Memoirs of Hadrian

by Маргерит Юрсенар

  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

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  A reconstruction of an historical figure and of the world of his time written in the first person borders on the domain of fiction, and sometimes of poetry; it can therefore dispense with formal statement of evidence for the historical facts concerned. Its human significance, however, is greatly enriched by close adherence to those facts. Since the main object of the author here has been to approach inner reality, if possible, through careful examination of what the documents themselves afford, it seems advisable to offer the reader some discussion of the principal materials employed, though not to present a complete bibliography, which would extend beyond the scope of the present volume. Some brief indication will also be given of the comparatively few changes, all of secondary importance, which add to, or cautiously modify, what history has told us.

  The reader who likes to consider sources at first hand will not necessarily know where to find the principal ancient texts relating to Hadrian, or even what they are, since most of them come down to us from writers of the late classical period who are relatively little read, and who are ordinarily familiar only to specialists. Our two chief authorities are the Greek historian Dio Cassius and the Latin chronicler known by the name of Spartianus. Dio’s Roman History, written about forty years after Hadrian’s death but surviving, unfortunately, only in abridged form, devotes a chapter to this emperor. Somewhat more than a century after Dio, and apparently writing independently of his Greek predecessor, Spartianus composed a Life of Hadrian, one of the most substantial texts of the Historia Augusta, and a Life of Aelius Caesar, a slighter work of that same collection. The latter biography presents a very plausible likeness of Hadrian’s adopted son, and is superficial only because, after all, the subject was so himself. These two writers had access to documents no longer extant, among others an autobiography published by Hadrian under the name of his freedman Phlegon, as well as a collection of the emperor’s letters assembled by this same secretary. Neither Dio nor Spartianus is great as historian or biographer, but their very lack of art, and, to a certain degree, their lack of system, leave them singularly close to actuality. On the whole, modern research has confirmed their assertions in striking manner, and it is in great part upon their piecemeal accumulation of facts that the present interpretation is based.

  Mention may also be made, without attempting a comprehensive listing, of some details gleaned in other Lives of the Historia Augusta, in particular in the biographies of Antoninus and of Marcus Aurelius by Julius Capitolinus. Some phrases have been taken from Aurelius Victor’s Book of the Caesars and from the unknown author of the Epitome, professedly the work of Aurelius Victor, too. Both these writers, though only some half century later than Spartianus, already conceive of Hadrian’s life as almost legendary, but the splendor of their rhetoric puts them in a class apart. The historians Eutropius and Ammianus Marcellinus, also of the latter half of the fourth century, add little to the information given by earlier writers on Hadrian. Likewise the notice on this emperor in the Lexicon of the tenth-century Byzantine scholar Suidas, and the few pages devoted to him by the historian Zonaras, of the twelfth century, hardly do more than repeat Dio; but two other notices in Suidas provide each a fact little known about one episode in Hadrian’s life, namely that a Consolation was addressed to him by the philosopher Numenios, and that Mesomedes, the court musician, composed music for the funeral of Antinous.

  From Hadrian himself we have a certain number of works of unquestioned authenticity: from his official life there is administrative correspondence and there are fragments of discourses or reports, like the noted address to the troops at Lambaesis, conserved for the most part in inscriptions; also his legal decisions, handed down by the jurists. From his personal life we have poems mentioned by authors of his time, such as his celebrated Animula Vagula Blandula, or occurring as votive inscriptions, like the poem to Eros and the Uranian Aphrodite on the temple wall at Thespiae (G. Kaibel, Epigr. Gr. 811). Three letters supposedly written by Hadrian, and concerning his personal life, are of doubtful authenticity (Letter to Matidia, Letter to Servianus, Letter addressed by the Dying Emperor to Antoninus, to be found respectively in the collection of Dositheus, in the Vita Saturnini of Vopiscus, and in a fragment of Fayum papyrus, edited by Grenfell and Hunt, Fayum Towns and Their Papyri, 1900). All three of these letters, nevertheless, are decidedly characteristic of the man to whom they are attributed, and therefore certain indications which they afford have been used in this book.

  References or allusions to Hadrian or to his entourage are to be found scattered through most of the writers of the second and third centuries, and serve to complete suggestions in the chronicles, or fill in lacunae there. Thus, to cite only a few examples, the episode of the hunt in Libya is taken from a fragment of a poem of Pancrates, The Hunt of Hadrian and Antinous, found in Egypt and published in 1911 in the collection, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, VIII, No. 1085; Athenaeus, Aulus Gellius, and Philostratus have furnished numerous details on the sophists and poets of the imperial court; both the Younger Pliny and Martial add a few touches to the somewhat sketchy information left to us by Apuleius and by Trajan’s historians for two of Hadrian’s friends, Voconius and Licinius Sura. The description of Hadrian’s grief at the death of Antinous is drawn from the historians of the reign, but also from certain passages in the Church Fathers, who though indeed disapproving are sometimes more understanding on this subject, and above all more varied in their approach to it, than the usual blanket references to their opinions would reveal. We have allusions to that grief also in the writings of the emperor’s friend Arrian, from whom actual passages have been incorporated in these Memoirs (Letter from Arrian to the Emperor Hadrian on the Occasion of the Circumnavigation of the Black Sea, a text questioned by some scholars, but accepted by others as genuine except for minor interpolations). For the war in Palestine, certain details known to be authentic have been extracted from the Talmud, where they lie imbedded in an immense amount of legendary material; they serve to supplement the principal account of that war as given in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History. Details of the exile of Favorinus come from a fragment of that writer in a manuscript of the Vatican Library published in 1931 (M. Norsa and G. Vitelli, // Papiro Vaticano Greco II, in Studi e Testi, LIII); the horrible episode of the secretary blinded in one eye occurs in a treatise of Galen, who was physician to Marcus Aurelius; the picture of the dying Hadrian is built upon the somber portrait which Fronto, an intimate of Marcus Aurelius, gives of the emperor in his last years.

  Statues, reliefs, inscriptions, and coins have provided factual details not recorded by ancient writers. Certain glimpses into the savagery of the Dacian and Sarmatian wars, such as prisoners burned alive and counselors of King Decebalus poisoning themselves on the day of their capitulation, are afforded by the scenes on Trajan’s Column (W. Froehner, La Colonne Trajane, 1865; I. A. Richmond, Trajan’s Army on Trajan’s Column, Papers of the British School at Rome, XIII, 1935). Certain inscriptions serve as points of departure for episodes constructed in this work: thus the three poems of Julia Balbilla carved on the legs of the Colossus of Memnon, and Hadrian’s own name carved on that statue as well, help to build the visit to Thebes (J. A. Letronne, Recueil des Inscriptions grecques et latines de I’Egypte, II, 1848, and R. Cagnat, Inscr. Graec. ad res Rom. pert., I, 1186-7). The day of the year on which Antinous was born is given as it occurs on an inscription left by a fraternity of workmen and slaves in Lanuvium, who chose that new deity for their patron and protector in the year 133 (Corp. Inscr. Lot. XIV, 2112). This precision as to the day has been questioned by Mommsen but has been accepted since his time by less hy
percritical scholars. The several phrases presented in these Memoirs as if inscribed on the tomb of the favorite are taken from the long text in hieroglyphs on the obelisk of the Pincio in Rome, telling of Antinous’ funeral and detailing the ritual of his cult. (A. Erman, Obelisken Romischer Zeit, in Mitt. d. deutsch. arch. Inst., Rom. Abt., XI, 1896; O. Marucchi, Gli Obelischi Egiziani di Roma, 1898). The coins of the reign suggest many details for the voyages described; the legends on some of these coins have furnished titles for the parts of this book (with two exceptions, one drawn from Aurelius Victor), and have often provided the keynotes for Hadrian’s meditations themselves.

  To discuss briefly the study of Hadrian and his period by modern and contemporary writers it may first be noted that already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all historians of Rome from Tillemont to Gibbon have touched upon this emperor, but their works, substantial as they are (the critical spirit which animates the article on Hadrian in Bayle’s Dictionnaire, for example, remains unrivaled in its kind), belong henceforth to History’s history. Nearer our time even the brilliant sketch by Renan in the first chapter of L’Eglise Chrétienne shows equally the marks of age. Nor is there a complete modern biography, properly speaking, to which the reader can be referred without reservation. The earliest work of the kind, that of Gregorovius, published in 1851 (revised edition 1884), is not without life and color, but is weak in everything that concerns Hadrian as administrator and prince, and is in great part outdated by researches of the past half century. The more methodical study of O. Th. Schulz, Leben des Kaisers Hadrian, Leipzig, 1904, is less rich in humanistic erudition than Gregorovius and is also outdated in part. The more recent biography by B. W. Henderson, The Life and Principate of the Emperor Hadrian, A.D. 76-138, published in 1923, though lengthy, gives only a superficial idea of Hadrian’s thought and of the intellectual currents of his time, making too little use of available sources.