Portrait of a man 'almost wise'

“There are books,” Marguerite Yourcenar wrote, “which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.” Yourcenar, one of French literature’s ‘Immortals’, expressed those sentiments when reflecting on her own two-decade journey to write about the life of one of the ancient world’s great rulers, the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The book she began in her twenties between 1924 and 1929 (these versions were all destroyed) was eventually published in the original French in 1951 and the English translation, Memoirs Of Hadrian, (a collaboration between Yourcenar and her close friend Grace Frick) came out three years later.

Yourcenar’s intention with this epistolary novel was to capture, at a single glance, “…a life that is known and completed, recorded and fixed by History”. This wouldn’t be possible by doing just a conventional fictionalised first-person narrative. There had to be a reckoning on the part of the man looking back at his own life, standing “…in much the same position as we stand when we look at it.”

Memoirs Of Hadrian begins with the emperor getting the news that his life will soon end. So he begins a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, one of his eventual successors, reflecting on his early life, his time with an expansionist Roman army conquering much of the known world, his affinity for the arts and the glories of the Greek civilisation, how he came to succeed the Emperor Trajan and the various political machinations that try to thwart him as he tries to rule in a just and enlightened manner.

Good intentions, of course, are not easy to follow through especially when you are the ruler of a sprawling empire. Adding another layer of complexity was the fact that Hadrian was born in modern-day Spain rather than being a true son of Rome — this gave his enemies plenty of ammunition to question his credentials and mock his Spanish-accented Latin. Hadrian himself couldn’t quiet down his own self-doubts about where he belonged, but he worked it to his advantage as he tells Marcus Aurelius, “Though a foreigner in every land, in no place did I feel myself a stranger.”

It’s not just the evolution of the man from military strategist to political thinker that Yourcenar traces in the book, but also his tragic personal life. He was married to his predecessor’s grandniece but he never had children with his wife and anyway, the true love of his life was a young Greek man, Antinous, who he meets on his travels in Bithynia. Looking back at his time with Antinous and assured of his position in power, Hadrian says that he seems “…to return to the Age of Gold. Trouble was no more: past efforts were repaid by an ease which was almost divine.”

Such happiness would never last and in losing Antinous, Hadrian tries to immortalise him by deifying him and establishing a cult in his memory in Egypt. His final years are spent battling illness and putting down a rebellion in the Middle East. As he comes face to face with the final passage, Yourcenar’s prose reaches sublime heights, a gentle exhortation as she channels the dying emperor, “Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes…”

In melding herself so closely to her subject such that she becomes his medium eighteen centuries later, Yourcenar accomplishes something extraordinary with the Memoirs Of Hadrian and has bestowed a gift to the reader of the “…portrait of a man who was almost wise.”

(The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.)

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.