Ancient literary critics have set down certain rules for imaginative treatments of historical episodes: they must be based on historical fact; the imagined episodes and motivation must be "such as might likely have happened" (Aristotle would say they must be truer than actual history), and the whole must be instructive and edifying. Marguerite Yourcenar has not only observed these rules in her book, "Hadrian's Memoirs," but has also followed a favorite ancient practice in putting her reconstruction in the form of an epistle, addressed by Hadrian to his adoptive grandson and eventual successor, Marcus Aurelius. The excellence of her product proves the wisdom of the ancients.

Even a reader indifferent to history and historical personages must find the Hadrian here presented a full and sensitive man well worth knowing. The early pages in which the prospect of imminent death leads him to savor the experiences and sensations of his past life are quite wonderful, regardless of the subject's time and place. But Hadrian was also a very remarkable emperor, and introduced the era Gibbon declared most Europeans would prefer to live in if given their choice; by an imagination informed and controlled by scholarship Miss Yourcenar breathes life into the enigmatic data concerning the man and communicates a vivid sense of the multifarious empire he ruled.

Conscientious as Miss Yourcenar has been in presenting the externals of the emperor and his realm, such information may after all be obtained, on higher authority if not as agreeably, in unimaginative handbooks. Her highest usefulness and greatest success is in a field beyond the range of the orthodox historian, a field to which only the imaginative writer can be adequate, but in which he frequently fails, especially if he is dealing with a non-Christian environment. What was the actual ethical and psychological climate in which these people lived and acted? How did a highly intelligent, responsible, and sensitive man regard the relations between his body and soul and between both and the universe in the period just before a sharp dualism between body and soul, between man and eternal reality, became an unquestioned assumption? It is difficult almost to the point of impossibility to think away two millennia of a different tradition, whether we adhere to that tradition or reject it, difficult to reconstruct Hadrian's relations to his gods, his conscience, his family, his beloved Antinous, his carnal appetites, to Jews and Christians without revealing moral disapproval, however dissembled, or labored or truculent approval. Hadrian must not be made a stick with which to belabor either Christians or pagans, ascetics or libertines. Miss Yourcenar has come as near as can be to assaying Hadrian's position in these central matters in his own and not alien terms; for us, then, the unfamiliar motivations are a new increment of knowledge rather than a confirmation of existing prejudices.

A reconstruction of ethical motivations can only be subjective, and for the reader its validity must depend upon the credit which its creator has established in matters susceptible to objective tests. Here Miss Yourcenar's credit is very high. Not only is her understanding of character mature and perceptive, but she has exploited all available ancient evidence and has consulted the best modern scholarship. In a full Author's Note at the end of her book she lists and appraises her sources, ancient and modern, points out where she has taken liberties with chronology or dramatis personae, and explains why she felt justified in embroidering certain scraps from ancient writers as she did. When readers are likely to be incapable of judging the reliability of historical fiction the responsibility of the author is almost as great as that of textbook makers. By letting us look into her workshop Miss Yourcenar shows us how far we may accept her presentation as history and what degree of plausibility her own reconstructions can have. Her example is to be commended to all writers of historical fiction. (pp. 12-13)