Memoirs of Hadrian

by Маргерит Юрсенар

  On the Isthmus the Games were celebrated with a splendor unparalleled since ancient times; my hope, in reviving these Hellenic festivals, was to make Greece a living unity once more. We were drawn by the hunt to the valley of the Helicon, then in its last bronzed red of autumn; at the spring of Narcissus we paused, near the Sanctuary of Love; there we offered a trophy, the pelt of a young she-bear fixed by nails of gold to the temple wall, to Eros, that god who is wisest of all.

  The ship lent me by Erastos, the merchant of Ephesus, to sail the Archipelago, idled at anchor in Phaleron Bay;

  [Hadrian 158a.jpg] Hadrianic Cuirass with High Relief of Roman Wolf Supporting Athena Torso Standing in Agora, Athens

  [Hadrian 158bc.jpg] Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens

  [Hadrian 158d.jpg] Antinous of Eleusis Museum of Eleusis (Found in Ruins of Eleusis)

  I had come back to Athens like a man coming home. I ventured to add to the beauty of this city, trying to perfect what was already admirable. For the first time Athens was to grow again, taking on new life after long decline. I doubled the city in extent: along the Ilissus I planned a new Athens, the city of Hadrian joined to the city of Theseus. Everything had to be rearranged, or constructed anew. Six centuries earlier the great temple consecrated to the Olympian Zeus had been left abandoned almost as soon as the structure was started. My workmen took up the task and Athens again felt the joy of activity such as she had not known since the days of Pericles: I was completing what one of the Seleucids had aspired in vain to finish, and was making amends in kind for the depredations of our Sulla. To inspect the work I went daily in and out of a labyrinth of machines and intricate pulleys, of half-dressed columns and marble blocks haphazardly piled, gleaming white against the blue sky. There was something of the excitement of the naval shipyards; a mighty vessel had been salvaged and was being fitted out for the future.

  In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible. I am somewhat practiced in all the arts, but music is the only one to which I have steadily kept and in which I profess to some skill. At Rome I had to dissemble this taste, but could indulge it with discretion in Athens. The musicians used to gather in a court where a cypress grew, near a statue of Hermes. There were only six or seven of them, an orchestra of reeds and lyres; to these we sometimes added a professional with a cithara. My instrument was chiefly the long flute. We played ancient tunes, some almost forgotten, and newer works as well, composed for me. I liked the hard vigor of the Dorian airs, but certainly had no aversion to voluptuous or passionate melodies, or to the poignant, subtly broken rhythms which sober, fearful folk reject as intoxicating for the senses and the soul. Through the strings of his lyre I could see the profile of my young companion, gravely absorbed in his part in the group, his fingers moving with care along the taut cords.

  That perfect winter was rich in friendly intercourse: the opulent Atticus, whose bank was financing my constructions (though not without profit therefrom), invited me to his gardens in Kephissia where he lived surrounded by a court of lecturers and writers then in fashion; his son, young Herod, a subtle wit, proved indispensable at my Athenian suppers. He had certainly lost the timidity which once left him speechless before me, on the occasion of his embassy to the Sarmatian frontier on behalf of the youth of Athens to congratulate me on my accession; but his growing vanity now seemed to me no more than mildly ridiculous. Herod’s rival in eloquence, and in wealth, was the rhetorician Polemo, glory of Laodicea, who beguiled me by his Oriental style, shimmering and full as the gold-bearing waves of Pactolus; this clever craftsman in words lived as he discoursed, with splendor.

  But the most precious of all these encounters was that with Arrian of Nicomedia, the best of my friends. Younger than I by some twelve years, he had already begun that outstanding political and military career in which he continues to distinguish himself and to serve the State. His experience in government, his knowledge of hunting, horses, and dogs, and of all bodily exercise, raised him infinitely above the mere word-mongers of the time. In his youth he had been prey to one of those strange passions of the soul without which, perhaps, there can be no true wisdom, nor true greatness: two years of his life had been passed at Nicopolis in Epirus in the cold, bare room where Epictetus lay dying; he had set himself the task of gathering and transcribing, word for word, the last sayings of that aged and ailing philosopher. That period of enthusiasm had left its mark upon him; from it he retained certain admirable moral disciplines, and a kind of grave simplicity. In secret he practiced austerities which no one even suspected. But his long apprenticeship to Stoic duty had not hardened him into self-righteousness; he was too intelligent not to realize that the heights of virtue, like those of love, owe their special value to their very rarity, to their quality of unique achievement and sublime excess. Now he was striving to model himself upon the calm good sense and perfect honesty of Xenophon. He was writing the history of his country, Bithynia; I had placed this province, so long ill governed by proconsuls, under my personal jurisdiction; Arrian advised me in my plans for reform. This assiduous reader of Socratic dialogue treated my young favorite with tender deference, for he knew full well the rich stores of heroism, devotion, and even wisdom, on which Greece has drawn to ennoble love between friends. These two Bithynians spoke the soft speech of Ionia, where word endings are almost Homeric in form. I later persuaded Arrian to employ this dialect in his writings.

  At that period Athens had its philosopher of the frugal life: in a cabin of the village of Colonus, Demonax was leading an exemplary but merry existence. He was no Socrates, for he lacked both the subtlety and the ardor, but I relished his waggish good humor. Another of these good-hearted friends was the actor Aristomenes, a spirited performer of ancient Attic comedy. I used to call him my Greek partridge; short, fat, happy as a child (or a bird), he was better informed than anyone else on religious rituals, poetry, and cookery of former days. He was long a source of amusement and instruction to me. At about that time Antinous chose as his tutor the philosopher Chabrias, a Platonist with leanings toward Orphic teachings, and the most innocent of men; he developed a kind of watchdog fidelity to the boy which was later transferred to me. Eleven years of court life have not changed him; he is still the same honest, pious creature, chastely absorbed in his dreams, blind to all intrigue and deaf to rumor. He annoys me at times, but I shall part with him only at my death.

  My relations with the Stoic philosopher Euphrates were of shorter duration. He had retired to Athens after brilliant successes in Rome. I engaged him as my reader, but the suffering which he had long endured from a liver abscess, and the resulting weakness, convinced him that his life no longer offered him anything worth the living. He asked my permission to quit my service by suicide. I have never been opposed to voluntary departure from life, and had considered it as a possible end in my hour of crisis before Trajan’s death. The problem of suicide which has obsessed me since seemed then of easy solution. Euphrates received the authorization which he sought; I had it carried to him by my young Bithynian, perhaps because it would have pleased me myself to receive from the hands of such a messenger this final response. The philosopher came to the palace that same evening for a conversation which differed in no respect from all preceding visits; he killed himself the next day. We talked over the incident several times; the boy remained somber for some days thereafter. This ardent young creature held death in horror; I had not observed that he already gave it much thought. For my part I could ill conceive that anyone would willingly leave a world which seemed to me so fair, or fail to exhaust to the end, despite all its evils, its utmost possibility of thought and of contact, and even of seeing. I have indeed changed since that time.

  The years merge: my memory forms but a single fresco whereon are crowded the events and travels of several seasons. The luxuriously fitted bark of the merchant Erastos turned its prow first toward the Orient, then to the south, and only at last toward Italy, which was fast
becoming for me the Occident. We twice touched Rhodes; Delos, blinding white, was visited on an April morning, and later on under full moon of the summer solstice; storms on the coast of Epirus allowed me to prolong a stay in Dodona. In Sicily we delayed a few days to explore the mystery of the Syracusan springs, Arethusa and Cyane, fair nymphs of blue waters. There I thought again of Licinius Sura, the statesman devoting his scant leisure to study of the marvels of hydraulics. They had told me much of the curious colors of dawn on the Ionian Sea, when beheld from the heights of Aetna. I decided to make the ascent of the mountain. We passed from the region of vines to the beds of lava, and on to the snow; the agile youth fairly ran on those steep slopes, but the scientists who went with me climbed by muleback. At the summit a shelter had been built for us to await the dawn. It came: an immense rainbow arched from horizon to horizon; on the icy crest strange fires blazed; earth and sea spread out to view as far as Africa, within sight, and as Greece, which we merely guessed at. That was truly an Olympian height in my life. All was there, the golden fringe of cloud, the eagles, and the cupbearer of immortality.

  Halcyon seasons, solstice of my days… . Far from exaggerating my former happiness, I must struggle against too weak a portrayal; even now the recollection overpowers me. More sincere than most men, I can freely admit the secret causes of this felicity: that calm so propitious for work and for discipline of the mind seems to me one of the richest results of love. And it puzzles me that these joys, so precarious at best, and so rarely perfect in the course of human life, however we may have sought or received them, should be regarded with such mistrust by the so-called wise, who denounce the danger of habit and excess in sensuous delight, instead of fearing its absence or its loss; in tyrannizing over their senses they pass time which would be better occupied in putting their souls to rights, or embellishing them. At that period I paid as constant attention to the greater securing of my happiness, to enjoying and judging it, too, as I had always done for the smallest details of my acts; and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body? Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece; the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull. My own felicity is in no way responsible for those of my imprudences which shattered it later on; in so far as I have acted in harmony with it I have been wise. I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

  It was some time later, in Phrygia, on the borderlands where Greece melts into Asia, that I formed the clearest and most complete idea of the nature of this happiness. We were camping in a wild and desert place, on the site of the tomb of Alcibiades, who died there a victim of machinations of the Satraps. His grave had been neglected for several centuries; I ordered a statue of Parian marble for the effigy of that man so beloved by Greece. I also arranged for commemorative rites to be celebrated annually there. The neighboring villagers joined with the members of my escort for the first of these ceremonies; a young bull was sacrificed, and part of its flesh put aside for the night’s feast. A horse race was improvised upon the plain, and dances likewise. The Bithynian took part with a kind of fiery grace, and later that evening beside the last fire he sang. The upraised head showed the curve of the fine, strong throat.

  I like to measure myself alongside the dead; that night I compared my life with the life of that great artist in pleasure, no longer young, who fell pierced by arrows on this spot, defended to the end by a beloved companion and wept over by an Athenian courtesan. My young years made no pretension to the prestige of Alcibiades’ youth, but my versatility equalled or surpassed his own. I had tasted as many delights, had reflected more, and had done far more work; I knew, like him, the strange felicity of being loved. Alcibiades had seduced everyone and everything, even History herself; and nevertheless he left behind him mounds of Athenian dead, abandoned in the quarries of Syracuse, his own country on verge of collapse, and the gods of the crossroads drunkenly mutilated by his hands. I had governed a world infinitely larger than that of his time, and had kept peace therein; I had rigged it like a fair ship made ready for a voyage which might last for centuries; I had striven my utmost to encourage in man the sense of the divine, but without at the same time sacrificing to it what is essentially human. My bliss was my reward.

  There was Rome still. But I was no longer obliged to feel my way there, to reassure and to please. The achievements of my administration were not to be denied; the gates of the temple of Janus, open in time of war, remained closed; my plans were bearing fruit: the prosperity of the provinces flowed back upon the capital. I no longer refused the title which they had proposed to me at the time of my accession, Father of the Country.

  Plotina was no more. On a previous sojourn in the City I had seen her for the last time, this woman with the tired smile whom official nomenclature named my mother, and who was so much more, my sole friend among women. This time there was only her funeral urn, placed in the chamber below Trajan’s Column. I attended in person the ceremonies for her apotheosis, and contrary to imperial custom wore mourning for the full nine days. But death made little change in an intimacy which for years had dispensed with mere presence; the empress remained for me what she always had been, a mind and a spirit with which mine had united.

  Some of the great works of construction were nearing completion: the Colosseum, restored and cleansed of reminders of Nero which still haunted its site, was no longer adorned with the image of that emperor, but with a colossal statue of the Sun, Helios the King, in allusion to my family name of Aelius. They were putting the last touches to the Temple of Venus and Rome, erected likewise on the site of the scandalous House of Gold, where Nero had grossly displayed a luxury ill acquired. Roma, Amor: the divinity of the Eternal City was now for the first time identified with the Mother of Love, inspirer of every joy. It was a basic concept in my life. The Roman power was thus taking on that cosmic and sacred character, that pacific, protective form which I aspired to give it. At times it occurred to me to identify the late empress with that wise Venus, my heavenly counselor.

  More and more the different gods seemed to me merged mysteriously in one Whole, emanations infinitely varied, but all equally manifesting the same force; their contradictions were only expressions of an underlying accord. The construction of a temple of All Gods, a Pantheon, seemed increasingly desirable to me. I had chosen a site on the ruins of the old public baths given by Agrippa, Augustus’ son-in-law, to the people of Rome. Nothing remained of the former structure except a porch and a marble plaque bearing his dedication to the Roman citizens; this inscription was carefully replaced, just as before, on the front of the new temple. It mattered little to me to have my name recorded on this monument, which was the product of my very thought. On the contrary, it pleased me that a text of more than a century ago should link this new edifice to the beginning of our empire, to that reign which Augustus had brought to peaceful conclusion. Even in my innovations I liked to feel that I was, above all, a continuator. Farther back, beyond Trajan and Nerva, now become officially my father and my grandfather, I looked for example even to those twelve Caesars so mistreated by Suetonius: the clearsightedness of Tiberius, without his harshness; the learning of Claudius, without his weakness; Nero’s taste for the arts, but stripped of all foolish vanity; the kindness of Titus, stopping short of his sentimentality; Vespasian’s thrift, but not his absurd miserliness. These princes had played their part in human affairs; it devolved upon me, to choose hereafter from among their acts what should be continued, consolidating the best things, correcting the worst, until the day when other men, either more or less qualified than I, but charged with equal responsibility, would undertake to review my acts likewise. The dedication of the Temple of Venus and Rome was a kind of triumph, celebrated by chariot races, public spectacles, and distribution of spices and perfumes. The twenty-four elephants which had transported the enormous blocks of building st
one, reducing thereby the forced labor of slaves, figured in the procession, great living monoliths themselves. The date chosen for this festival was the anniversary of Rome’s birth, the eighth day following the Ides of April in the eight hundred and eighty-second year after the founding of the City. Never had a Roman spring been so intense, so sweet and so blue.

  On the same day, with graver solemnity, as if muted, a dedicatory ceremony took place inside the Pantheon. I myself had revised the architectural plans, drawn with too little daring by Apollodorus: utilizing the arts of Greece only as ornamentation, like an added luxury, I had gone back for the basic form of the structure to primitive, fabled times of Rome, to the round temples of ancient Etruria. My intention had been that this sanctuary of All Gods should reproduce the likeness of the terrestrial globe and of the stellar sphere, that globe wherein are enclosed the seeds of eternal fire, and that hollow sphere containing all. Such was also the form of our ancestors’ huts where the smoke of man’s earliest hearths escaped through an orifice at the top. The cupola, constructed of a hard but lightweight volcanic stone which seemed still to share in the upward movement of flames, revealed the sky through a great hole at the center, showing alternately dark and blue. This temple, both open and mysteriously enclosed, was conceived as a solar quadrant. The hours would make their round on that caissoned ceiling, so carefully polished by Greek artisans; the disk of daylight would rest suspended there like a shield of gold; rain would form its clear pool on the pavement below; prayers would rise like smoke toward that void where we place the gods.