Memoirs of Hadrian

by Маргерит Юрсенар

  A few men before me had traveled over the earth: Pythagoras, Plato, some dozen philosophers in all, and a fair number of adventurers. Now for the first time the traveller was also the master, free both to see and to reform, or to create anew. That chance fell to me; I reflected that possibly centuries would pass before there might be another such happy accord between an office, a temperament, and a world. And it was then that I felt the advantage of being a newcomer, a man alone, scarcely bound even by marriage, childless and practically without ancestors, a Ulysses with no external Ithaca. I must here admit what I have told no one else: I have never had a feeling of belonging wholly to any one place, not even to my beloved Athens, nor even to Rome. Though a foreigner in every land, in no place did I feel myself a stranger. The different professions which make up the trade of emperor were practiced along the way: I resumed military life like a garment grown comfortable with use, and fell back readily into the jargon of the camps, that Latin deformed by the pressure of barbaric languages and sprinkled with the usual profanity and obvious jokes; I again grew used to the heavy equipment of the days of maneuvers, and to that change in equilibrium in the whole body which the weight of a shield on the left arm can produce. More arduous were the interminable duties of accountant, wherever I went, whether for auditing the records of the province of Asia or those of a small British town in debt for construction of public baths. I have already spoken of my function as judge. Comparisons drawn from other employments came to mind: I thought of the itinerant doctor going from door to door for care of the sick, of the street department employee called to repair a pavement or to solder a water main; of the overseer running back and forth on the ship, encouraging the oarsmen but sparing his whip as he could. And today, on the Villa’s terrace, watching the slaves treat the orchard trees or weed the flower beds, I think most of all of the coming and going of a watchful gardener.

  The craftsmen whom I took with me on my rounds caused me little concern: their love of travel was as strong as my own. But I had trouble with the writers and scholars. The indispensable Phlegon fusses like an old woman, but he is the only secretary who has held up under the years: he is still with me. The poet Florus, to whom I proposed a Latin secretaryship, proclaimed right and left that he would not have wished to be Caesar, forced to battle the cold of Scythia, or British rain. The long excursions on foot did not appeal to him either. On my side, I gladly left to him the delights of Rome’s literary life, the taverns where the same witticisms are exchanged each night and the same mosquitoes are endured in common. To Suetonius I had given the post of curator of archives, thus granting him access to secret documents which he needed for his biographies of the Caesars. This clever man so well named Tranquillus was hardly to be imagined outside a library; he, too, stayed behind in Rome, where he became one of my wife’s intimates, a member of that small circle of discontented conservatives who gathered around her to find fault with the ways of the world. This group was little to my liking; I had Tranquillus pensioned off, and he retired to his cottage in the Sabine Hills there to mull undisturbed over the vices of Tiberius. A Greek secretariat was held for some time by Favorinus of Arles. That dwarf with the high treble voice was not devoid of subtlety but his mind was the most given to false deductions of any that I have encountered. We were always disputing, but his erudition charmed me. I was amused at his hypochondria; he dwelt upon his health like a lover attending a cherished mistress. His Hindu servant prepared his rice, imported from the Orient at great expense; unfortunately, this exotic cook spoke Greek badly, and said but little in any language, so he taught me nothing about the marvels of his native land. Favorinus flattered himself on having accomplished three rather rare things in his life: though a Gaul, he had Hellenized himself better than anyone else; though of humble origin, he was constantly quarrelling with the emperor and coming off none the worse for it, a remarkable fact which was, however, entirely to my credit; though impotent, he was continually paying fines for seduction of married women. And it is true that his lady admirers in provincial literary circles caused him difficulties from which I had more than once to extricate him. I wearied of that, and Eudemo took his place. But on the whole I have been unaccountably well served. The respect of that little group of friends and employees has survived, the gods only know how, through the rough intimacies of travel; their discretion has been still more astonishing, if possible, than their fidelity. The Suetoniuses of the future will have few anecdotes to harvest concerning me. What the public knows of my life I have revealed. My friends have kept my secrets, political and otherwise; it is fair to say that I often did the same for them.

  To build is to collaborate with earth, to put a human mark upon a landscape, modifying it forever thereby; the process also contributes to that slow change which makes up the history of cities. What thought and care to determine the exact site for a bridge, or for a fountain, and to give a mountain road that perfect curve which is at the same time the shortest… . The widening of the road to Megara transformed the shore along the Scironian Cliffs; the two thousand odd stadia of paved way, provided with cisterns and military posts, which connected Antinoöpolis with the Red Sea brought an era of security to the desert following an era of danger. For construction of a system of aqueducts in Troas all the revenue from five hundred cities of the province of Asia was not too high a price; an aqueduct for Carthage atoned in some part for the rigors of the Punic Wars. The erecting of fortifications was much like constructing dykes: the object was to find the line on which a shore, or an empire, can be defended, the point where the assault of waves (or barbarians) will be held back, stopped, or utterly broken. The beauty of the gulfs bore fruit with the opening of harbors. The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.

  I have done much rebuilding. To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future. Thus beneath the stones we find the secret of the springs.

  Our life is brief: we are always referring to centuries which precede or follow our own as if they were totally alien to us, but I have come close to them in my play with stone. These walls which I reinforce are still warm from contact with vanished bodies; hands yet unborn will caress the shafts of these columns. The more I have meditated upon my death, and especially upon that of another, the more I have tried to add to our lives these virtually indestructible extensions. At Rome I preferred to use our enduring brick; it returns but slowly to the earth, from which it comes, and its imperceptible settling and crumbling leave a mountainous mass even when the edifice has ceased to be visibly what it was built for, a fortress, a circus, or a tomb. In Greece and in Asia I chose the native marble, that fair substance which, once cut, stays so faithful to human measurements and proportions that the plan of an entire temple survives in each fragment of a broken column.

  Architecture is rich in possibilities more varied than Vitruvius’ four orders would seem to allow; our great stone blocks, like our tones in music, are amenable to endless regrouping. For the Pantheon I turned to the ancient Etruria of augurs and soothsayers; the sunny temple of Venus, on the contrary, is a round of Ionic forms, a profusion of white and pale rose columns clustered about the voluptuous goddess whence sprang the race of Caesar. The Olympieion of Athens, built on the plain, had to be in exact counterpoise to the Parthenon on its hill, vastness opposed to perfection, ardor kneeling before calm, splendor at the feet of beauty. The chapels of Antinous and his temples were magic chambers, commemorating a mysterious passage between life and death; these shrines to an overpowering joy and grief were places of prayer and evocation of the dead; there I gave myself over to my sorrow. My tomb on the bank of the Tiber reproduces, on a gigantic scale, the ancient vaults of the Appian Way, but its very proportions transform it, recalling Ctesiphon and Babylon with their terraces and towers by which man seeks to climb nearer the stars. Sepulchral
Egypt provided the plan for the obelisks and rows of sphinxes of that cenotaph which forces upon a vaguely hostile Rome the memory of the friend forever mourned.

  The Villa was the tomb of my travels, the last encampment of the nomad, the equivalent, though in marble, of the tents and pavilions of the princes of Asia. Almost everything that appeals to our taste has already been tried in the world of forms; I turned toward the realm of color: jasper as green as the depths of the sea, porphyry dense as flesh, basalt and somber obsidian. The crimson of the hangings was adorned with more and more intricate embroideries; the mosaics of the walls or pavements were never too golden, too white, or too dark. Each building-stone was the strange concretion of a will, a memory, and sometimes a challenge. Each structure was the chart of a dream.

  Plotinopolis, Hadrianopolis, Antinoöpolis, Hadrianotherae. … I have multiplied these human beehives as much as possible. Plumber and mason, engineer and architect preside at the births of cities; the operation also requires certain magical gifts. In a world still largely made up of woods, desert, and uncultivated plain, a city is indeed a fine sight, with its paved streets, its temple to some god or other, its public baths and toilets, a shop where the barber discusses with his clients the news from Rome, its pastry shop, shoestore, and perhaps a bookshop, its doctor’s sign, and a theatre, where from time to time a comedy of Terence is played. Our men of fashion complain of the uniformity of our cities; they suffer in seeing everywhere the same statue of the emperor, and the same water pipes.

  They are wrong: the beauty of Nîmes is wholly different from that of Arles. But that very uniformity, to be found now on three continents, reassures the traveler as does the sight of a milestone; even the dullest of our towns have their comforting significance as shelters and posting stops. A city: that framework constructed by men for men, monotonous if you will, but only as are wax cells laden with honey, a place of meeting and exchange, where peasants come to sell their produce, and linger to gape and stare at the paintings of a portico… .

  My cities were born of encounters, both my own encounters with given corners of the earth and the conjunction of my plans as emperor with the incidents of my personal life. Plotinopolis grew from the need to establish new market towns in Thrace, but also from the tender desire to honor Plotina. Hadrianotherae is designed to serve as a trading town for the forest dwellers of Asia Minor: at first it had been for me a summer retreat, with its forest full of wild game, its hunting lodge of rough hewn logs below the hill of the god Attys, and its headlong stream where we bathed each morning. Hadrianopolis in Epirus reopened an urban center in the heart of an impoverished province: it owes its start to a visit which I made to the oracle of Dodona. Hadrianopolis in Thrace, an agricultural and military outpost strategically placed on the edge of barbarian lands, is populated by veterans of the Sarmatian wars: I know at first hand the strength and the weakness of each one of those men, their names, the number of their years of service, and of their wounds. Antinoöpolis, dearest of all, born on the site of sorrow, is confined to a narrow band of arid soil between the river and the cliffs. I was only the more desirous, therefore, to enrich it with other resources, trade with India, river traffic, and the learned graces of a Greek metropolis. There is not a place on earth that I care less to revisit, but there are few to which I have devoted more pains. It is a veritable city of columns, a perpetual peristyle. I exchange dispatches with its governor, Fidus Aquila, about the propylaea of its temple and the statues of its triumphal arch; I have chosen the names of its district divisions and religious and administrative units, symbolic names both obvious and secret which catalogue all my memories. I myself drew the plan of its Corinthian colonnades and the corresponding alignment of palm trees spaced regularly along the river banks. Countless times have I walked in thought that almost perfect quadrilateral, cut by parallel streets and divided in two by the broad avenue which leads from a Greek theatre to a tomb.

  We are crowded with statues and cloyed with the exquisite in painting and sculpture, but this abundance is an illusion, for we reproduce over and over some dozen masterpieces which are now beyond our power to invent. Like other collectors I have had copied for the Villa the Hermaphrodite and the Centaur, the Niobid and the Venus. I have wanted to live as much as possible in the midst of this music of forms. I have encouraged experimentation with the thought and methods of the past, a learned archaism which might recapture lost intentions and lost techniques. I tried those variations which consist of transcribing in red marble a flayed Marsyas, portrayed heretofore only in white, going back thus into the world of painted figures; or of transposing to the pallor of Parian marble the black grain of Egypt’s statues, changing the idol to a ghost. Our art is perfect, that is to say, completed, but its perfection can be modulated as finely as can a pure voice: we have still the chance to play with skill the game of perpetual approach to, or withdrawal from, that solution found once for all; we may go to the limit of control, or excess, and enclose within that beauteous sphere innumerable new constructions.

  There is advantage in having behind us multiple points of comparison, in being free to follow Scopas intelligently, or to diverge, voluptuously, from Praxiteles. My contacts with the arts of barbarians have led me to believe that each race limits itself to certain subjects and to certain modes among those conceivable; each period, too, makes a selection among the possibilities offered to each race. In Egypt I have seen colossal gods, and kings; on the wrists of Sarmatian prisoners I have found bracelets which endlessly repeat the same galloping horse, or the same serpents devouring each other. But our art (I mean that of the Greeks) has chosen man as its center. We alone have known how to show latent strength and agility in bodies in repose; we alone have made a smooth brow the symbol of wise reflection. I am like our sculptors: the human contents me; I find everything there, even what is eternal. The image of the Centaur sums up for me all forests, so greatly loved, and storm winds never breathe better than in a sea goddess’ billowing scarf. Natural objects and sacred emblems have value for me only as they are weighted with human associations: the phallic and funeral pine cone, the vase with doves which suggests siesta beside a fountain, the griffon which carries the beloved to the sky.

  The art of portraiture was of slight interest to me. Our Roman busts have value only as records, faces copied to the last wrinkle, with every single wart; stencils of figures with whom we brush elbows in life, and whom we forget as soon as they die. The Greeks, on the contrary, have loved human perfection to the point of caring but little for the varied visages of men. I tend merely to glance at my own likeness, that dark face so changed by the whiteness of marble, those wide-opened eyes, that thin though sensuous mouth, controlled to the point of quivering. But I have been more preoccupied by the face of another. As soon as he began to count in my life art ceased to be a luxury and became a resource, a form of succor. I have forced this image upon the world: there are today more portraits of that youth than of any illustrious man whatsoever, or of any queen. At first my desire was to have recorded in sculpture the successive beauties of a changing form; but later, art became a kind of magical operation, capable of evoking a countenance lost. Colossal effigies seemed to offer one means of expressing the true proportions which love gives to those we cherish; I wanted those images to be enormous, like a face seen at close range, tall and solemn figures, like visions and apparitions in a terrifying dream, and as overwhelming as the memory itself has remained. I demanded perfect execution, nay, perfection pure; in short, that god who every boy dying at twenty is for those who have loved him; but I sought also an exact resemblance, the familiar presence and each irregularity of a face dearer than beauty itself. How many discussions it cost to keep intact the heavy line of an eyebrow, that slightly swollen curve of the lip. … I was counting desperately on the eternity of stone and the fidelity of bronze to perpetuate a body which was perishable, or already destroyed, but I also insisted that the marble, rubbed daily with a mixture of acid and oil, should take on
the shimmer, and almost the softness, of youthful flesh.

  The face was unique, still I found it everywhere; I amalgamated divinities, sexes, and eternal attributes, the hardy Diana of the forests with the melancholy Bacchus, the vigorous Hermes of the palaestrae with the twofold god who sleeps, head on arm, like a fallen flower. I remarked how much a thoughtful young man resembles a virile Athena.

  My sculptors went slightly astray; the less able fell into the error of too soft a line, or too obvious; all, however, were more or less caught up in the dream. There are statues and paintings of the youth alive, reflecting that immense and changing landscape which extends from the fifteenth to the twentieth year: the serious profile of the obedient child; that statue where a sculptor of Corinth has ventured to retain the careless ease of a young boy with lounging posture and sloping shoulders, one hand on his hip, as if he were watching a game of dice at some street corner. There is that marble where Papias of Aphrodisias has outlined a body tenderly nude, with the delicate resilience of narcissus. And Aristeas has carved under my direction, in rather rough stonework, that young head so imperious and proud. There are the posthumous portraits, where death has left his mark, those great faces with the knowing lips, laden with secrets which I no longer share, because they are no longer those of the living. There is the bas-relief where the Carian Antonianos has transposed to a divine and melancholy shade the vintager clothed in a tunic of raw silk, his friendly dog nuzzling against his bare leg. And that almost intolerable mask, the work of a sculptor of Gyrene, where pleasure and pain meet on the same face, and seem to break against each other like two waves on the same rock. And those small clay figures sold for a penny which have served as a part of the imperial propaganda: Tellus Stabilita, the Genius of the Pacified Earth in the guise of a reclining youth who holds fruits and flowers.