himself steadily to nursing me without letting anything be seen of what might add to a patient’s anxiety or fatigue. But Diotimus is sobbing, his head buried in the cushions. I have assured his future; he does not like Italy; he will be able to realize his dream, which is to return to Gadara and open a school of eloquence there with a friend; he has nothing to lose by my death. And nevertheless the slight shoulder moves convulsively under the folds of his tunic; on my fingers I feel those tender tears. To the last, Hadrian will have been loved in human wise.

Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again… . Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes… .

TO THE DEIFIED AUGUST HADRIAN

SON OF TRAJAN CONQUEROR OF THE PARTHIANS GRANDSON OF NERVA

HIGH PONTIFF

HONORED FOR THE XXIIND TIME

WITH THE TRIBUNICIAN POWER

THREE TIMES CONSUL TWO TIMES HAILED IN TRIUMPH

FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY AND TO HIS DEIFIED SPOUSE

SABINA ANTONINUS THEIR SON DEDICATES THIS MEMORIAL

TO LUCIUS AELIUS CAESAR

SON OF THE DEIFIED HADRIAN

TWO TIMES CONSUL

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A reconstruction of an historical figure and of the world of his time written in the first person borders on the domain of fiction, and sometimes of poetry; it can therefore dispense with formal statement of evidence for the historical facts concerned. Its human significance, however, is greatly enriched by close adherence to those facts. Since the main object of the author here has been to approach inner reality, if possible, through careful examination of what the documents themselves afford, it seems advisable to offer the reader some discussion of the principal materials employed, though not to present a complete bibliography, which would extend beyond the scope of the present volume. Some brief indication will also be given of the comparatively few changes, all of secondary importance, which add to, or cautiously modify, what history has told us.

The reader who likes to consider sources at first hand will not necessarily know where to find the principal ancient texts relating to Hadrian, or even what they are, since most of them come down to us from writers of the late classical period who are relatively little read, and who are ordinarily familiar only to specialists. Our two chief authorities are the Greek historian Dio Cassius and the Latin chronicler known by the name of Spartianus. Dio’s Roman History, written about forty years after Hadrian’s death but surviving, unfortunately, only in abridged form, devotes a chapter to this emperor. Somewhat more than a century after Dio, and apparently writing independently of his Greek predecessor, Spartianus composed a Life of Hadrian, one of the most substantial texts of the Historia Augusta, and a Life of Aelius Caesar, a slighter work of that same collection. The latter biography presents a very plausible likeness of Hadrian’s adopted son, and is superficial only because, after all, the subject was so himself. These two writers had access to documents no longer extant, among others an autobiography published by Hadrian under the name of his freedman Phlegon, as well as a collection of the emperor’s letters assembled by this same secretary. Neither Dio nor Spartianus is great as historian or biographer, but their very lack of art, and, to a certain degree, their lack of system, leave them singularly close to actuality. On the whole, modern research has confirmed their assertions in striking manner, and it is in great part upon their piecemeal accumulation of facts that the present interpretation is based.

Mention may also be made, without attempting a comprehensive listing, of some details gleaned in other Lives of the Historia Augusta, in particular in the biographies of Antoninus and of Marcus Aurelius by Julius Capitolinus. Some phrases have been taken from Aurelius Victor’s Book of the Caesars and from the unknown author of the Epitome, professedly the work of Aurelius Victor, too. Both these writers, though only some half century later than Spartianus, already conceive of Hadrian’s life as almost legendary, but the splendor of their rhetoric puts them in a class apart. The historians Eutropius and Ammianus Marcellinus, also of the latter half of the fourth century, add little to the information given by earlier writers on Hadrian. Likewise the notice on this emperor in the Lexicon of the tenth-century Byzantine scholar Suidas, and the few pages devoted to him by the historian Zonaras, of the twelfth century, hardly do more than repeat Dio; but two other notices in Suidas provide each a fact little known about one episode in Hadrian’s life, namely that a Consolation was addressed to him by the philosopher Numenios, and that Mesomedes, the court musician, composed music for the funeral of Antinous.

From Hadrian himself we have a certain number of works of unquestioned authenticity: from his official life there is administrative correspondence and there are fragments of discourses or reports, like the noted address to the troops at Lambaesis, conserved for the most part in inscriptions; also his legal decisions, handed down by the jurists. From his personal life we have poems mentioned by authors of his time, such as his celebrated Animula Vagula Blandula, or occurring as votive inscriptions, like the poem to Eros and the Uranian Aphrodite on the temple wall at Thespiae (G. Kaibel, Epigr. Gr. 811). Three letters supposedly written by Hadrian, and concerning his personal life, are of doubtful authenticity (Letter to Matidia, Letter to Servianus, Letter addressed by the Dying Emperor to Antoninus, to be found respectively in the collection of Dositheus, in the Vita Saturnini of Vopiscus, and in a fragment of Fayum papyrus, edited by Grenfell and Hunt, Fayum Towns and Their Papyri, 1900). All three of these letters, nevertheless, are decidedly characteristic of the man to whom they are attributed, and therefore certain indications which they afford have been used in this book.

References or allusions to Hadrian or to his entourage are to be found scattered through most of the writers of the second and third centuries, and serve to complete suggestions in the chronicles, or fill in lacunae there. Thus, to cite only a few examples, the episode of the hunt in Libya is taken from a fragment of a poem of Pancrates, The Hunt of Hadrian and Antinous, found in Egypt and published in 1911 in the collection, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, VIII, No. 1085; Athenaeus, Aulus Gellius, and Philostratus have furnished numerous details on the sophists and poets of the imperial court; both the Younger Pliny and Martial add a few touches to the somewhat sketchy information left to us by Apuleius and by Trajan’s historians for two of Hadrian’s friends, Voconius and Licinius Sura. The description of Hadrian’s grief at the death of Antinous is drawn from the historians of the reign, but also from certain passages in the Church Fathers, who though indeed disapproving are sometimes more understanding on this subject, and above all more varied in their approach to it, than the usual blanket references to their opinions would reveal. We have allusions to that grief also in the writings of the emperor’s friend Arrian, from whom actual passages have been incorporated in these Memoirs (Letter from Arrian to the Emperor Hadrian on the Occasion of the Circumnavigation of the Black Sea, a text questioned by some scholars, but accepted by others as genuine except for minor interpolations). For the war in Palestine, certain details known to be authentic have been extracted from the Talmud, where they lie imbedded in an immense amount of legendary material; they serve to supplement the principal account of that war as given in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History. Details of the exile of Favorinus come from a fragment of that writer in a manuscript of the Vatican Library published in 1931 (M. Norsa and G. Vitelli, // Papiro Vaticano Greco II, in Studi e Testi, LIII); the horrible episode of the secretary blinded in one eye occurs in a treatise of Galen, who was physician to Marcus Aurelius; the picture of the dying Hadrian is built upon the somber portrait which Fronto, an intimate of Marcus Aurelius, gives of the emperor in his last years.

Statues, reliefs, inscriptions, and coins have provided factual details not recorded by ancient writers. Certain glimpses into the savagery of the Dacian and Sarmatian wars, such as prisoners burned alive and counselors of King Decebalus poisoning themselves on the day of their capitulation, are afforded by the scenes on Trajan’s Column (W. Froehner, La Colonne Trajane, 1865; I. A. Richmond, Trajan’s Army on Trajan’s Column, Papers of the British School at Rome, XIII, 1935). Certain inscriptions serve as points of departure for episodes constructed in this work: thus the three poems of Julia Balbilla carved on the legs of the Colossus of Memnon, and Hadrian’s own name carved on that statue as well, help to build the visit to Thebes (J. A. Letronne, Recueil des Inscriptions grecques et latines de I’Egypte, II, 1848, and R. Cagnat, Inscr. Graec. ad res Rom. pert., I, 1186-7). The day of the year on which Antinous was born is given as it occurs on an inscription left by a fraternity of workmen and slaves in Lanuvium, who chose that new deity for their patron and protector in the year 133 (Corp. Inscr. Lot. XIV, 2112). This precision as to the day has been questioned by Mommsen but has been accepted since his time by less hypercritical scholars. The several phrases presented in these Memoirs as if inscribed on the tomb of the favorite are taken from the long text in hieroglyphs on the obelisk of the Pincio in Rome, telling of Antinous’ funeral and detailing the ritual of his cult. (A. Erman, Obelisken Romischer Zeit, in Mitt. d. deutsch. arch. Inst., Rom. Abt., XI, 1896; O. Marucchi, Gli Obelischi Egiziani di Roma, 1898). The coins of the reign suggest many details for the voyages described; the legends on some of these coins have furnished titles for the parts of this book (with two exceptions, one drawn from Aurelius Victor), and have often provided the keynotes for Hadrian’s meditations themselves.

To discuss briefly the study of Hadrian and his period by modern and contemporary writers it may first be noted that already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all historians of Rome from Tillemont to Gibbon have touched upon this emperor, but their works, substantial as they are (the critical spirit which animates the article on Hadrian in Bayle’s Dictionnaire, for example, remains unrivaled in its kind), belong henceforth to History’s history. Nearer our time even the brilliant sketch by Renan in the first chapter of L’Eglise Chrétienne shows equally the marks of age. Nor is there a complete modern biography, properly speaking, to which the reader can be referred without reservation. The earliest work of the kind, that of Gregorovius, published in 1851 (revised edition 1884), is not without life and color, but is weak in everything that concerns Hadrian as administrator and prince, and is in great part outdated by researches of the past half century. The more methodical study of O. Th. Schulz, Leben des Kaisers Hadrian, Leipzig, 1904, is less rich in humanistic erudition than Gregorovius and is also outdated in part. The more recent biography by B. W. Henderson, The Life and Principate of the Emperor Hadrian, A.D. 76-138, published in 1923, though lengthy, gives only a superficial idea of Hadrian’s thought and of the intellectual currents of his time, making too little use of available sources.

But important specialized studies abound; in many respects modern scholarship has thrown new light upon the history of Hadrian’s reign and administration. To cite only a few such studies, recent or at least relatively recent, and easily accessible, there are in English the chapter devoted to Hadrian’s social and financial reforms in the masterly work of M. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 1926; the valuable studies, respectively, of R. H. Lacey, The Equestrian Officials of Trajan and Hadrian: Their Careers, with some Notes on Hadrian’s Reforms, Princeton, 1917; of Paul Alexander, Letters and Speeches of the Emperor Hadrian, Harv. Stud, in Class. Phil., XLIX, 1938; of W. D. Gray, A Study of the Life of Hadrian Prior to his Accession, Smith Coll. Stud, in Hist., 1919; of F. Pringsheim, The Legal Policy and Reforms of Hadrian, Journ. of Rom. Stud., XXIV, 1934; of R. G. Collingwood and J. N. L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, 2nd ed., 1937, which includes an excellent chapter on Hadrian’s visit to the British Isles. Jocelyn Toynbee offers a valuable interpretation of Hadrian’s liberal and pacific policies in her Roman Empire and Modern Europe, Dublin Review, Jan., 1945. Among French scholarly studies may be mentioned the chapters devoted to Hadrian in Le Haut-Empire Romain of Leon Homo, 1933, and in L’Empire Romain of E. Albertini, 1936; the analysis of Trajan’s Parthian campaigns and Hadrian’s peace policy in Histoire de I’Asie by Rene Grousset, Vol. 1, 1921 (followed closely for the description of the Parthian campaigns in these Memoirs); the study of the literary productions of Hadrian in Les Empereurs et les Lettres latines by Henri Bardon, 1944; the respective works of Paul Graindor, Athenes sous Hadrien, 1934, Cairo, of Louis Ferret, La Titulature imperiale d’Hadrien, 1929, and of Bernard d-Or’ geval, L’Empereur Hadrien, son oeuvre legislative et administrative, 1950. But the most comprehensive studies of the sources for Hadrian and his chronology are still those of the German School, J. Dürr, Die Reisen des Kaisers Hadrian, Vienna, 1881; J. Plew, Quellenuntersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisers Hadrian, Strassburg, 1890; E. Kornemann, Kaiser Hadrian und der letzte grosse Historiker von Rom, Leipzig, 1905; and especially the admirable short work of Wilhelm Weber, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisers Hadrianus, Leipzig, 1907. By the same Weber is the striking essay Hadrian, published in English in the Cambridge Ancient History, XI (The Imperial Peace), 1936, pp. 294-324. For the study of Hadrian’s coins (apart from those of Antinous, to be discussed below) in relation to the events of the reign, consult H. Mattingly and E. A. Sydenham, The Roman Imperial Coinage, II, 1926; P. L. Strack, Untersuchungen zur römischen Reichspragung des zweiten Jahrhunderts, II, Stuttgart, 1933.

Much material about Hadrian is to be found in studies made on his associates, and on problems which led to, or followed, the war in Palestine. For Trajan’s reign, and in particular for his wars, see (apart from the text of Grousset mentioned above) R. Paribeni, Optimus Princeps, Messina (1927); M. Durry, Le regne de Trajan d’apres les monnaies, Revue Hist., LVII, 1932; R. P. Longden, Nerva and Trajan, and The Wars of Trajan, chapters in Cambridge Ancient History, XI, 1936; and Wilhelm Weber, Traian und Hadrian, in Meister der Politik I2, Stuttgart, 1923. On Aelius Caesar, A. S. L. Farquharson, On the Names of Aelius Caesar, Class. Quar. II, 1908, and J. Carcopino, L’Heredite dynastique chez les Antonins, 1950 (whose hypotheses have been set aside as unconvincing in favor of a more literal interpretation of the texts). On the affair of the four “consulars,” see especially A. von Premerstein, Das Attentat der Konsulare auf Hadrian in Jahre 118, in Klio, 1908; J. Carcopino, Lusius Quietus, l’homme de Qwrnyn, in Istros, 1934. On the Greek entourage of Hadrian, see more particularly A. von Premerstein, C. Julius Quadratus Bassus, in Sitz. Bayr. Akad. d. Wiss., 1934; P. Graindor, Un Milliar-daire antique: Hérode Atticus et sa famille, Cairo, 1930; A. Boulanger, Aelius Aristide et la sophistique dans la province d’Asie au IIe siecle de notre ere, in Bib. des EC. Fr. d’Athenes et de Rome, 1923; K. Horna, Die Hymnen des Mesomedes, Leipzig, 1928; G. Martellotti, Mesomede, in Scuola di Filol. Class., Rome, 1929; H. C. Puech, Numenius d’Apamee, in Melanges Bidez, Brussels, 1934. On the Jewish war, for studies in English see especially A. L. Sachar, A History of the Jews, 1950; S. Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine, 1942; and the articles of W. D. Gray, The Founding of Aelia Capitolina and the Chronology of the Jewish War under Hadrian, and New Light from Egypt on the Early Reign of Hadrian, Amer. Journ. of Semit. Lang, and Lit., 1923; R. Harris, Hadrian’s Decree of Expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem, Harv. Theol. Rev. XIX, 1926; W. Stinespring, Hadrian in Palestine, Amer. Orient. Soc. LIX, 1939. See also, apart from the German works already cited, A. von Premerstein, Alexandrinische und jiidische Gesandte vor Kaiser Hadrian, in Hermes, LVII, 1922. In French, Renan’s account of Hadrian’s war in Palestine, in L’Eglise Chretienne, 1879, is essential still. The archaeologists of Israel, too, are now steadily bringing new contributions to our still limited knowledge of the history and topography of this war.

What we know of Antinous, and of the posthumous cult which was built up around him, is derived from a limited number of ancient texts, both historical and literary and most of them brief, and some of which have been cited already in this Note; from a few inscriptions, like that of the very important text on the obelisk of the Pincio mentioned above; and from the innumerable statues, bas-reliefs, and coins of the Bithynian favorite which have come down to us. That is to say, history, iconography, and esthetic evaluation are here inseparable. Up to the time of the Renaissance, the very reprobation with which Christian tradition had surrounded the deified youth helped to keep his memory alive; from the sixteenth century on, the statues discovered in Roman vineyards, as well as the counterfeits of forgers, have served to enrich the princely and papal collections with his image. In 1764 Winckelmann, in his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, presented with a kind of fervor the first comprehensive study of Antinous portraiture, based on the statues to be seen in the Rome of his time. Such example was soon to be followed in the course of the nineteenth century by numerous essays in the fields of historical scholarship or esthetics; unequal in value, these studies are chiefly significant for what they reveal of the tastes or the moral conventions of their period. Among them should be noted especially the Antinous of L. Dietrichson (Christiania, 1884), a work which though based on somewhat confused idealism, and decidedly outdated from the point of view of iconographic research, nevertheless lists with almost passionate care all the ancient texts and inscriptions known about Antinous at that time. The study of F. Laban, Der Gemütsausdruck des Antinous, Berlin, 1891, enumerates different reactions in those German studies of esthetics from Winckelmann to the end of the nineteenth century which discuss Antinous portraiture, but it hardly touches upon the actual iconography and history of Hadrian’s favorite. The essay on Antinous by J. Addington Symonds in his Sketches in Italy and Greece, 1900, is singularly penetrating, although the tone is now outmoded and the information on some points is outdated by recent research; unlike Laban, he tries with the help of literary and artistic documentation to approach the young Bithynian as a living reality. Symonds is one of the first critics to note the conscious revival by Hadrian of Greek erotic tradition (Note 4, p. 21, A Problem in Greek Ethics, privately printed, 1883, reimpressions, 1901, 1908). The important study published in 1923 by Pirro Marconi, Antinoo. Saggio sull’Arte dell’ Eta Adrianea, (Mon. Ant. R. Accad. Lincei, XXIX), provides a very nearly complete catalogue of statues and bas-reliefs of the favorite known at that date, with good photographic illustration; although poor in discussion of esthetic values, this work marks a great advance in the iconography of the subject (still incomplete today). Marconi’s careful scrutiny and comparison of the individual statues adds a few points to our knowledge of the history of Antinous himself and spells an end to the hazy dreaming in which even the best romantic critics had indulged with regard to that youth. The brief study of E. Holm, Das Bildnis des Antinous, Leipzig, 1933, is typical of the narrowly specialized dissertation in which iconography is wholly dissociated from psychology and from history. The second volume of Robert West’s Romische Porträt-Plastik, Munich, 1941, contains notices (sometimes too absolute on points still open to question) on the life and portraits of Antinous, accompanied by good photographic reproduction of some of the best known statues and relief figures of Hadrian’s favorite. The long essay of G. Blum, Numismatique d’Antinoos, Journ. Int. d’Arch. Numismatique, XVI, Athens, 1914, is still indispensable for the study of the coins of Antinous, for which it offers the only attempt, to date, in complete cataloguing and analysis. For the coins of Antinous struck in Asia Minor, consult W. H. Wad-dington, E. Babelon and Th. Reinach, Recueil general des Monnaies Grecques d’Asie-Mineure, I-IV, 1904-12, and I, 2nd ed., 1925; for his Alexandrine coins, J. Vogt, Die Alexandrin-ischen Munzen, I-II, Stuttgart, 1924; and for some of his coins in Greece, C. Seltman, Greek Sculpture and Some Festival Coins, in Hesperia, the Journ. Amer. School of Class. Stud, at Athens, XVII, 1948.

Without mentioning the discussions of portraiture of Antinous in general appraisals of Hadrianic art, which will be referred to below, we should indicate here the great number of books, articles, and archaeological notices containing descriptions of portraits of the young Bithynian newly discovered or identified, or new appreciations of those portrayals; for example, R. Lanciani and C. L. Visconti, Delle Scoperte … in Bulletino Communale di Roma, XIV, 1886, pp. 189-90, 208-14; G. Rizzo, Antinoo-Silvano, in Ausonia, III, 1908; P. Gauckler, Le Sanctuaire syrien du Janicule, 1912; R. Bar-toccini, Le Terme di Lepcis (Leptis Magna), in Africa Italiana, 1929; S. Reinach, Les tetes des medallions de I’Arc de Constantin, in Rev. Arch., Serie 4, XV, 1910; H. Bulle, Ein Jagd-denkmal des Kaisers Hadrian, in Jahr. d. arch. Inst., XXXIV, 1919; E. Buschor, Die Hadrianischen Jagdbilder, in Mitt. d. deutsch. arch. Inst., Rom. Abt. XXXVIII-IX, 1923-24; H. Kahler, Hadrian und seine Villa bei Tivoli, Berlin, 1950, note 151, pp. 177-9; C. Seltman, Approach to Greek Art, 1948. Such new research on points of iconography or numismatics has made it possible to ascertain certain aspects of the cult of Antinous and even certain dates in that short life.

As to the religious atmosphere which seems to have surrounded Antinous’ death, see especially W. Weber, Drei U-tersuchungen zur aegyptisch-griechischen Religion, Heidelberg, 1911; likewise P. Graindor, Athenes sous Hadrien (cited above among specialized studies on Hadrian), p. 13. The problem of the exact location of the tomb of Antinous is still unsolved, despite the arguments of C. Hiilsen, Das Grab des Antinous, in Mitt. d. deutsch. arch. Inst., Rom. Abt., XI, 1896, and in Bert. Philol. Wochenschr., March 15, 1919, and the opposite view of Kahler on this point (note 158, p. 179, of his work already cited). And finally should be noted the valuable chapter of Father A. J. Festugiere, La Valeur religieuse des papyrus magiques in his book L’Ideal religieux des Grecs et I’Evangile, 1932, especially for its analysis of the sacrifice of the Esies (death by immersion with consequent attainment of divine status for the victim); though without reference to the story of Hadrian’s favorite, this study nevertheless throws light upon practices known to us hitherto only through an outworn literary tradition, and thus allows this legend of voluntary sacrifice to be taken out of the storehouse of operatic episode and fitted again into the very exact framework of a specific occult tradition.

Most books on the general subjects of Greco-Roman and late Greek art give much space to the art which is termed Hadrianic. Mention is made here only of a few of the more substantial accessible works, all of which could have been also included among the good modern appreciations of Antinous portraiture above: H. B. Walters, The Art of the Romans, 1911, 2nd ed., 1928; Eugenie Strong, Chapter XV on The Golden Age of Hadrian in Art in Ancient Rome, II, 1929; G. Rodenwaldt, Die Kunst der Antike (Hellas und Rom), in Propylaen-Kunstgeschichte, III, 2, Berlin, 1930, and Art from Nero to the Antonines, in Cambridge Ancient History, XI, 1936. The work of Jocelyn Toynbee, The Hadrianic School: A Chapter in the History of Greek Art, 1934, is essential for Hadrianic motifs in coins and reliefs, and for their cultural and political implications. For Hadrianic portraiture in general, in addition to the book of West mentioned above, may be noted, among others, the work of P. Graindor, Busies et Statues-Portraits de I’Egypte Romaine (no date), and of F. Poulsen, Greek and Roman Portraits in English Country Houses, 1923. This much abridged list may be terminated with reference to only a few studies on Hadrian’s architectural constructions: that of P. Graindor, Athenes sous Hadrian (mentioned above) for his buildings in Greece; for his military architecture that of J. C. Bruce, Handbook to the Roman Wall, ed. by Ian A. Richmond, 10th ed., 1947, and of R. G. Collingwood, Roman Britain, cited above among specialized studies on Hadrian. For the Villa Adriana, the works of Gaston Boissier, Promenades archeologiques, Rome et Pompei, 1886, and Pierre Gusman, La Villa imperiale de Tibur, 1904, are still essential; more recent works are those of R. Paribeni, La Villa dell’ Imperatore Adriano a Tivoli, Milan (1927), and H. Kahler, Hadrian und seine Villa bei Tivoli, cited above on the subject of Antinous.

As to Antinoöpolis, we know something of its appearance from travelers’ accounts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (a sentence from a Sieur Paul Lucas, who described the ruins in 1714, in the second edition of his Voyage au Levant, has been incorporated in the present work), but our detailed information comes from the admirable drawings of Edmé Jomard, made for the monumental Description de I’Egypte (Vol. IV, Paris, 1817), begun at Napoleon’s order during the Egyptian campaign. They offer a very moving record of the ruined city, completely destroyed since that time. For, about the year I860, the ancient materials of the triumphal arch, the colonnades, and the theater were converted into cement or used otherwise to build factories in a neighboring Arab town. The French archaeologist Albert Gayet was the first to excavate on the site of Antinoöpolis, at the end of the last century; among his many findings were mummies of officiating attendants in the Antinous cult, together with their funeral equipment, but hardly a vestige was recovered of anything dating from the actual time of the city’s founding by Hadrian. Gayet’s Exploration des Ruines d’Antinoe, in Annales of the Guimet Museum, XXVI, 3, 1897, and other notes published in those Annales on that subject, through rather unmethodical, remain essential for study of the site. The papyri of Antinoöpolis and those of Oxyrhynchus, in the same district, in successive publication since 1898, have afforded no new details about the architecture of the Hadrianic city or the cult of the favorite there, but they provide a very complete list of its religious and administrative divisions, which evidently come down from Hadrian himself and bear witness to the strong influence of Eleusinian ritual on his thought. Weber, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisers Hadrianus, and Graindor, Athenes sous Hadrien, both cited before, give some discussion of this list, as do two other studies: E. Kühn, Antinoöpolis, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Hellenismus in römischen Aegypten, Gottingen, 1913, and B. Kiibler, Antinoupolis, Leipzig, 1914. The brief article of M. J. de Johnson, Antinoe and its Papyri, in Journ. of Egypt. Arch., I, 1914, gives an excellent summary of the topography of the ancient city. The Italian archaeologist Evaristo Breccia has also studied the site of Antinoöpolis, and has contributed an article on the subject to the Enciclopedia Italiana (1928) which includes a useful bibliography.

History has its rules, though they are not always followed even by professional historians; poetry, too, has its laws. The two are not necessarily irreconcilable. The perspectives chosen for this narrative made necessary some rearrangements of detail, together with certain simplifications or modifications intended to eliminate repetitions, lagging, or confusion which only didactic explanation would have dispelled. It was important that these adjustments, all relating only to very small points, should in no way change the spirit or the significance of the incident or the fact in question. In other cases, the lack of authentic details for some given episode of Hadrian’s life has obliged the writer to prudent filling in of such lacunae from information furnished by contemporary texts treating of analogous experiences or events; these joinings had, of course, to be kept to the indispensable minimum. And last, this work, which tries to evoke Hadrian not only as he was but also as his contemporaries saw him, and sometimes imagined him, could even make some sparing use of legendary material, provided that the material thus chosen corresponded to the conception that the men of his time (and he himself, perhaps) had of his personality. The method of making such changes and additions is best explained by specific examples, with which this Note is hereby concluded.

The character Marullinus is built upon a name, that of an ancestor of Hadrian, and upon a tradition which says that an uncle (and not the grandfather) of the future emperor foretold the boy’s fortune; the portrait of the old man and the circumstances of his death are imaginary. The character Gallus is based on an historical Gallus who played the part described here, but the detail of his final discomfiture is created only in order to emphasize one of Hadrian’s traits most often mentioned, his capacity for bitter resentment. The episode of Mithraic initiation is invented; that cult was already in vogue in the army at the time, and it is possible, but not proved, that Hadrian desired to be initiated into it while he was still a young officer. Likewise, it is only a possibility that Antinous submitted himself to the ritual blood bath in Palmyra; Turbo, Meles Agrippa, and Castoras are all historical figures, but their participation in the respective initiations is invented. Hadrian’s meeting with the Gymnosophist is not given by history; it has been built from first-and second-century texts which describe episodes of the same kind. All details concerning Attianus are authentic except for one or two allusions to his private life, of which we know nothing. The chapter on the mistresses has been constructed out of two lines of Spartianus (XI, 7-8) on this subject; the effort has been to stay within the most plausible general outlines, supplementing by invention where it was essential to do so.

Pompeius Proculus was indeed governor of Bithynia, but was not surely so in 123-24 during the emperor’s visit in those years. Strato of Sardis, an erotic poet and compiler of the twelfth book of the Greek Anthology, probably lived in Hadrian’s time; there is nothing to prove that he saw the emperor in person, but it was tempting to make these two men meet. The visit of Lucius to Alexandria in 130 is deduced (as Gregorovius has already done) from a text often contested, the Letter to Servianus, discussed above, nor does the passage of this letter which refers to Lucius require such interpretation. We do not know, therefore, if he was in Egypt at that time, but almost all the details given for him at this period are drawn from his biography by Spartianus. The story of Antinous’ sacrifice is traditional (Dio, LXIX, 11; Spartianus XIV, 7); the detail of the magic operations is suggested by recipes from Egyptian papyri on magic, but the incidents of the evening in Canopus are invented. The episode of the fall of a child from a balcony, during a banquet, placed in these Memoirs in the course of Hadrian’s stop at Philae, is drawn from a report in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and took place in reality nearly forty years after Hadrian’s journey in Egypt. The two examples of miracles reported by Spartianus as supposedly performed by the emperor in his last years have been blended into one. The association of Apollodorus with the Servianus conspiracy is only a hypothesis, but one which can perhaps be defended.

Chabrias, Celer, and Diotimus are mentioned several times by Marcus Aurelius, who, however, indicates only their names and their passionate loyalty to Hadrian’s memory. They have been introduced into this reconstruction in order to evoke something of the court of Tibur during the last years of the reign: Chabrias represents the circle of Platonist or Stoic philosophers who surrounded the emperor; the military element is represented by Celer (not to be confused with that Celer mentioned by Philostratus and Aristides as secretary for Greek correspondence); Diotimus stands for the group of imperial eromenoi (the term long established by tradition for young favorites). Three names of actual associates of the emperor have thus served as points of departure for three characters who are, for the most part, invented. The physician Iollas, on the contrary, is an actual person for whom we lack the true name; nor do we know if he came originally from Alexandria. The freedman Onesimus was in Hadrian’s service, but we do not know if his role was that of procurer for Hadrian; the name of Crescens as a secretary of Servianus is authenticated by an inscription, but history does not tell us that he betrayed his master. Opramoas was a great merchant of Hadrian’s time who aided Hadrian and his army, but there is nothing to prove that he accompanied Hadrian to the Euphrates. Arrian’s wife is known to us by an inscription, but we do not know if she was “proud and elegant” as Hadrian says here. Only a few minor characters are wholly invented, the slave Euphorion, the actors Olympus and Bathyllus, the physician Leotychides, the young British tribune, and the guide Assar. The two sorceresses, of the Island of Britain and of Canopus respectively, are created to suggest the world of fortune tellers and dealers in occult sciences with whom Hadrian liked to surround himself. The feminine name of Arete comes from an authentic poem of Hadrian (Inscr. Graec., XIV, 1089), but is given only arbitrarily here to the housekeeper of the Villa; the name of the courier Menecrates is taken from the Letter of the King Fermes to the Emperor Hadrian (H. Osmont, Bibliotheque de I’Ecole des Chartres, Vol. 74, 1913), a text of wholly legendary content which comes to us from a medieval manuscript and of which history, properly speaking, can make no use; the Letter could, however, have borrowed this particular name from other documents now lost. In the passages concerning young Marcus Aurelius the names Veronica and Theodoras are modifications, in part for the sake of euphony, of the two names Benedicta and Theodotus given in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius 1, xvii, 7).

The brief sketch of the family background of Antinous is not historical, but attempts to take into consideration the social conditions which prevailed at that time in Bithynia. On certain controversial points, such as the cause for enforced retirement of Suetonius, the origin of Antinous, whether slave or free, the active participation of Hadrian in the Palestinian war, the dates of apotheosis of Sabina and of interment of Aelius Caesar in the Castel Sant Angelo, it has been necessary to choose between hypotheses of historians, but the effort has been to make that choice only with good reason. In other cases, like that of the adoption of Hadrian by Trajan, or of the death of Antinous, the author has tried to leave that very incertitude which before it existed in history doubtless existed in life itself.

REFLECTIONS ON THE COMPOSITION OF MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN

To G.F.

The idea for this book and the first writing of it, in whole or in part, and in various forms, date from the period between 1924 and 1929, between my twentieth and twenty-fifth year. All those manuscripts were destroyed, deservedly.

In turning the pages of a volume of Flaubert’s correspondence much read and heavily underscored by me about the year 1927 I came again upon this admirable sentence: “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.” A great part of my life was going to be spent in trying to define, and then to portray, that man existing alone and yet closely bound with all being.

I resumed work on the book in 1934; after prolonged research some fifteen pages were written which seemed to me final in form. Then the project was abandoned, only to be taken up again several times between 1934 and 1937.

There was a long period in which I thought of the work in the form of a series of dialogues, where all the voices of those times would be heard. But whatever I did, the details seemed to take undue precedence; the parts threatened the balance of the whole; Hadrian’s voice was drowned out by all the others. I was not succeeding in my attempt to reconstruct that world as seen and heard by one man.

From the version of 1934 only one sentence has been retained: “I begin to discern the profile of my death.” Like a painter who has chosen a landscape, but who constantly shifts his easel now right, now left, I had at last found a point from which to view the book.

Take a life that is known and completed, recorded and fixed by History (as much as lives ever can be fixed), so that its entire course may be seen at a single glance; more important still, choose the moment when the man who lived that existence weighs and examines it, and is, for the briefest span, capable of judging it. Try to manage so that he stands before his own life in much the same position as we stand when we look at it.

Mornings spent at the Villa Adriana; innumerable evenings passed in small cafés around the Olympieion; the constant back and forth over Greek seas; roads of Asia Minor. In order to make full use of these memories of mine they had first to recede as far from me as is the Second Century.

Experiments with time: eighteen days, eighteen months, eighteen years, or eighteen centuries. The motionless survival of statues which, like the head of the Mondragone Antinous in the Louvre, are still living in a past time, a time that has died. The problem of time foreshortened in terms of human generations: some five and twenty aged men, their withered hands interlinked to form a chain, would be enough to establish an unbroken contact between Hadrian and ourselves.

In 1937, during a first stay in the United States, I did some reading for this book in the libraries at Yale; I wrote the visit to the physician, and the passage on renunciation of bodily exercise. These fragments, re-worked, are still part of the present version.

In any case, I was too young. There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty. Earlier than that one may well fail to recognize those great natural boundaries which from person to person, and from century to century, separate the infinite variety of mankind; or, on the contrary, one may attach too much importance to mere administrative barriers, to the customs houses or the sentry boxes erected between man and man. It took me years to learn how to calculate exactly the distances between the emperor and myself.

I ceased to work on the book (except for a few days, in Paris) between 1937 and 1939.

Some mention of T. E. Lawrence reminded me that his tracks in Asia Minor cross and recross those of Hadrian. But the background for Hadrian is not the desert; it is Athens and her hills. The more I thought of these two men, the more the adventure of one who rejects life (and first of all rejects himself) made me desirous of presenting, through Hadrian, the point of view of the man who accepts all experience, or at least who refuses on one score only to accept elsewhere. It goes without saying, of course, that the asceticism of the one and the hedonism of the other are at many points interchangeable.

In October of 1939 the manuscript was left behind in Europe, together with the greater part of the notes; I nevertheless took with me to the United States the several resumes of my former readings at Yale and a map of the Roman Empire at the time of Trajan’s death which I had carried about with me for years; also the profile photograph of the Antinous of the Archaeological Museum in Florence, purchased there in 1926, the young face gravely sweet.

From 1939 to 1948 the project was wholly abandoned. I thought of it at times, but with discouragement, and almost with indifference, as one thinks of the impossible. And with something like shame for ever having ventured upon such an undertaking.

The lapse into despair of a writer who does not write.

In the worst hours of apathy and dejection I would go for solace to Hartford’s fine museum, seeking out a Canaletto painting of Rome, the Pantheon standing brown and gold against the blue sky of a late afternoon in summer; and each time I would come away from it comforted, and once again at peace.

About the year 1941 I had discovered by chance, in an artists’ supply shop in New York, four Piranesi engravings which G … and I bought. One of them, a View of Hadrian’s Villa which I had not known before, is an interior of the chapel of Canopus, from which were taken in the Seventeenth Century the Antinous in Egyptian style and the accompanying basalt statues of priestesses, all to be seen today in the Vatican. The foreground shows a round structure, burst open like a skull, from which fallen trees and brush hang vaguely down, like strands of hair. The genius of Piranesi, almost mediumistic, has truly caught the element of hallucination here: he has sensed the long-continued rituals of mourning, the tragic architecture of an inner world. For several years I looked at this drawing almost daily, without a thought for my former enterprise, which I supposed that I had given up. Such are the curious detours of what is called oblivion.

In the spring of 1947, while sorting over some papers I burned the notes taken at Yale; they seemed to have become by that time completely useless.

Still, Hadrian’s name appears in an essay on Greek myth which I wrote in 1943 and which Roger Caillois published during those war years in Les Lettres Franfaises, in Buenos Aires. Then in 1945 the figure of the drowned Antinous, borne along somehow on that Lethean current, came again to the surface in an unfinished essay, Canticle of the Soul and its True Freedom, written just before the advent of a serious illness.

Keep in mind that everything recounted here is thrown out of perspective by what is left unsaid: these notes serve

[Hadrian 324a.jpg] Interior of the Pantheon, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

[Hadrian 324bc.jpg] Temple of Canope Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

[Hadrian 324d.jpg] Foundation Wall of Hadrian’s Tomb, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

only to mark the lacunae. There is nothing, for example, of what I was doing during those difficult years, nor of the thinking, the work, the worries and anxieties, or the joys; nor of the tremendous repercussion of external events and the perpetual testing of oneself upon the touchstone of fact. And I pass also in silence over the experiences of illness, and over other, more profound experiences which they bring in their train; and over the perpetual search for, or presence of, love.

Never mind. That disjunction, that break in continuity, that “night of the soul” which so many of us experienced at the time, each in his own way (and so often in far more tragic and final form than did I), was essential, perhaps, in order to force me into trying to bridge not only the distance which separated me from Hadrian, but, above all, the distance which separated me from my true self.

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit. During those years in an unfamiliar land I had kept on with the reading of authors from classical antiquity: the red or green cloth-bound volumes of Loeb-Heinemann editions had become a country of my own. Thus, since one of the best ways to reconstruct a man’s thinking is to rebuild his library, I had actually been working for years, without knowing it, to refurnish the bookshelves at Tibur in advance. Now I had only to imagine the swollen hands of a sick man holding the half-rolled manuscripts.

Do, from within, the same work of reconstruction which the nineteenth-century archaeologists have done from without.

In December of 1948 I received from Switzerland a trunk which I had stored there during the war, with its contents of family papers and letters some ten years old. I sat down by the fire to work my way through the debris, as if to take some gloomy inventory after a death. I passed several evenings alone at the task, undoing the separate packets and running through them before destroying that accumulation of correspondence with people whom I had forgotten, and who had forgotten me, some of them still alive, others dead. A few of the pages bore dates of a generation ago, and even the names had quite gone from my mind. As I unfolded and threw mechanically into the fire that exchange of dead thoughts between a Marie and a Francois or a Paul, long since disappeared, I came upon four or five typewritten sheets, the paper of which had turned yellow. The salutation told me nothing: “My dear Mark …” Mark… . What friend or love, what distant relative was this? I could not recall the name at all. It was several minutes before I remembered that Mark stood here for Marcus A urelius, and that I had in hand a fragment of the lost manuscript. From that moment there was no question but that this book must be taken up again, whatever the cost.

That same night I reopened two of the volumes which had also just been returned to me, remnants of a library in large part lost. One was Dio Cassius in Henri Estienne’s beautiful printing, and the other a volume of an ordinary edition of Historia Augusta, the two principal sources for Hadrian’s life, purchased at the time that I was intending to write this book. Everything that the world, and I, had gone through in the interval now served to enrich these chronicles of an earlier age, and threw upon that imperial existence certain other lights and other shades. Once I had thought chiefly of the man of letters, the traveller, the poet, the lover; none of that had faded, to be sure, but now for the first time I could see among all those figures, standing out with great clarity of line, the most official and yet the most hidden form of all, that of the emperor. The fact of having lived in a world which is toppling around us had taught me the importance of the Prince.

I fell to making, and then re-making, this portrait of a man who was almost wise.

Only one other figure in history has tempted me with nearly the same insistence: Omar Khayyam, the poet-astronomer. But the life of Khayyam is that of the pure contemplator, and of the somber skeptic, too; the world of action meant little to him. Furthermore, I do not know Persia, nor do I know its language.

Another thing virtually impossible, to take a feminine character as a central figure, to make Plotina, for example, rather than Hadrian, the axis of my narrative. Women’s lives are much too limited, or else too secret. If a woman does recount her own life she is promptly reproached for being no longer truly feminine. It is already hard enough to give some element of truth to the utterances of a man.

I left for Taos, in New Mexico, taking with me the blank sheets for a fresh start on the book (the swimmer who plunges into the water with no assurance that he will reach the other shore). Closed inside my compartment as if in a cubicle of some Egyptian tomb, I worked late into the night between New York and Chicago; then all the next day, in the restaurant of a Chicago station where I awaited a train blocked by storms and snow; then again until dawn, alone in the observation car of a Santa Fe limited, surrounded by black spurs of the Colorado mountains, and by the eternal pattern of the stars. Thus were written at a single impulsion the passages on food, love, sleep, and the knowledge of men. I can hardly recall a day spent with more ardor, or more lucid nights.

I pass as rapidly as possible over three years of research, of interest to specialists alone, and over the development of a method akin to controlled delirium, of interest, probably, to none but madmen. And yet this term delirium smacks too much of romanticism; let us say, rather, a constant participation, as intensely aware as possible, in that which has been.

One foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts, or, more accurately and without metaphor, absorption in that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports oneself, in thought, into another’s body and soul.

Portrait of a voice. If I have chosen to write these Memoirs of Hadrian in the first person it is in order to dispense with any intermediary, in so far as possible, even were that intermediary myself. Surely Hadrian could speak more forcibly and more subtly of his life than could I.

Those who put the historical novel in a category apart are forgetting that what every novelist does is only to interpret, by means of the techniques which his period affords, a certain number of past events; his memories, whether consciously or unconsciously recalled, whether personal or impersonal, are all woven of the same stuff as History itself. The work of Proust is a reconstruction of a lost past quite as much as is War and Peace. The historical novel of the 1830’s, it is true, tends toward melodrama, and to cloak-and-dagger romance; but not more than does Balzac’s magnificent Duchess of Langeais, or his startling Girl with the Golden Eyes, both of wholly contemporary setting. Flaubert painstakingly rebuilds a Carthaginian palace by charging his description with hundreds of minute details, thus employing essentially the same method as for his picture of Yonville, a village of his own time and of his own Normandy. In our day, when introspection tends to dominate literary forms, the historical novel, or what may for convenience’s sake be called by that name, must take the plunge into time recaptured, and must fully establish itself within some inner world.

Time itself has nothing to do with the matter. It is always surprising to me that my contemporaries, masters as they consider themselves to be over space, apparently remain unaware that one can contract the distance between centuries at will.

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father’s life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade? Here, where Hadrian’s life is concerned, try to manage so that the lacunae of our texts coincide with what he himself might have forgotten.

Which is not to suggest, as is too often done, that historical truth is never to be attained, in any of its aspects. With this kind of truth, as with all others, the problem is the same: one errs more or less.

The rules of the game: learn everything, read everything, inquire into everything, while at the same time adapting to one’s ends the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, or the method of Hindu ascetics, who for years, and to the point of exhaustion, try to visualize ever more exactly the images which they create beneath their closed eyelids. Through hundreds of card notes pursue each incident to the very moment that it occurred; endeavor to restore the mobility and suppleness of life to those visages known to us only in stone. When two texts, or two assertions, or perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex. Strive to read a text of the Second Century with the eyes, soul, and feelings of the Second Century; let it steep in that mother solution which the facts of its own time provide; set aside, if possible, all beliefs and sentiments which have accumulated in successive strata between those persons and us. And nevertheless take advantage (though prudently, and solely by way of preparatory study) of all possibilities for comparison and cross-checking, and of new perspectives slowly developed by the many centuries and events separating us from a given text, a fact, a man; make use of such aids more or less as guide-marks along the road of return toward one particular point in time. Keep one’s own shadow out of the picture; leave the mirror clean of the mist of one’s own breath; take only what is most essential and durable in us, in the emotions aroused by the senses or in the operations of the mind, as our point of contact with those men who, like us, nibbled olives and drank wine, or gummed their fingers with honey, who fought bitter winds and blinding rain, or in summer sought the plane tree’s shade; who took their pleasures, thought their own thoughts, grew old, and died.

Several times I have had physicians “diagnose” the brief passages in the chronicles which deal with Hadrian’s illness. Indications not so different, after all, from the clinical descriptions of Balzac’s last days.

Make good use, the better to understand Hadrian’s malady, of the first symptoms of a heart ailment.

“What’s Hecuba to him?” Hamlet asks when a strolling player weeps over that tragic queen. Thus the Prince of Denmark is forced to admit that this actor who sheds genuine tears has managed to establish with a woman dead for three thousand years a more profound relationship than he himself has with his own father, so recently buried, and whose wrongs he does not feel fully enough to seek swift revenge.

The human substance and structure hardly change: nothing is more stable than the curve of a heel, the position of a tendon, or the form of a toe. But there are periods when the shoe is less deforming than in others. In the century of which I speak we are still very close to the undisguised freedom of the bare foot.

In crediting Hadrian with prophetic insight I was keeping within the realm of plausibility as long as such prognostics remained vague and general. The impartial analyst of human affairs ordinarily makes few mistakes as to the ultimate course of events, but he begins to err seriously when he tries to foresee the exact way that events will work out, their turning points and details. Napoleon on Saint Helena predicted that a century after his death Europe would have turned either revolutionary or Cossack; he stated the two terms of the problem extremely well, but could not imagine one superposed upon the other. On the whole, however, it is only out of pride or gross ignorance, or cowardice, that we refuse to see in the present the lineaments of times to come. Those sages of the ancient world, unbound by dogma of any kind, thought as we do in terms of physics, or rather, of physiology, as applied to the whole universe: they envisaged the end of man and the dying out of this sphere. Both Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius knew full well that gods, and civilizations, pass and die. We are not the first to look upon an inexorable future.

My attribution of clairvoyance to the emperor was, in any case, only a means of bringing into play the almost Faustian element of his character, as it appears, for example, in the Sibylline Verses and in the writings of Aelius Aristides, or in the portrait of Hadrian grown old, as sketched by Fronto. Rightly or not, the contemporaries of this dying man ascribed to him something more than human powers.

If this man had not maintained peace in the world, and revived the economy of the empire, his personal fortunes and misfortunes would have moved me less.

One can never give enough time to the absorbing study of relationships between texts. The poem on the hunting trophy consecrated by Hadrian at Thespiae to the God of Love and to the Uranian Venus, “on the hills of Helicon, beside Narcissus” spring”, can be dated as of the autumn of the year 124; at about that same time the emperor passed through Mantinea, where, according to Pausanius, he had the tomb of Epaminondas rebuilt, and wrote a poem to be inscribed upon it. The Mantinean inscription is now lost, but Hadrian’s act of homage is to be fully understood, perhaps, only if we view it in relation to a passage of Plutarch’s Morals which tells us that Epaminondas was buried in that place between two young friends struck down at his side. If for date of the meeting of the emperor and Antinous we accept the stay in Asia Minor of 123-124, which is in any case the most plausible date and the best supported by iconographical evidence, these two poems then would form a part of what might be called the Antinous cycle; both are inspired by that same Greece of heroic lovers which Arrian evoked later on, after the death of the favorite, when he compared the youth to Patroclus.

A certain number of persons whose portraits one would wish to develop: Plotina, Sabina, Arrian, Suetonius. But Hadrian could see them only in part, from the point of view at which he was standing. Antinous himself has to be presented by refraction, through the emperor’s memories, that is to say, in passionately meticulous detail, not devoid of a few errors.

All that can be said of the temperament of Antinous is inscribed in any one of his likenesses. “Eager and impassionated tenderness, sullen effeminacy”: Shelley, with a poet’s admirable candor, says the essential in six words, while most of the nineteenth-century art critics and historians could only expatiate upon the subject with righteous declamation, or else idealize about it, vaguely and hypocritically.

We are rich in portraits of Antinous; they range in quality from the mediocre to the incomparable. Despite variations due to the skill of the respective sculptors or to the age of the model, or to differences between portraits made from life and those executed to commemorate the youth after death, all are striking and deeply moving because of the incredible realism of the face, always immediately recognizable and nevertheless so diversely interpreted, and because they are examples, unique in classical antiquity, of survival and repetition in stone of a countenance which was neither that of a statesman nor of a philosopher, but simply of one who was loved. Among these portraits the two most beautiful are the least known: they are also the only ones which transmit to us the name of the sculptor. One is the bas-relief signed by Antonianos of Aphrodisias and found some fifty years ago on the property of an agronomic institute, the Fundi Rustici, in the Committee Room of which it is now placed. Since no guidebook of Rome indicates its existence in that city already so crowded with statues, tourists do not know about it. This work of Antonianos has been carved in Italian marble, so it was certainly executed in Italy, and doubtless in Rome, either because that artist was already established in the capital, or because he had been brought back by Hadrian on one of the emperor’s travels. It has exquisite delicacy. The young head, pensively inclined, is framed by the tendrils of a vine twined in supple arabesque; the brevity of life comes inevitably to mind, the sacrificial grape and the fruit-scented air of an evening in autumn. Unhappily, the marble has suffered from storage in a cellar during the recent war-years: its whiteness is temporarily obscured and earth-stained, and three fingers of the figure’s left hand have been broken. Thus do gods pay for the follies of men.

*[The preceding paragraph appeared for the first time six years ago; meanwhile this bas-relief was acquired by a Roman banker, Arturo Oslo, a whimsical man who probably would have stirred the imagination of Stendhal or of Balzac. Signor Osio has lavished upon this fair object the same solicitous attention that he gives to the animals on his property at the edge of Rome, where they run free in their natural state, and to the trees which he has planted by the thousand on his shore estate at Orbetello. A rare virtue, this last, for Stendhal was writing as early as 1828, “The Italians loathe trees;” and what would he say today when real estate speculators, trying to pack more and more colossal apartment houses into Rome, are circumventing the city’s laws to protect its handsome umbrella pines? Their method is simply to kill the trees by injections of hot water. A rare luxury, too, though one which many a man of wealth could enjoy, is this landowner’s animation of woods and fields with creatures at full liberty, and that not for the pleasure of hunting them down, but for reconstituting a veritable Eden. The love for statues of classical antiquity, those great peaceful objects which seem so solid and yet are so easily destroyed, is an uncommon taste among private collectors in these agitated times, cut off from both past and future. The new possessor of the bas-relief of Antonianos, acting on the advice of experts, has just had it cleaned by a specialist whose light, slow rubbing by hand has removed the rust and moisture stains from the marble and restored its soft gleam, like that of alabaster or of ivory.]

* Addition of 1958.

The second of these masterpieces is the famous sardonyx known as the Marlborough Gem, because it once belonged to that family collection, now dispersed. For more than thirty years this fine intaglio seemed to have been lost, or hidden away, but in January of 1952 it came to light in a public sale in London; the informed taste of the great collector Giorgio Sangiorgi has brought it back to Rome. I am indebted to him for the chance to see and to handle this unique gem. A signature, though no longer complete, can be read around the edge; it is thought, and doubtless correctly, to be that of the sculptor of the bas-relief, Antonianos of Aphrodisias. So skilfully has the master-carver enclosed that perfect profile within the narrow compass of a sardonyx that this bit of stone stands as testimony to a great lost art quite as much as does any statue or any relief. The proportions of the work make us forget the dimensions of the object. At some time during the Byzantine period the gem was set in a nugget of solid gold, and in this form passed from collector to collector, none of whose names we know, until it reached Venice; it is mentioned as part of a great seventeenth-century collection there. In the next century it was purchased by the celebrated dealer in antiques, Gavin Hamilton, and brought to England, whence it now returns to Rome, its starting-point. Of all objects still above ground today it is the one of which we can assume with some assurance that it has often been held in Hadrian’s hands.

One has to go into the most remote corners of a subject in order to discover the simplest things, and things of most general literary interest. It is only in studying Phlegon, secretary to Hadrian, that I learned that we owe to this forgotten personage the first, and one of the finest, of the great ghost stories, that somber, sensuous Bride of Corinth which inspired Goethe’s ballad, and likewise the Corinthian Wedding of Anatole France. It must be said, however, that Phlegon also took down, with the same avid and uncritical curiosity for everything beyond ordinary experience, some absurd stories of two-headed monsters, and of hermaphrodites got with child. Such was the stuff of the conversations, on some days, at least, at the imperial table.

Those who would have preferred a Journal of Hadrian to his Memoirs forget that a man of action rarely keeps a journal; it is almost always later on, and in a period of prolonged inactivity, that he does his recollecting, makes his notations, and, very often, has cause for wonder at the course his life has taken.

If all other documents were lacking, the Letter of Arrian to the Emperor Hadrian on the Circumnavigation of the Black Sea would suffice to recreate in broad outline that great imperial figure: the scrupulous exactitude of the chief-of-state who would know all details; his interest in the work both of war and of peace; his concern for good likenesses in statues, and that these should be finely wrought; his passion for the poetry and legend of an earlier day. And that society, rare in any period, but destined to vanish completely after the time of Marcus Aurelius, wherein the scholarly administrator can still address his prince as a friend, however subtly shaded his deference and his respect. Everything is there: the nostalgia for ancient Greece and its ideals, discreet allusion to a lost love and to mystical consolation sought by the bereaved survivor, the haunting appeal of unknown lands and barbarous climes. The evocation of desert wastes peopled only by seabirds, so profoundly romantic in spirit, calls to mind the exquisite vase found in Villa Hadriana, to be seen today in the Museum of the Terme in Rome; there on a field of marble snow a flock of wild heron are spreading their wings to fly away, in utter solitude.

Note of 1949: the more I strive for an exact portrait the farther I diverge from the kind of book, and of man, who would please the public. Only a few students of human destiny will understand.

In our time the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as the medium of expression. This study of the destiny of a man called Hadrian would have been cast in the form of a tragedy in the Seventeenth Century, or of an essay, perhaps, in the period of the Renaissance.

This book is the condensation of a vast work composed for myself alone. I had taken the habit of writing each night, in almost automatic fashion, the result of those long, self-induced visions whereby I could place myself intimately within another period of time. The merest word, the slightest gesture, the least perceptible implications were noted down; scenes now summed up in a line or two, in the book as it is, passed before me in fullest detail, and as if in slow motion. Added all together, these accounts would have afforded material for a volume of several thousand pages, but each morning I would burn the work of the night before. In such fashion I wrote a great number of decidedly abstruse meditations, and several descriptions bordering on the obscene.

He who seeks passionately for truth, or at least for accuracy, is frequently the one best able to perceive, like Pilate, that truth is not absolute or pure. Hence, mingled with his most direct assertions we find hesitations, deviousness, and reservations which a more conventional mind would not evince. At certain moments, though very seldom, it has even occurred to me that the emperor was lying. In such cases I had to let him lie, like the rest of us.

The utter fatuity of those who say to you, “By ‘Hadrian’ you mean yourself!” Almost as unsubtle as those who wonder why one should choose a subject so remote in time and in space. The sorcerer who pricks his thumb before he evokes the shades knows well that they will heed his call only because they can lap his blood. He knows, too, or ought to know, that the voices who speak to him are wiser and more worthy of attention than are his own clamorous outcries.

It did not take me long to realize that I had embarked upon the life of a very great man. From that time on, still more respect for truth, closer attention, and, on my part, ever more silence.

In a sense, every life that is recounted is offered as an example; we write in order to attack or to defend a view of the universe, and to set forth a system of conduct which is our own. It is none the less true, however, that nearly every biographer disqualifies himself by over-idealizing his subject or by deliberate disparagement, by exaggerated stress on certain details or by cautious omission of others. Thus a character is arbitrarily constructed, taking the place of the man to be understood and explained. A human life cannot be graphed, whatever people may say, by two virtual perpendiculars, representing what a man believed himself to be and what he wished to be, plus a flat horizontal for what he actually was; rather, the diagram has to be composed of three curving lines, extended to infinity, ever meeting and ever diverging.

Whatever one does, one always rebuilds the monument in his own way. But it is already something gained to have used only the original stones.

Every being who has gone through the adventure of living is myself.

This Second Century appeals to me because it was the last century, for a very long period of time, in which men could think and express themselves with full freedom. As for us, we are perhaps already very far from such times as that.

On the 26th of December, 1950, on an evening of freezing cold and in the almost polar silence of Mount Desert Island, off the Atlantic shore, I was striving to live again through the smothering heat of a day in July, in the year 138 in Baiae, to feel the weight of a sheet on weary, heavy limbs, and to catch the barely perceptible sound of that tideless sea as from time to time it reached a man whose whole attention was concentrated upon other murmurs, those of his approaching death. I tried to go as far as the last sip of water, the last spasm of pain, the last image in his mind. Now the emperor had but to die.

This book bears no dedication. It ought to have been dedicated to G.F… , and would have been, were there not a kind of impropriety in putting a personal inscription at the opening of a work where, precisely, I was trying to efface the personal. But even the longest dedication is too short and too commonplace to honor a friendship so uncommon. When I try to define this asset which has been mine now for years, I tell myself that such a privilege, however rare it may be, is surely not unique; that in the whole adventure of bringing a book successfully to its conclusion, or even in the entire life of some fortunate writers, there must have been sometimes, in the background, perhaps, someone who will not let pass the weak or inaccurate sentence which we ourselves would retain, out of fatigue; someone who would re-read with us for the twentieth time, if need be, a questionable page; someone who takes down for us from the library shelves the heavy tomes in which we may find a helpful suggestion, and who persists in continuing to peruse them long after weariness has made us give up; someone who bolsters our courage and approves, or sometimes disputes, our ideas; who shares with us, and with equal fervor, the joys of art and of living, the endless work which both require, never easy but never dull; someone who is neither our shadow nor our reflection, nor even our complement, but simply himself; someone who leaves us ideally free, but who nevertheless obliges us to be fully what we are. Hospes Comesque.

In December, 1951, learned of the fairly recent death of the German historian Wilhelm Weber, and in April, 1952, of the death of the scholar Paul Graindor, both of whose works I have so much used. A few days ago talked with G.B… and J.F… , who had known the engraver Pierre Gusman in Rome at the time that he was drawing, with passion, all the different parts of the Villa. The feeling of belonging to a kind of Gens Aelia, of being, as it were, one of the throng of secretaries who had served the great man, of participating in the change of that imperial guard which poets and humanists mount in relay around any great memory. Thus (and it is doubtless the same for specialists in the study of Napoleon, or for lovers of Dante),

over the ages is formed a circle of kindred spirits, moved by the same interests and sympathies, or concerned with the same problems.

The pedants of comedy, Vadius and Blazius still exist, and their fat cousin Basil is ever about. Once and once only have I happened to be confronted with that mixture of insults and coarse jokes; with extracts truncated or skillfully deformed, so as to make our sentences say some absurdity which they do not say; with captious arguments built up by assertions both vague and peremptory enough to win ready credence from the reader respectful of academic trappings and lacking the time, or the desire, to look up the sources for himself. Characteristic, all of it, of a certain species which, fortunately, is rare. On the contrary, what genuine good will have so many scholars shown who could just as readily, in these times of excessive specialization, have disdained outright any literary effort at reconstruction of the past which might seem to them to trespass on their domain… . Too many of them have graciously, and of their own accord, taken trouble to rectify some error already in print, or to confirm a detail, support a hypothesis, expedite new research, for me not to express here a word of gratitude to such well-disposed readers. Each book which sees a new edition owes something to the discriminating people who have read it.

Do the best one can. Do it over again. Then still improve, even if ever so slightly, those retouches. “It is myself that I re-make,” said the poet Yeats in speaking of his revisions.

Yesterday, at the Villa, I thought of the thousands of lives, silent and furtive as those of wild beasts, unthinking as those of plants, who have followed in succession here between Hadrian’s time and ours: gypsies of Piranesi’s day, pillagers of the ruins, beggars, goatherds, and peasants lodged as best they could in some corner of the rubble. At the end of an olive grove, in an ancient corridor partly cleared, G … and I came upon a shepherd’s bed of rushes, with his improvised clothes-peg stuck between two blocks of Roman cement, and the ashes of his fire not yet cold. A sense of intimacy with humble, ordinary things, a little like what one feels at the Louvre when, after closing hour, the cots of the guardians appear in among the statues.