When Marguerite Yourcenar gives Hadrian the floor to tell Marcus Aurelius, whom she had adopted as her grandson, what happened to him, the emperor is 60 years old. He has little time left, he has already taken charge of his life as if it were an accepted defeat, he suffers from dropsy of the heart. There is not much ahead, behind him are a lot of stories, heartbreaks and joys, moments of urgency and happiness, time for words, study and knowledge, for love and dreams and projects, for pain and loneliness. Yourcenar, in the notes that accompany the novel, records an observation that she read in 1927 in a letter from Flaubert: “When the gods no longer existed and Christ had not yet appeared, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when there was only man.” She stuck with that phrase, she set out to understand it to its ultimate consequences. This is what he did piecemeal with Adriano. He started with all his energy between the ages of 20 and 25, and destroyed everything he had written then (but which already contained everything). Then he tried again around 1934, but gave up again between 1939 and 1948. He kept moving forward, he kept tearing up papers. Memoirs of Hadrian (Readers’ Circle) was finally published in 1951.
At the beginning of the book, Hadrian explains to Marcus that he is going through his life again “in search of his plan” and confesses that it does not seem essential to him “to have been emperor.” There are other things that matter more to him than what has happened to him, but what is difficult to imagine now, in this age full of cheap religions and sanctimonious people who are constantly bending to the grand designs of parties, social movements, churches and social networks, is how Yourcenar could get into the skin of a man alone in a world without gods.
Hadrian was a soldier, he spent long periods on the frontier, constantly fighting the barbarians. He realised that he could be ruthless, he was a good leader, he achieved glory. “The traces of our crimes were visible everywhere,” he says at one point when referring to the advance of the legions. He also explains that his true homeland was books, that he felt Greek before anything else (even though he was born in Italica). At the age of 28 he married Trajan’s grandniece. He was governor in Syria. Trajan named him his successor and he became emperor when he was 40. “I wanted power. I wanted it to impose my plans, test my remedies, restore peace. Above all I wanted it to be myself before I died.”
Yourcenar also writes in his notes that “everything escapes us, and everyone, and even ourselves”, that reconstructing any life is to pay attention to a few “floating images”, which in the end are nothing more than “ruined walls, walls of shadow”. Hadrian loved Antinous and lost him. He also managed to establish a time of peace, what he intended was, for example, “that the humblest traveller could wander from one country, from one continent to another, without vexatious formalities, without dangers, everywhere secure in a minimum of legality and culture”. “To each his own path”, there is no other formula in a world without gods. And Hadrian said that we go through, that we accumulate experiences and then one day we will die. When summer comes, he observes, we look for a place under the shade of a plane tree. That’s it.
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