"Hadrian's Memoirs" is historical fiction at its best. Marguerite Yourcenar has avoided the usual hack plot and romantic baubles and produced a moving and scholarly recreation of a fascinating scene and epoch—Hadrian's Rome.

Coming after Trajan's reign of military adventures, Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire as a philosopher king, reforming its political and economic structure. Under his hand the Pax Romana flowered. The very slogan of his reign, stamped on money and carved on marble, was "Humanity, Liberty, Happiness." In Miss Yourcenar's novel, however, Hadrian emerges as a much more full-bodied character than the ideal ruler envisioned by Plato. Writing in the difficult memoir form, and placing the reader directly within the mind of Hadrian himself, the author takes us through the doubts as well as the decisions, the private jealousies and pleasures as well as the public life, of an emperor. The illusion is completely captivating; not since Robert Graves's "I, Claudius" or Thornton Wilder's "The Ides of March" has a volume of fiction reached so deeply into the blend of humanism and cruelty, decadence and power, art and economics referred to inadequately as "pagan Rome."

Miss Yourcenar recreates paganism without judging it, and many readers will find the results not altogether comfortable. Judaism and Christianity, examined entirely from Hadrian's point of view, appear as rather bloodthirsty barbarisms, hurling anathemas not so much against Roman policy, which was based on theological self-determination, as against the existence of Rome itself. But the fascination of "Hadrian's Memoirs" does not depend entirely on the impressive historical scholarship of its author. Miss Yourcenar writes beautifully as well as authoritatively…. As a result, the novel retains much of the crystal texture, wit, and sensitivity of classic prose.