10/31/2023 0 Comments Memoires of hadrian![]() “There are places where one has chosen to live,” Yourcenar writes in her notes, “invisible abodes quite outside the current of time. His companions of mind console him, his remembered and imagined travels. When Antinous, the love of Hadrian’s saeculum aurum dies suddenly, at twenty, the emperor and all his lavished titles become “only a man with greying hair sobbing on the deck of a boat.”Įven in the midst of love, Hadrian is alone his constant solitude is the price of his imperium. The novel’s most compelling events are those in which the emperor’s powers falter-in illness or age, or in love. Most of what happens, after all, happens at his behest. ![]() Plot is as incidental to Memoirs of Hadrian as to real life: I did not turn the pages to learn what happens next, but to discover what Hadrian thinks of it. In adopting Marcus, he reflects: “I may be giving mankind the only chance it will ever have to see a philosopher pure of heart ruling over his fellow men.” I winced at all these lines they stung far more today than when I first read them. Still he applies all his power to the realization of such an ideal. ” In other words, he wishes, as anyone does, for the impossible. A peace between Rome and Parthia reopens trade routes all the way to India: “The circulation of gold and the passage of ideas (as subtle as that of vital air in the arteries) were beginning again within the world’s great body: earth’s pulse began to beat once more.”ĭespising sectarian bigotry, he dreams of a Jerusalem-and a world-where “several races and several beliefs could live in peace. So I returned to Hadrian’s vision of a Rome made global through its citizens’ exchange of goods and ideas rather than its legions’ conquests. Not because the classics translate into the moment, but because a moment can ready us to return to them. I did not seek out “What Memoirs of Hadrian can tell us about Covid-19.” But I did reach for this book in this moment, and not another in another. Among these is the temptation to reduce the work of the past to an allegory for the present. Reading the classics in a crisis presents impediments as well as consolations. Literary-minded websites published writers’ dispatches from their respective quarantines. As I reread the novel, the new genre of the “letter from isolation” began to circulate. ![]() In our century, in our own belated empire, the Covid-19 pandemic Covid-19 collapses the fate of individuals and the state into a single, urgent concern, despite our old American pretense that the state thrives only at the expense of the individual. I reread these lines in the midst of a quarantine that has so disagreeably drawn our attention to the details of bodies in extremis-cases, vectors, clusters. The professional eye saw in me only a mass of humors, a sorry mixture of blood and lymph. It is difficult to remain emperor in presence of a physician, and difficult even to keep one’s essential quality as a man. I spare you details which would be as disagreeable to you as to me, the description of the body of an old man who is about to die of a dropsical heart. Hadrian describes a recent physical examination: As the body natural declines, the body politic falls similarly into question. Hadrian’s project illustrates the coalescence in one person of the life of a man and the life of the state. The emperor still speaks to us, however that “us” may change. Such rigorous examination of facts-especially the troublesome fact of the self-serves the real 21st century as well as the imagined 2nd. Instead, these Memoirs linger over Hadrian’s meditations on the nature of power and its proper use in affairs of state or friendship or love. In the novel-Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterpiece-Hadrian’s rise from provincial Spain to the throne of Caesar is almost an afterthought. “I have formed a project for telling you about my life to know myself better before I die.” ![]() “My dear Mark,” the dying emperor writes from his villa at Tibur to his eventual heir, the adolescent he blesses as Aurelius. Memoirs of Hadrian begins in illness and distance, and with a letter.
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