Memoirs of Hadrian

*[Nothing need be changed in 1958 in the preceding paragraph; the clothes-peg of the shepherd is still there, though not his bed. G … and I have again sat resting on the grass of the Vale of Tempe, among the violets, at that sacred moment of the year when everything begins anew, in spite of the threats which man today is everywhere raising overhead. But nevertheless the Villa has suffered pernicious change. Not all of it, to be sure: a whole which the centuries have slowly destroyed, but have also formed, is not so quickly altered. By an error seldom committed in Italy certain dubious “embellishments” have followed in the wake of excavations and necessary repairs. Olive groves have been cut down to make way for a highly conspicuous parking lot, complete with shop and counter service of the type prevalent at exposition grounds, thus transforming the Poecilium’s noble solitude into a city square; visitors may drink from a cement fountain which offers water through an absurd plaster mask, a would-be imitation of the antique; another mask, even more pointless, decorates the wall of the great pool, where a flotilla of ducks now holds forth. Still more plaster graces the Canal: casts of the garden statues found here in recent diggings have been placed on pedestals and lined up somewhat arbitrarily along its banks; the originals, fairly average Greco-Roman work, do not deserve the honor of so conspicuous a position, but neither do they merit the indignity of being copied in such hideous material, both swollen and unsubstantial. This new decor gives to the once melancholy Canopus something of the air of a studio set, ready for a film version of “life in Imperial Rome”.

There is nothing more easily destroyed than the equilibrium of the fairest places. A text remains intact regardless of our whims of interpretation, and survives our commentaries; but the slightest imprudence inflicted upon stone, the shortest macadamized road cut through a field where grass has peacefully grown for centuries, does something irreparable, and for ever. The beauty goes, and the authenticity likewise.]

* Addition of 1958.

There are places where one has chosen to live, invisible abodes which one makes for oneself quite outside the current of time. I have lived in Tibur, and shall die there, perhaps, as Hadrian did on Achilles’ Isle.

No. Once more I have gone back to the Villa, to its garden pavillions built for privacy and for repose, to the vestiges of a luxury free of pomp, and as little imperial as possible, conceived of rather for the wealthy connoisseur who tries to combine the pleasures of art with the charms of rural life. In the Pantheon I have watched for the exact spot where sunlight would fall on a morning of April 21, and along the Mausoleum’s halls have retraced that funeral path so often walked by the friends of the emperor’s last days, Chabrias, Diotimus, and Celer. But I have ceased to feel the immediate presence of those beings, the living reality of those events; they are near me still, but of the past, neither more nor less now than the memories of my own life. Our commerce with others does not long endure; it ceases once satisfaction is obtained, the lesson learned, the service rendered, the book complete. What I could say has been said; what I could learn has been learned. Let us turn, for the time that is left to us, to other work.

N 258 —

ISBN 0-374-5-0348.6

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR

Memoirs of Hadrian

Followed by Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian

Translated from the French by GRACE FRICK in collaboration with the Author

This novel, unique in its approach to a figure from Roman history, has had international acclaim from the time that it first appeared, in France. It has already been translated into fourteen languages of Europe and Asia. Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, the work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. The author describes the book as a meditation upon history, but this meditation is built upon intensive study of the personal and political life of a great and complex character as seen by himself and by his contemporaries, both friends and enemies. In a prose as firm as that of the great Latin stylists of his time, Hadrian’s arduous early years, his triumphs and reversals, his gradual re-ordering of a war-torn world are reconstructed with an imaginative insight which only years in the company of the Emperor could give.

Marguerite Yourcenar writes only in French. She is the author of some fifteen books varying in range from art and literary criticism to novels historical and modern, and to drama, poetry, and translation (from English and from ancient and modern Greek). As widely travelled as the Emperor of whom she writes, she was born in Brussels of French parents and has lived in several countries of Europe, but is now an American citizen, making her home since 1950 on Mount Desert Island, Maine.

In January 1981, Mme Yourcenar became the first woman to be elected to the prestigious French Academy, a measure of the extraordinary place she holds in the history of French letters.

Illustrated with over 40 photographs especially chosen by the author FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX, 19 Union Square West, New York 10003