Memoirs of Hadrian

by Маргерит Юрсенар

  This solemnity was for me one of those moments when all things converge. Standing beside me in that well of daylight was my entire administrative staff; these men were the materials which composed the destiny of my mature years, by then already more than half completed. I could discern the austere vigor of Marcius Turbo, faithful servitor of the State; the frowning dignity of Servianus, whose grumblings, whispered ever lower, no longer reached my ears; the regal elegance of Lucius Ceionius; and slightly to one side, in that luminous shade which is best for divine apparitions, the dreamy visage of the young Greek in whom I had embodied my Fortune. My wife, present there also, had just received the title of empress.

  For a long time, already, I had been more inclined toward the fables of loves and quarrels of the gods than to the clumsy commentaries of philosophers upon the nature of divinity; I was willing to be the terrestrial image of that Jupiter who is the more god in that he is also man, who supports the world, incarnating justice and giving order to the universe, but who is at the same time the lover of Ganymedes and Europas, the negligent husband of a bitter Juno. Disposed that day to see everything without shadow, in fancy I likened the empress to that goddess in whose honor, during a recent visit to Argos, I had consecrated a golden peacock adorned with precious stones. I could have freed myself by divorce from this unloved woman; had I been a private citizen I should not have hesitated to do so. But she troubled me very little, and nothing in her conduct justified so public an insult. As a young wife, she had taken offense at my ways, but only in much the same manner as her uncle had been irked by my debts. She was now confronted with manifestations of a passion which promised to endure, but she seemed not to notice them. Like many a woman little sensitive to love she poorly divined its power; such ignorance precluded the possibilities of tolerance and jealousy alike. She took umbrage only if her titles or her security were threatened, and such was not the case.

  Nothing was left of that youthful charm which had briefly attracted me to her in former days; this Spanish woman grown prematurely old was grave and hard. I owed it to her natural coldness that she never took a lover, and was pleased that she wore her matronly veils with dignity; they were almost the veils of a widow. I rather liked to have the profile of an empress on the Roman coins, with an inscription on the reverse, sometimes to Matronly Virtue, sometimes to Tranquillity. Often now I thought of that symbolical marriage which takes place on the night of the Eleusinian festivities between the high priestess and the hierophant, and which is not a union or even a contact, but is a rite, and is sacred as such.

  From the top of a terrace on the night following these celebrations I watched Rome ablaze. Those festive bonfires were surely as brilliant as the disastrous conflagrations lighted by Nero; they were almost as terrifying, too. Rome the crucible, but also the furnace, the boiling metal, the hammer, and the anvil as well, visible proof of the changes and repetitions of history, one place in the world where man will have most passionately lived. The great fire of Troy from which a fugitive had escaped, taking with him his aged father, his young son, and his household goods, had passed down to us that night in this flaming festival. I thought also, with something like awe, of conflagrations to come. These millions of lives past, present, and future, these structures newly arisen from ancient edifices and followed themselves by structures yet to be born, seemed to me to succeed each other in time like waves; by chance it was at my feet that night that this great surf swept to shore. I say nothing of those moments of rapture when the sacred cloth, the imperial purple, which I so seldom consented to wear, was thrown over the shoulders of the youth who was fast becoming for me my Genius; it pleased me, certainly, to place that rich red against the pale gold of a body, but I wanted above all to compel my Fortune and my Bliss, those uncertain, intangible entities, to assume this visible, earthly form, to acquire the warmth and reassuring weight of flesh. The solid walls of the Palatine Palace, which I occupied so little, but which I had just rebuilt, seemed to sway like a ship at sea; the curtains drawn back to admit the night air were like those of a high cabin aft, and the cries of the crowd were the sound of wind in the sails. The massive reef in the distance, perceptible in the dark, that gigantic base of my tomb so newly begun on the banks of the Tiber, suggested to me no regret at the moment, no terror nor vain meditation upon the brevity of life.

  Little by little the light changed. For two years and more the very passage of time had been marked in the progress of a young life perfecting itself, growing radiant, and mounting to its zenith: the grave voice accustoming itself to cry orders to pilots and to masters of the hunt; the lengthened stride of the runner; the limbs of the horseman more expertly mastering his mount. The schoolboy of Claudiopolis who had learned by heart long fragments of Homer was now enamored of voluptuous, abstruse poems, or infatuated with certain passages of Plato. My young shepherd was turning into a young prince. He was no longer a mere boy, eager to jump down from his horse at the halts to offer spring water cupped in his hands: the donor now knew the immense worth of his gifts. At the hunts organized in Tuscany, in Lucius’ domains, it had pleased me to place this perfect visage in among the heavy and care-laden faces of high officials, or alongside the sharp Oriental profiles and the broad, hairy faces of barbarian huntsmen, thus obliging the beloved to maintain also the difficult role of friend. In Rome intrigues had been woven around that young head, and low devices used to secure his influence, or to supplant it. He had known enough to despise all that, or ignore it; absorption in his one thought endowed this youth of eighteen with a capacity for indifference which the wisest of men might envy. But the beautiful lips had taken on a bitter line already observed by the sculptors.

  Here I give the moralists occasion for easy triumph. My critics are ready to point out the consequences of aberration and excess in what befell me; it is the harder for me to refute them in that I fail to see what the error is, or where the excess lies. I try to review my crime, if it is one, in its true proportions. I tell myself that suicide is not rare, and that it is common to die at twenty; that the death of Antinous is a problem and a catastrophe for me alone. It is possible that such a disaster was inseparable from too exuberant joy, and from a plentitude of experience which I would have refused to forego either for myself or for my companion in danger. Even my remorse has gradually become a form of possession, though bitter, and a way of assuring myself that, to the end, I have been the sorry master of his destiny. But I am well aware that other factors exist, namely, the will and decision of that fair stranger who each loved one is, and remains for us, in spite of everything. In taking upon myself the entire fault I reduce the young figure to proportions of a wax statuette which I might have shaped, and crushed, in my hands. I have no right to detract from the extraordinary masterpiece which he made of his departure; I must leave to the boy the credit for his own death.

  It goes without saying that I lay no blame upon the physical desire, ordinary enough, which determined my choice in love. Similar passions had often occurred in my life; these frequent adventures so far had cost no more than a minimum of pledges, troubles, or lies. My brief fancy for Lucius had involved me in only a few follies easy to mend. There was nothing to keep this supreme affection from following the same course, nothing except precisely that unique quality which distinguished it from the others. Mere habit would have led us to that inglorious but safe ending which life brings to all who accept its slow dulling from wear. I should have seen passion change into friendship, as the moralists would have it do, or into indifference, as is more often the case. A young person would have grown away from me at about the time that our bonds would have begun to weigh me down; other sensual routines, or the same under other forms, would have been established in his life; the future would have held a marriage neither worse nor better than many another, a post in provincial administration, or the direction of some rural domain in Bithynia. Or otherwise, there would have been simple inertia, and court life continued in some subaltern position; to put it a
t the worst, one of those careers of fallen favorites who turn into confidants or panders. Wisdom, if I understand it at all, consists of admitting each of such possibilities and dangers, which make up life itself, while trying to ward off the worst. But we were not wise, neither the boy nor I.

  I had not awaited the coming of Antinous to feel myself a god, but success was multiplying around me the sense of vertiginous heights. The seasons seemed to collaborate with the poets and musicians of my escort to make our existence one continuous Olympian festival. The day of my arrival in Carthage a five-year drought came to an end; the crowds, wild with joy at the downpour, acclaimed me as dispenser of blessings from above; great works of public construction for Africa thereafter were only a means of channeling such celestial prodigality. A short time before, in the course of a stop in Sardinia, we took refuge in a peasant’s hut during a storm; Antinous helped our host broil a few slices of tuna over the coals, and I felt like Zeus visiting Philemon in company with Hermes. The youth half reclining on a couch, knees upraised, was that same Hermes untying his sandals; it was Bacchus who gathered grapes or tasted for me the cup of red wine; the fingers hardened by the bowstring were those of Eros. Amid so many fantasies, and surrounded by such wonders, I sometimes forgot the purely human, the boy who vainly strove to learn Latin, who begged the engineer Decrianus for lessons in mathematics, then quickly gave up, and who at the slightest reproach used to take himself off to the prow of the ship to gaze broodingly at the sea.

  The African journey had its culmination in the newly completed camp at Lambaesis, under blazing July sun; my companion donned cuirass and military tunic with boyish delight; for these few days I was the nude but helmeted Mars taking part in the camp sports, the athletic Hercules who revelled in the feeling of still youthful vigor. In spite of the heat and the long labors of digging and grading completed before my arrival, the army functioned, like everything else, with divine facility: it would have been impossible to force a runner to one more hurdle, to demand of a horseman a single new jump without spoiling the value of the maneuvers themselves, and breaking into that exact equilibrium which constitutes their beauty. I had to point out to the officers only one slight error, a group of horses left without cover during a feigned attack on open ground; my prefect Cornelianus satisfied me in every respect. Intelligent order governed these masses of men and beasts of burden, these barbarian women with their sturdy children who crowded round the headquarters to kiss my hands. This was not servile obedience; that wild energy was applied to the support of my program for security; nothing had cost too much, and nothing had been neglected. I thought of having Arrian compose a treatise on tactics and discipline as perfect as is a body well-formed. In Athens, three months later, the dedication of the Olympieion was occasion for festivals which recalled the Roman solemnities, but what in Rome had been celebrated on earth seemed there to occur in the heavens. Late on a luminous day of autumn I took my station in that porch which had been conceived on the superhuman scale of Zeus himself; the marble temple, built on the spot where Deucalion had watched the Deluge recede, seemed to lose its weight and float like a great white cloud; even my ritual robe was in tone with the evening colors on nearby Hymettus. I had entrusted Polemo with the inaugural discourse. It was at this time that Greece granted me those divine appellations wherein I could recognize both a source of prestige and the most secret aim of my life’s work: Evergetes, Olympian, Epiphanios, Master of All. And the most beautiful of all these titles, and most difficult to merit, Ionian and Friend of Greece. There was much of the actor in Polemo, but the play of features in a great performer sometimes translates the emotion shared by a whole people, and a whole century. He raised his eyes to the heavens and gathered himself together before his exordium, seeming to assemble within him all gifts held in that moment of time: I had collaborated with the ages, and with Greek life itself; the authority which I wielded was less a power than a mysterious force, superior to man but operating effectively only through the intermediary of a human person; the marriage of Rome with Athens had been accomplished; the future once more held the hope of the past; Greece was stirring again like a vessel, long becalmed, caught anew in the current of the wind. Just then a moment’s melancholy came over me; I could not but reflect that these words of completion and perfection contained within them the very word end; perhaps I had offered only one more object as prey to Time the Devourer.

  We were taken next inside the temple where the sculptors were still at work; the immense, half-assembled statue of Zeus in ivory and gold seemed to lighten somewhat that dim shade; at the foot of the scaffolding lay the great python brought from India at my order to be consecrated in this Greek sanctuary. Already reposing in its filigree basket, the divine snake, emblem of Earth on which it crawls, has long been associated with the nude youth who symbolizes the emperor’s Genius. Antinous, entering more and more into that role, himself fed the monster its ration of wing-clipped wrens. Then, raising his arms, he prayed. I knew that this prayer, made for me, was addressed to no one but myself, though I was not god enough to grasp its sense, nor to know if it would some day be answered. There was comfort in leaving that silence and pale twilight to regain the city streets, where lamps were alight, to feel the friendliness of the crowd and hear the vendors’ cries in the dusty evening air. The young face which was soon to adorn so many coins of the Greek world was becoming a familiar presence for the people, and a sign.

  I did not love less; indeed I loved more. But the weight of love, like that of an arm thrown tenderly across a chest, becomes little by little too heavy to bear. Passing interests reappeared: I remember the hard, elegant youth who was with me during a stay in Miletus, but whom I gave up. I recall that evening in Sardis when the poet Strato escorted us from brothel to brothel, and we surrounded ourselves with conquests of doubtful value. This same Strato, who had preferred obscurity in the freedom of Asia’s taverns to life in my court, was a man of exquisite sensibility, a mocking wit quick to assert the vanity of all that is not pleasure itself, in order perhaps to excuse himself for having sacrificed to it everything else. And there was that night in Smyrna when I forced the beloved one to endure the presence of a courtesan. His conception of love had remained austere because it was centered on but one being; his disgust now verged on nausea. Later on he got used to that sort of thing. Such idle experiments on my part are explained well enough by a taste for dissipation; there was also mingled therein the thought of inventing a new kind of intimacy in which the companion in pleasure would not cease to be the beloved and the friend; there was the desire to instruct him, too, giving him some of the experiences which had been those of my own youth. And possibly, though less clearly avowed, there was some intention of lowering him slowly to the level of routine pleasures which involve no commitments.

  A certain dread of bondage impelled me to wound this umbrageous affection, which threatened to encumber my life. On a journey to Troas we visited the plain of the Scamander in time of catastrophe: I had come to see the flood and appraise its damage at first hand; the waters, under a strangely green sky, were making mere islets of the mounds of the ancient tombs. I took a moment to pay homage at the tomb of Hector; Antinous stood dreaming over Patroclus’ grave but I failed to recognize in the devoted young fawn who accompanied me an emulator of Achilles’ friend: when I derided those passionate loyalties which abound chiefly in books the handsome boy was insulted, and flushed crimson. Frankness was rapidly becoming the one virtue to which I constrained myself; I was beginning to realize that our observance of that heroic code which Greece had built around the attachment of a mature man for a younger companion is often no more for us than hypocrisy and pretence. More sensitive to Rome’s prejudices than I was aware, I recalled that although they grant sensuality a role they see only shameful folly in love; I was again seized by my mania for avoiding exclusive dependence on any one being. Shortcomings which were merely those of youth, and as such were inseparable from my choice, began to exasperate me. I
n this passion of wholly different order I was finally reinstating all that had irritated me in my Roman mistresses: perfumes, elaborate attire, and the cool luxury of jewels took their place again in my life. Fears almost without justification had entered that brooding heart; I have seen the boy anxious at the thought of soon becoming nineteen. Dangerous whims and sudden anger shaking the Medusa-like curls above that stubborn brow alternated with a melancholy which was close to stupor, and with a gentleness more and more broken. Once I struck him; I shall remember forever those horrified eyes. But the offended idol remained an idol, and my expiatory sacrifices began.

  All the sacred Mysteries of Asia, with their strident music, served now to add to this voluptuous unrest. The period of Eleusis had indeed gone by. Initiations into strange or secret cults (practices tolerated rather than approved, and which the legislator in me regarded with distrust) appealed at that moment of life when dance leaves us reeling and song ends in outcry. In Samothrace I had been initiated into the Mysteries of the Cabiri, ancient and obscene rites as sacred as flesh and blood; at the Cave of Trophonius milk-fed serpents glided about my ankles; the Thracian feasts of Orpheus taught me savage brotherhood rites. The statesman who had imposed severe penalties upon all forms of mutilation now consented to attend the orgies of Cybele: I witnessed the hideous whirling of bleeding dancers; fascinated as a kid in presence of a snake, my young companion watched with terror these men who were electing to answer the demands of age and of sex with a response as final as that of death itself, and perhaps more dreadful.