Memoirs of Hadrian     by Marguerite Yourcenar, Translated by G. Frick Original title: Memoires d’Hadrien Original language: French Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 1976 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 1.13 x 8.93 x 5.99 ISBN: 0374503486 List Price: $15.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.50 Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 1955 Pub. Place: UK Not available for ordering Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1959 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 253 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by Penguin / Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 1982 Pub. Place: UK Format: 252 pages Not available for ordering

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The imaginary memoirs of the man who built the famous wall, one of the last Roman Emperors considered to be a great man and a wise ruler. While the earlier Nine Coins in the Fountain is an exhilarating, brief panoply of mainly female characters, explored in rather a feminine way, with glancing blows of subtle insight, Hadrian is the 350 page rather stately evocation of an ascetic and self-disciplined warrior and imperial leader. That the same woman wrote both books, albeit after many years of intense study of the classical period and its texts, is quite startling.


The ease and convincingness of these pseudo-Memoirs has won them a great following, in fact Hadrian is an ideal book to curl up with for anyone with a real interest in the past, a past that Yourcenar herself points out (in the fascinating Reflections on the Composition, published at the end of Hadrian) is only the span of ‘some five and twenty aged men, their withered hands interlinked to form a chain’ from our own living breathing selves.


Although one is convinced by the wise reflections on statecraft, on philosophy, on treachery and diplomacy of the old Emperor inscribing his memories in a letter to his chosen successor, rather charmingly the preoccupations, the tastes perhaps of Yourcenar break through too; an enormous part of the book is dedicated to Hadrian’s quite short-lived relationship to the love of his life a Greek youth called Antinous. The homo- or perhaps bi-sexuality of the Hellenophile Ancient Roman aristocracy is taken as read, something that might surprise the more conservative reader; as will perhaps Hadrian’s (Yourcenar’s?) discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of monotheism and the bitter criticisms of the ‘fanatical’ Jewish and Christian subjects of the still pagan Roman Empire.


Perhaps it is especially these points, as well as the emphasis on the importance of the Greek cultural and spiritual influence on Rome that make the book so interesting. If only we could stand outside our times and look objectively at the influence of Christian thought that is so fundamental to our history, we might learn better to appreciate both its advantages and its weaknesses. The nearest we can do to achieve perspective and a set of concepts wider than the ones we are born into is to learn to connect profoundly with history, with the voices of those who came before.


Yourcenar’s Hadrian is an entertaining and profitable book in its own right but also something of a guide to acquiring the broader, less prejudiced, less immediate outlook that the study of the past can also bequeath us, along with its tales of terror and torture.

‘There is but one thing in which I feel superior to most men: I am freer, and at the same time more compliant, than they dare to be. Nearly all of them fail to recognise their due liberty, and likewise their true servitude. They curse their fetters, but seem sometimes to find them matter for pride. Yet they pass their days in vain license, and do not know how to fashion for themselves the lightest yoke. For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free man (all who try that have proved tiresome), but a technique: I hoped to discover the hinge where our will meets and moves with destiny, and where discipline strengthens, instead of restraining, our nature.’ p43