Of all the joys which are slowly abandoning me, sleep is one of the most prec ious, though one of the most common, too. A man who sleeps but little and poorly , propped on many a cushion, has ample time to meditate upon this particular del ight. I grant that the most perfect repose is almost necessarily a complement to love, that profound rest which is reflected in two bodies. But what interests m e here is the specific mystery of sleep partaken of for itself alone, the inevit able plunge risked each night by the naked man, solitary and unarmed, into an oc ean where everything changes, the colors, the densities, and even the rhythm of breathing, and where we meet the dead.
What reassures us about sleep is that we do come out of it, and come out of it unchanged, since some mysterious ban keeps us from bringing back with us in their true form even the remnants of our dream s. What also reassures us is that sleep heals us of fatigue, but heals us by the most radical of means in arranging that we cease temporarily to exist.
There, a s elsewhere, the pleasure and the art consist in conscious surrender to that bli ssful unconsciousness, and in accepting to be slightly less strong, less light, less heavy and less definite than our waking selves. I shall return later to the strange world of our dreams, for I prefer to speak here of certain experiences of pure sleep and pure awakening which border on death and resurrection.
I am tr ying to recapture the exact sensation of such overpowering sleep as that of boyh ood where, still fully clad, one toppled over one's books, transported as if by lightning out of mathematics and the law into the midst of a deep and substantia l sleep so filled with unused energy that one tasted, as it were, the very essen ce of being through the closed eyelids.
I evoke the short, sudden snatches of sl umber on the bare ground, in the forest after tiring days of hunts; the barking of the dogs would awaken me, or their paws planted on my chest. So total was the eclipse that each time I could have found myself to be someone else, and I was perplexed and often saddened by the strict law which brought me back from so far away to re-enter this narrow confine of humanity which is myself.
What are thos e particularities upon which we lay such store, since they count so little for u s when we are liberated in sleep, and since for one second before returning, reg retfully, into the body of Hadrian I was about to savor almost consciously that new existence without content and without past? On the other hand, sickness and age have also their prodigies and receive fro m sleep other forms of benediction.
About a year ago, after a singularly exhaust ing day in Rome, I experienced one of those respites wherein the depletion of on e's forces serves to work the same miracle as did the unexploited reserves of fo rmer days. I go but rarely to the City now; once there I try to accomplish as mu ch as possible. The day had been disagreeably full: a session at the Senate had been followed by a session in court, and by an interminable discussion with one of the quaestors; then by a religious ceremony which could not be cut short, and upon which it steadily rained.
I myself had fitted all these different activiti es closely together, crowding them in so as to leave between them the least time possible for importunate requests and idle flatteries. The return on horseback was one of my last trips of the kind. I reached the Villa sickened and chilled a s we are only when the blood actually refuses, and no longer works in our veins.
Celer and Chabrias rushed to my aid, but solicitude can be wearing even when it is sincere. Retiring to my apartment I swallowed a few spoonfuls of a hot broth which I prepare myself, not out of suspicion, as is surmised, but because I thu s procure for myself the luxury of being alone.
I lay down: sleep seemed as far removed from me as health itself, and as youth or vigor. I dozed off. The sandgl ass proved to me that I had slept barely an hour, but a brief moment of complete repose, at my age, is equal to sleep which formerly lasted throughout half a re volution of the stars; my time is measured from now on in much smaller units.
Sleep, in so short a time, had repaired my excesses of vir tue with the same impartiality which it would have applied to the repair of my v ices. For the divinity of the great restorer consists in bestowing his benefits upon the sleeper without concern for him, exactly as water charged with curative powers cares not at all who may drink from its source. But if we think so little about a phenomenon which absorbs at least a third o f every life it is because a certain modesty is needed to appreciate its gifts.
Asleep, Caius Caligula and Aristides the Just are alike; my important but empty privileges are forgotten, and nothing distinguishes me from the black porter who lies guard at my door. What is our insomnia but the mad obstinacy of our mind i n manufacturing thoughts and trains of reasoning, syllogisms and definitions of its own, refusing to abdicate in favor of that divine stupidity of closed eyes, or the wise folly of dreams? The man who cannot sleep, and I have had only too m any occasions for some months to establish the point for myself, refuses more or less consciously to entrust himself to the flow of things.
Brother of Death. Isocrates was wrong, and his sentence is a mere exercise in rhetoric. I begi n to have some acquaintance with death; it has other secrets, more alien still t o our present condition as men. And nevertheless, so intricate and so profound a re these mysteries of absence and partial oblivion that we feel half assured tha t somewhere the white spring of sleep flows into the dark spring of death.
I hav e never cared to gaze, as they slept, upon those I loved; they were resting from me, I know; they were escaping me, too. And every man feels some shame of his v isage in the sully of sleep; how often, when I have risen early to read or to st udy, have I replaced the rumpled pillows myself, and the disordered covers, thos e almost obscene evidences of our encounters with nothingness, proofs that each night we have already ceased to be.
Little by little this letter, begun in order to tell you of the progress of m y illness, has become the diversion of a man who no longer has the energy requir ed for continued application to affairs of state; it has become, in fact, the wr itten meditation of a sick man who holds audience with his memories. I propose n ow to do more than this: I have formed a project for telling you about my life.
To be sure, last year I composed an official summary of my career, to which my s ecretary Phlegon gave his name. I told as few lies therein as possible; regard f or public interest and decency nevertheless forced me to modify certain facts. T he truth which I intend to set forth here is not particularly scandalous, or is so only to the degree that any truth creates a scandal. I do not expect your sev enteen years to understand anything of it. I desire, all the same, to instruct y ou and to shock you, as well.
Your tutors, whom I have chosen myself, have given you a severe education, well supervised and too much protected, perhaps; from i t I hope that eventually great benefit will accrue both to you and to the State.
I offer you here, in guise of corrective, a recital stripped of preconceived id eas and of mere abstract principles; it is drawn wholly from the experience of o ne man, who is myself. I am trusting to this examination of facts to give me som e definition of myself, and to judge myself, perhaps, or at the very least to kn ow myself better before I die.
Like everyone else I have at my disposal only thr ee means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most dif ficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide their secrets from us, or to make us believe that they have secrets where none exist; and books, with the particular errors of perspective to which they inevitably give rise.
I have read nearly ev erything that our historians and poets have written, and even our story-tellers, although the latter are considered frivolous; and to such reading I owe perhaps more instruction than I have gathered in the somewhat varied situations of my o wn life. The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as th e great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.
On the o ther hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books. But books lie, even those that are most sincere. Some, like Lucan, make it heavy, and encumber it with a solemnity which it does not possess; others, on the contrary, like Petronius, make life l ighter than it is, like a hollow, bouncing ball, easy to toss to and fro in a un iverse without weight.
The poets transport us into a world which is vaster and m ore beautiful than our own, with more ardor and sweetness, different therefore, and in practice almost uninhabitable. The philosophers, in order to study realit y pure, subject it to about the same transformations as fire or pestle make subs tance undergo: nothing that we have known of a person or of a fact seems to subs ist in those ashes or those crystals to which they are reduced.
Historians propo se to us systems too perfect for explaining the past, with sequence of cause and effect much too exact and clear to have been ever entirely true; they rearrange what is dead, unresisting material, and I know that even Plutarch will never re capture Alexander.
The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly mor e than butchers who hang up for sale morsels of meat attractive to flies.
I shou ld take little comfort in a world without books, but reality is not to be found in them because it is not there whole. Direct observation of man is a method still less satisfactory, limited as it frequently is to the cheap reflections which human malice enjoys. Rank, position , all such hazards tend to restrict the field of vision for the student of manki nd: my slave has totally different facilities for observing me from what I posse ss for observing him, but his means to do so are as limited as my own.
Every mor ning for twenty years, old Euphorion has handed me my flask of oil and my sponge , but my knowledge of him ends with his acts of service, and his knowledge of me ends with my bath; any effort on the part of either emperor or slave to learn m ore straightway produces the effect of an indiscretion.
Almost everything that w e know about anyone else is at second hand. If by chance a man does confess, he pleads his own cause and his apology is made in advance. If we are observing him , then he is not alone. They have reproached me for liking to read the police re ports of Rome, but I learn from them, all the time, matter for amazement; whethe r friends or suspects, familiars or persons unknown, these people astound me; an d their follies serve as excuse for mine.
Nor do I tire of comparing the clothed and the unclothed man. But these reports, so artlessly detailed, add to my stor e of documents without aiding me in the least to render a final verdict. That th is magistrate of austere appearance may have committed a crime in no way permits me to know him better.
I am henceforth in the presence of two phenomena instead of one, the outer aspect of the magistrate and his crime. As to self-observation, I make it a rule, if only to come to terms with that individual with whom I must live up to my last day, but an intimacy of nearly si xty years' standing leaves still many chances for error.
When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity. A more impersonal approach yields informations as c ool and detached as the theories which I could develop on the science of numbers : I employ what intelligence I have to look from above and afar upon my life, wh ich accordingly becomes the life of another.
But these two procedures for gainin g knowledge are difficult, and require, the one, a descent into oneself, the oth er, a departure from self. Out of inertia I tend, like everyone else, to substit ute for such methods those of mere habit, thus conceiving of my life partly as t he public sees it, with judgments ready-made, that is to say poorly made, like a set pattern to which an unskillful tailor laboriously fits the cloth which we b ring him.
All this is equipment of unequal value; the tools are more or less dul led; but I have no others: it is with them that I must fashion for myself as wel l as may be some conception of my destiny as man. When I consider my life, I am appalled to find it a shapeless mass.
A hero's existence, such as is described to us, is simple; it goes straight to the mark, like an arrow. Most men like to reduce their lives to a formula, whether in boas t or lament, but almost always in recrimination; their memories oblingingly cons truct for them a clear and comprehensible past. My life has contours less firm. I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely b y the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holdi ng to that extremity throughout their lives.
They are our poles, or our antipode s. I have occupied each of the extremes in turn, but have not kept to any one of them; life has always drawn me away. And nevertheless neither can I boast, like some plowman or worthy carter, of a middle-of-the-road existence. The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training.
Here and there protrude the gra nite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chan ce.
I strive to retrace my life to find in it some plan, following a vein of lea d, or of gold, or the course of some subterranean stream, but such devices are o nly tricks of perspective in the memory. From time to time, in an encounter or a n omen, or in a particular series of happenings, I think that I recognize the wo rking of fate, but too many paths lead nowhere at all, and too many sums add up to nothing.
To be sure, I perceive in this diversity and disorder the presence o f a person; but his form seems nearly always to be shaped by the pressure of cir cumstances; his features are blurred, like a face reflected in water. I am not o f those who say that their actions bear no resemblance to them. Indeed, actions must do so, since they alone give my measure, and are the sole means of engravin g me upon the memory of men, or even upon my own memory and since perhaps the v ery possibility of continuing to express and modify oneself by action may consti tute the real difference between the state of the living and of the dead.
But t here is between me and these acts which compose me an indefinable hiatus, and th e proof of this separation is that I feel constantly the necessity of weighing a nd explaining what I do, and of giving account of it to myself. In such an evalu ation certain works of short duration are surely negligible; yet occupations whi ch have extended over a whole lifetime signify just as little. For example, it s eems to me as I write this hardly important to have been emperor.
Besides, a good three-quarters of my life escapes this definition by acts: th e mass of my wishes, my desires, and even my projects remains nebulous and fleet ing as a phantom; the remainder, the palpable part, more or less authenticated b y facts, is barely more distinct, and the sequence of events is as confused as t hat of dreams. I have a chronology of my own which is wholly unrelated to anythi ng based on the founding of Rome, or on the era of the Olympiads.
Fifteen years with the armies have lasted less long than a single morning at Athens; there are people whom I have seen much of throughout my life whom I shall not recognize i n Hades. Planes in space overlap likewise: Egypt and the Vale of Tempe are near, indeed, nor am I always in Tibur when I am here. Sometimes my life seems to me so commonplace as to be unworthy even of careful contemplation, let alone writin g about it, and is not at all more important, even in my own eyes, than the life of any other person.
Sometimes it seems to me unique, and for that very reason of no value, and useless, because it cannot be reduced to the common experience of men. No one thing explains me: neither my vices nor my virtues serve for answ er; my good fortune tells more, but only at intervals, without continuity, and a bove all, without logical reason. Still, the mind of man is reluctant to conside r itself as the product of chance, or the passing result of destinies over which no god presides, least of all himself.
A part of every life, even a life meriti ng very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source. My own failure to discover these things has sometimes inclined me toward magical explanations, and has led me to seek in the frenzies of the occult for what common sense has not taught me. When all the in volved calculations prove false, and the philosophers themselves have nothing mo re to tell us, it is excusable to turn to the random twitter of birds, or toward the distant mechanism of the stars.
He was descended from a line of ancestors long established in Spain, fr om the period of the Scipios, and was third of our name to bear senatorial rank; before that time our family had belonged to the equestrian order. Under Titus h e had taken some modest part in public affairs. Provincial that he was, he had n ever learned Greek, and he spoke Latin with a harsh Spanish accent which he pass ed on to me, and for which I was later ridiculed in Rome.
His mind, however, was not wholly uncultivated; after his death they found in his house a trunk full o f mathematical instruments and books untouched by him for twenty years. He was l earned in his way, with a knowledge half scientific, half peasant, that same mix ture of narrow prejudice and ancient wisdom which characterized the elder Cato.
But Cato was a man of the Roman Senate all his life, and of the war with Carthag e, a true representative of the stern Rome of the Republic. The almost impenetra ble hardness of Marullinus came from farther back, and from more ancient times. He was a man of the tribe, the incarnation of a sacred and awe-inspiring world o f which I have sometimes found vestiges among our Etruscan soothsayers.
He alway s went bareheaded, as I was criticized for doing later on; his horny feet spurne d all use of sandals, and his everyday clothing was hardly distinguishable from that of the aged beggars, or of the grave tenant farmers whom I used to see squa tting in the sun.
They said that he was a wizard, and the village folk tried to avoid his glance. But over animals he had singular powers. I have watched his gr izzled head approaching cautiously, though in friendly wise, toward a nest of ad ders, and before a lizard have seen his gnarled fingers execute a kind of dance. On summer nights he took me with him to study the sky from the top of a barre n hill.
I used to fall asleep in a furrow, tired out from counting meteors. He w ould stay sitting, gazing upward and turning imperceptibly with the stars. He mu st have known the systems of Philolaus and of Hipparchus, and that of Aristarchu s of Samos which was my choice in later years, but these speculations had ceased to interest him.
For him the stars were fiery points in the heavens, objects ak in to the stones and slow-moving insects from which he also drew portents, const ituent parts of a magic universe in which were combined the will of the gods, th e influence of demons, and the lot apportioned to men. He had cast my horoscope. One night I was eleven years old at the time he came and shook me from my sle ep and announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed t o predict a good harvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world.
Then, sei zed with mistrust, he went to fetch a brand from the small fire of root ends kep t going to warm us through the colder hours, held it over my hand, and read in m y solid, childish palm I know not what confirmation of lines written in the sky. The world for him was all of a piece; a hand served to confirm the stars. His n ews affected me less than one might think; a child is ready for anything.
Later, I imagine, he forgot his own prophecy in that indifference to both present and future which is characteristic of advanced age. They found him one morning in th e chestnut woods on the far edge of his domain, dead and already cold, and torn by birds of prey.
Before his death he had tried to teach me his art, but with no success; my natural curiosity tended to jump at once to conclusions without bur dening itself under the complicated and somewhat repellent details of his scienc e.
But the taste for certain dangerous experiments has remained with me, indeed only too much so. My father, Aelius Hadrianus Afer, was a man weighed down by his very virtues.
His life was passed in the thankless duties of civil administration; his voice hardly counted in the Senate. Contrary to usual practice, his governorship of th e province of Africa had not made him richer. At home, in our Spanish township o f Italica, he exhausted himself in the settlement of local disputes. Without amb itions and without joy, like many a man who from year to year thus effaces himse lf more and more, he had come to put a fanatic application into minor matters to which he limited himself.
I have myself known these honorable temptations to me ticulousness and scruple. Experience had produced in my father a skepticism towa rd all mankind in which he included me, as yet a child. I was tw elve when this overburdened man left us. My mother settled down, for the rest of her life, to an austere widowhood; I never saw her again from the day that I se t out for Rome, summoned hither by my guardian.
My memory of her face, elongated like those of most of our Spanish women and touched with melancholy sweetness, is confirmed by her image in wax on the Wall of Ancestors. She had the dainty fe et of the women of Gades, in their close-fitting sandals, nor was the gentle swa ying of the hips which marks the dancers of that region alien to this virtuous y oung matron.
I have often reflected upon the error that we commit in supposing t hat a man or a family necessarily share in the ideas or events of the century in which they happen to exist.
The effect of intrigues in Rome barely reached my p arents in that distant province of Spain, even though at the time of the revolt against Nero my grandfather had for one night offered hospitality to Galba. We l ived on the memory of obscure heroes of archives without renown, of a certain Fa bius Hadrianus who was burned alive by the Carthaginians in the siege of Utica, and of a second Fabius, an ill-starred soldier who pursued Mithridates on the ro ads of Asia Minor.
Of the writers of the period my father knew practically nothi ng: Lucan and Seneca were strangers to him, although like us they were of Spanis h origin. My great uncle Aelius, a scholar, confined his reading to the best kno wn authors of the time of Augustus. Such indifference to contemporary fashion ke pt them from many an error in taste, and especially from falling into turgid rhe toric.
Hellenism and the Orient were unknown, or at best regarded frowningly fro m afar; there was not, I believe, a single good Greek statue in the whole penins ula. Thrift went hand in hand with wealth, and a certain rusticity was always pr esent in our love of pompous ceremony. My sister Paulina was grave, silent, and sullen; she was married young to an old man. The standard of honesty was rigorou s, but we were harsh to slaves.
There was no curiosity about anything whatsoever ; one was careful to think on all subjects what becomes a citizen of Rome. Of th ese many virtues, if virtues they be, I shall have been the squanderer. Officially a Roman emperor is said to be born in Rome, but it was in Italica that I was born; it was upon that dry but fertile country that I later superpose d so many regions of the world. The official fiction has some merit: it proves t hat decisions of the mind and of the will do prevail over circumstance.
The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon ones elf; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools. The sch ools of Spain had suffered from the effects of provincial leisure. Terentius Sca urus' school, in Rome, gave mediocre instruction in the philosophers and the poe ts but afforded rather good preparation for the vicissitudes of human existence: teachers exercised a tyranny over pupils which it would shame me to impose upon men; enclosed within the narrow limits of his own learning, each one despised h is colleagues, who, in turn, had equally narrow knowledge of something else.
The se pedants made themselves hoarse in mere verbal disputes. The quarrels over pre cedence, the intrigues and calumnies, gave me acquaintance with what I was to en counter thereafter in every society in which I have lived, and to such experienc es was added the brutality of all childhood. And nevertheless I have loved certa in of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracke d voice of him who is first to reveal to you a masterpiece, or to unveil for you a new idea.
The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, after all; it was Socrates. The methods of grammarians and rhetoricians are perhaps less absurd than I th ought them to be during the years when I was subjected to them. Grammar, with it s mixture of logical rule and arbitrary usage, proposes to a young mind a foreta ste of what will be offered to him later on by law and ethics, those sciences of human conduct, and by all the systems wherein man has codified his instinctive experience.
As for the rhetorical exercises in which we were successively Xerxes and Themistocles, Octavius and Mark Antony, they intoxicated me; I felt like Pr oteus. The reading of the poets had still more overpowering effects; I am not s ure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
Poetry transformed me: initiation into death itself will not carry me farther along into another world than does a dusk of Virgil. In later years I c ame to prefer the roughness of Ennius, so close to the sacred origins of our rac e, or Lucretius' bitter wisdom; or to Homer's noble ease the homely parsimony of Hesiod.
The most complicated and most obscure poets have pleased me above all; they force my thought to strenuous exercise; I have sought, too, the latest and the oldest, those who open wholly new paths, or help me to find lost trails.
But in those days I liked chiefly in the art of verse whatever appealed most direct ly to the senses, whether the polished metal of Horace, or Ovid's soft texture, like flesh. Scaurus cast me into despair in assuring me that I should never be m ore than a mediocre poet; that both the gift and the application were wanting. F or a long time I thought he was mistaken; somewhere locked away are a volume or two of my love poems, most of them imitated from Catullus. But it is of little c oncern to me now whether my personal productions are worthless or not.
To my dying day I shall be grateful to Scaurus for having set me early to the study of Greek. I was still a child when for the first time I tried to trace on my tablets those characters of an unknown alphabet: here was a new world and th e beginning of my great travels, and also the feeling of a choice as deliberate, but at the same time as involuntary, as that of love.
I have loved the language for its flexibility, like that of a supple, perfect body, and for the richness of its vocabulary, in which every word bespeaks direct and varied contact with r eality: and because almost everything that men have said best has been said in G reek.
There are, I know, other languages, but they are petrified, or have yet to be born. Egyptian priests have shown me their antique symbols; they are signs r ather than words, ancient attempts at classification of the world and of things, the sepulchral speech of a dead race.
During the Jewish War the rabbi Joshua tr anslated literally for me some texts from Hebrew, that language of sectarians so obsessed by their god that they have neglected the human.
In the armies I grew accustomed to the language of the Celtic auxiliaries, and remember above all cer tain of their songs. But barbarian jargons are chiefly important as a rese rve for human expression, and for all the things which they will doubtless say i n time to come. Greek, on the contrary, has its treasures of experience already behind it, experience both of man and of the State.
From the Ionian tyrants to t he Athenian demagogues, from the austere integrity of an Agesilaus to the excess es of a Dionysius or a Demetrius, from the treason of Demaratus to the fidelity of Philopoemen, everything that any one of us can do to help or to hinder his fe llow man has been done, at least once, by a Greek. It is the same with our perso nal decisions: from cynicism to idealism, from the skepticism of Pyrrho to the m ystic dreams of Pythagoras, our refusals or our acceptances have already taken p lace; our very vices and virtues have Greek models.
There is nothing to equal th e beauty of a Latin votive or burial inscription: those few words graved on ston e sum up with majestic impersonality all that the world need ever know of us. It is in Latin that I have administered the empire; my epitaph will be carved in L atin on the walls of my mausoleum beside the Tiber; but it is in Greek that I sh all have thought and lived. At sixteen I returned to Rome after a stretch of preliminary training in the Seventh Legion, stationed then well into the Pyrenees, in a wild region of Spain very different from the southern part of the peninsula where I had passed my ch ildhood.
Acilius Attianus, my guardian, thought it good that some serious study should counterbalance these months of rough living and violent hunting. He allow ed himself, wisely, to be persuaded by Scaurus to send me to Athens to the sophi st Isaeus, a brilliant man with a special gift for the art of improvisation.
Ath ens won me straightway; the somewhat awkward student, a brooding but ardent yout h, had his first taste of that subtle air, those swift conversations, the stroll s in the long golden evenings, and that incomparable ease in which both discussi ons and pleasure are there pursued. Mathematics and the arts, as parallel studie s, engaged me in turn; Athens afforded me also the good fortune to follow a cour se in medicine under Leotychides.
I developed a passion for this s cience, which is too close to man ever to be absolute, but which, though subject to fad and to error, is constantly corrected by its contact with the immediate and the nude.
Leotychides approached things from the most positive and practical point of view; he had developed an admirable system for reduction of fractures. We used to walk together at evening along the shore; this man of universal inte rests was curious about the structure of shells and the composition of sea mud.
But he lacked facilities for experiment and regretted the Museum at Alexandria, where he had studied in his youth, with its laboratories and dissection rooms, i ts clash of opinions, and its competition between inventive minds. His was a cle ar, dry intelligence which taught me to value things above words, to mistrust me re formulas, and to observe rather than to judge.
It was this bitter Greek who t aught me method. In spite of the legends surrounding me, I have cared little for youth, and fo r my own youth least of all. This much vaunted portion of existence, considered dispassionately, seems to me often a formless, opaque, and unpolished period, bo th fragile and unstable.
Needless to say I have found a certain number of exquis ite exceptions to the rule, and two or three were admirable; of these, Mark, you yourself will have been the most pure. As for me, I was at twenty much what I a m today, but not consistently so. Not everything in me was bad, but it could hav e been: the good or the better parts also lent strength to the worse.
I look bac k with shame on my ignorance of the world, which I thought that I knew, and on m y impatience, and on a kind of frivolous ambition and gross avidity which I then had. Must the truth be told? In the midst of the studious life of Athens, where all pleasures, too, received their due, I regretted not Rome itself but the atm osphere of that place where the business of the world is continually done and un done, where are heard the pulleys and gears in the machine of governmental power.
The reign of Domitian was drawing to a close; my cousin Trajan, who had covere d himself with glory on the Rhine frontier, ranked now as a popular hero; the Sp anish tribe was gaining hold in Rome. The narrator, a Roman emperor of the second century A.
Concerned with building a just and beautiful world, he hopes to give the reader the benefit of his own experience as a statesman. How to acquire both power and wisdom?
Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, "Memoirs of Hadrian" has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.
Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, this 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 his contemporaries, both friends and enemies.
Marguerite Yourcenar reconstructs Hadrian's arduous early years, his triumphs and reversals, and his gradual reordering of a war-torn world. Memoirs of Hadrian A novel.
Legendary Figures examines revolutionary views of the past that have played a crucial role in European and American literature of the last years. I desire, all the same, to instruct you and to shock you as well. Your tutors, whom I have chosen myself, have given you this severe education, well supervised and too much protected, perhaps; from it, I hope that eventually, great benefit will accrue both to you and to the State.
I offer you here, in the guise of corrective, a recital stripped of preconceived ideas and of mere abstract principles; it is drawn wholly from the experience of one man, who is myself. I am trusting to this examination of facts to give me some definition of myself, and to judge myself, perhaps, or at the very least to know myself better before I die.
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