Memoirs of Hadrian

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 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 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