Memoirs of Hadrian
SynopsisPlot
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.
Story
About this book
Marguerite Yourcenar, born in Belgium and writing in French, published this historical novel in 1951. It takes the shape of a long letter from an aging Roman emperor to a boy of seventeen, Marcus Aurelius, whom he had brought into the line of succession. Hadrian sets down what he remembers: a hard boyhood, campaigns and reversals, and the slow work of settling an empire after war.
Within that account the emperor turns to poetry and music, to the philosophical questions he carried through office, and to Antinous, the young man from Bithynia in Asia Minor whom he loved. Yourcenar was drawn to a period unsettled in belief, when the old Roman gods commanded less faith and Christianity was not yet established. She connected that condition to Europe after the Second World War.
The historical Hadrian is known to have composed an autobiography, though no copy survives, which left space for invention grounded in research. Yourcenar first imagined the project as a teenager and put it aside, judging it work for someone past forty. Her sentences aim at the measured clarity of Latin prose from Hadrian's own century, and the book met wide acclaim on publication.
