SOURCE: "Rise and Fall of an Emperor: Mémoires d'Hadrien," in her From Violence to Vision: Sacrifice in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. 184-219.

Mémoires d'Hadrien was the work that, in 1951, catapulted Marguerite Yourcenar to international literary prominence. Begun and abandoned several times over the course of the preceding decades, this fictionalized autobiography of one of the last enlightened Roman emperors takes the form of a letter to Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian's eventual successor. The book was the fruit, by the author's own admission, of a certain postwar optimism regarding the future of mankind. In the speech that Yourcenar delivered upon the occasion of her induction to the Académie française in 1981 [published in En pèlerin et en étranger], she recalls her outlook during those years:

Ces années furent celles où, cherchant dans le passé un modèle resté imitable, j'imaginais comme encore possible l'existence d'un homme capable de 'stabiliser la terre', donc d'une intelligence humaine portée à son plus haut point de lucidité et d'efficacité.

Those were the years when, searching in the past for a model that remained imitable, I imagined as still possible the existence of a man capable of "stabilizing the earth," thus of a human intelligence extended to its highest point of lucidity and efficacy.

In discussing the genesis of Mémoires d'Hadrien with Matthieu Galey in Les yeux ouverts, Yourcenar is more explicit regarding the unfortunate inaccuracy of that optimism. The hope of a long-lived Pax Americana or Pax Europeana to which the establishment of the United Nations gave rise was not realized. Nor were any political geniuses forthcoming. "Il ne s'est présenté que de brillants seconds. Mais, à l'époque, j'avais la naïveté de croire que c'était encore possible"/"Only brilliant second-raters made their appearance. At the time, however, I was still naive enough to believe in the possibility of such a thing."

Given the markedly negative portrait painted by Yourcenar in Le coup de grâce of another man of arms and the degradation unto dictatorship of the 1930s Rome we have just left, one can hardly fail to be perplexed that Yourcenar should look to the hierarchical model of imperial authority in search of renewal for a war-battered world. Who could more closely resemble a Hitler or a Mussolini than an ancient Roman despot? The eminent French author and critic Michel Tournier has addressed this issue in his "Gustave et Marguerite." According to Tournier, the question raised by Mémoires d'Hadrien is whether or not it is possible to be a "good tyrant." Yourcenar's entire book, he asserts, provides an emphatically affirmative response to this question. "Il serait donc faux que le pouvoir rende fou, et que le pouvoir absolu rende absolument fou, comme semblent le prouver cent exemples historiques de Néron à Hitler en passant par Robespierre et Napoléon"/"Thus it would appear to be false that power drives one crazy, and that absolute power drives one absolutely crazy, as a hundred historical examples from Nero to Hitler by way of Robespierre and Napoleon would seem to prove." As Tournier goes on to say, Yourcenar's book recreates the twenty-one years of "imperial wisdom" that Hadrian's reign, beginning in the year A.D. 117 and ending with his death in 138, bestowed upon the citizens of the Roman Empire:

Cette sagesse se signale par l'intégration sans la moindre discordance de la sphère privée à la chose publique. Alors que les fous sanglants, que nous avons cités, menaient une politique sans contact avec leur vie d'homme ou perturbées par leurs passions personnelles, Hadrien se présente à nous comme un cosmos harmonieux où ses chasses, ses expéditions et ses amours occupent chacune leur juste place.

This wisdom distinguishes itself by integrating the private sphere with the state without the slightest discordance. Whereas the blood-soaked madmen, whom we have cited, carried out political policies bearing no relation to their life as men or perturbed by their personal passions, Hadrian presents himself to us as a harmonious cosmos in which his hunting parties, his expeditions and his loves each occupy their rightful place.

As this passage so accurately notes, the factor that distinguishes Hadrian from his destructive peers and presumptive political legatees is his capacity to integrate the personal and the private with the functions of his public office, to keep an ever-watchful eye on the human consequences of his imperial decisions. It is also this integrative facility that differentiates Hadrian from the protofascist narrator of Yourcenar's Le coup de grâce.

Madeleine Boussuges situates Hadrian with regard to the empire he governed: "Le siècle d'or des Antonins, où s'inscrit le règne de l'Empereur Hadrien, correspond à la fois à l'apogée de l'empire romain et au début de son déclin"/"The golden century of the Antonines, of which the reign of the emperor Hadrian was a part, corresponds at once to the apogee of the Roman Empire and to the beginning of its decline." The rise to a zenith and subsequent fall also characterize the structure of Yourcenar's account of Hadrian's life. During the first half of the text, the emperor climbs to dizzying heights of personal and professional success. Though seemingly irrepressible, his ascent is transformed nonetheless into decline with the sacrificial death of his beloved young companion Antinous. With this novel that inaugurates the period of her most renowned works, nearly two decades after her Athenian victims began wending their way toward Crete, sacrifice finds itself still at the center of the material—be it that of myth, that of daily life, or that of history—to which Marguerite Yourcenar devotes her creative attention.

It is a sixty-year-old Hadrian, already long afflicted by the ailing heart that will kill him two years later, who addresses the story of his life to the young man who will one day take his place. The narrator thus possesses a store of experience and wisdom that the Hadrian he narrates did not necessarily possess. Nowhere is this more evident than in the pages of reflection that open the emperor's letter to his adopted imperial grandson. Addressing topics as varied as Hadrian's health, his erstwhile hunting expeditions, and the virtues of a sound sleep, these meditations brim with benevolent sagacity. They paint a picture of a man whose acute intelligence is matched by his humaneness and form a kind of philosophical backdrop against which the story of Hadrian's life will be projected. Two themes emerge as paramount from these pages of reflection. They testify to traits of character that will play a crucial role throughout the book: Hadrian's will to maintain contact with the rudiments of life and his uncanny capacity to open himself to and partake of the Other, be that Other friend or foe.

Hadrian's nearly constant volition, much like that of Hercules in Le mystère d'Alceste, to keep in close touch with the elemental sources of life is first alluded to in a passage pertaining to the differences between Roman and Greek cuisine. The former is described as excessively rich and refined, whereas the latter is simple and better suited to the body's assimilative capacities. "J'ai goûté," affirms Hadrian,

dans tel bouge d'Egine ou de Phalère, à des nourritures si fraîches qu'elles demeuraient divinement propres, en dépit des doigts sales du garçon de taverne, si modiques, mais si suffisantes, qu elles sembiaient contenir sous la forme la plus résumée possible quelque essence d'immortalité.

In the merest hole of a place in Aegina or Phaleron I have tasted food so fresh that it remained divinely clean despite the dirty fingers of the tavern waiter; its quantity, though modest, was nevertheless so satisfying that it seemed to contain in the most reduced form possible some essence of immortality.

As is frequently the case, Hadrian's thoughts, having moved from the complicated gastronomy of Roman imperial banquets to the unadorned sufficiency of simple Greek taverns, turn subsequently to an even more primitive form of sustenance recalled from his past, that of the hunt. In this passage we learn that if the simple courses served by Greek waiters somehow suggest immortality, there is something sacramental in the sharing of the flesh of the hunt:

La viande cuite au soir des chasses avait elle aussi cette qualité presque sacramentelle, nous ramenait plus loin, aux origines sauvages des races. Le vin nous initie aux mystères volcaniques du sol, aux richesses minérales cachées: une coupe de Samos bue à midi, en plein soleil, ou au contraire absorbée par un soir d'hiver dans un état de fatigue qui permet de sentir immédiatement au creux du diaphragme son écoulement chaud, sa sure et brûlante dispersion le long de nos artères, est une sensation presque sacrée, parfois trop forte pour une tête humaine; je ne la retrouve plus si pure sortant des celliers numérotés de Rome, et le pédantisme des grands connaisseurs de crus m'impatiente. Plus pieusement encore, l'eau bue dans la paume ou à même la source fait couler en nous le sel le plus secret de la terre et la pluie du ciel.

Likewise meat cooked at night after a hunt had that same almost sacramental quality, taking us far back to the primitive origins of the races of men. Wine initiates us into the volcanic mysteries of the soil, and its hidden mineral riches; a cup of Samos drunk at noon in the heat of the sun or, on the contrary, absorbed of a winter evening when fatigue makes the warm current be felt at once in the hollow of the diaphragm and the sure and burning dispersion spreads along our arteries, such a drink provides a sensation which is almost sacred, and is sometimes too strong for the human head. No feeling so pure comes from the vintage-numbered cellars of Rome; the pedantry of great connoisseurs of wine wearies me. Water drunk more reverently still, from the hands or from the spring itself, diffuses within us the most secret salt of earth and the rain of heaven.

Like no Roman repast concocted by chefs of renown, wild game connects man to a primeval past. A cup of wine links the emperor to riches coursing through the earth like blood through veins. Simpler still, and thus more sacred, fresh water ties man to both heaven and earth. Hadrian's tendency to move from the complex to the simple, from the phenomenon at hand to its origins, displays again that same will to make contact with the real that fills his musings. Later Hadrian describes this volition as the "attention constante que j'avais toujours donnée aux moindres détails de mes actes"/"constant attention [I had always paid to] the smallest details of my acts." This unmediated connection to his world is one of the cornerstones of Hadrian's ascension to imperial eminence.

Standing beside this connectedness is Hadrian's ability to open himself to the Other. The second half of his opening reflections meditates on the question of the self and the Other, on the relations of alterity. This topic is broached first in a discussion of the seamless rapport that in earlier, more active, times had linked the emperor to his horse, Borysthenes. Though his own days as an equestrian are behind him, a vivid memory of the perfect harmony that had reigned between him and his horse continues to inform Hadrian's ability to participate viscerally in the pleasure "du cavalier et celui de la bête"/"both of horse and of rider" as he watches his aide Celer exercise the imperial mount. He still partakes in a similar way of the joys of swimming and running, though they too are forbidden him now. As the following passage suggests, there have even been times when Hadrian has tried to extend his empathic capacities beyond the realm of the human:

J'ai cru, et dans mes bons moments je crois encore, qu'il serait possible de partager de la sorte l'existence de tous, et cette sympathie serait l'une des espèces les moins révocables de l'immortalité. Il y eut des moments où cette compréhension s'efforça de dépasser l'humain, alla du nageur à la vague.

I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such sympathy would be one of the least revocable kinds of immortality. There have been moments when that comprehension tried to go beyond human experience, passing from the swimmer to the wave.

Just as Hadrian's ingestion of seared flesh, simple wines, and fresh water creates a sacred tie between him and the natural world, so too does his faculty for sympathetic engagement make it possible for him to participate meaningfully in modes of being beyond the boundaries of his own, seemingly limited, self.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the heightened state of sensual and spiritual receptivity to the Other which is love. Unlike Erick von Lhomond [the warrior character in Le coup de grâce] who closed out the Other in fear, the aging Hadrian insists on the necessity of abdicating one's masterful hold on oneself in complete surrender to the object of love:

De tous nos jeux, [l'amour] est le seul qui risque de bouleverser l'âme, le seul aussi où le joueur s'abandonne nécessairement au délire du corps. Il n'est pas indispensable que le buveur abdique sa raison, mais l'amant qui garde la sienne n'obéit pas jusqu'au bout à son dieu. L'abstinence ou l'excés n'engagent partout ailleurs que l'homme seul: sauf dans le cas de Diogène, dont les limitations et le caractère de raisonnable pis-aller se marquent d'eux-mêmes, toute démarche sensuelle nous place en présence de l'Autre, nous implique dans les exigences et les servitudes du choix.

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body's ecstasy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end. In every act save that of love, abstinence and excess alike involve but one person; any step in the direction of sensuality, however, places us in the presence of the Other, and involves us in the demands and servitudes to which our choice binds us (except in the case of Diogenes, where both the limitations and the merits of reasonable expedient are self-evident).

In much more graphic expression of the self-abandonment that amorous relations entail, Hadrian refers to himself some two pages later as "cloué au corps aimé comme un crucifié à sa croix"/"[n]ailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross."

When his thoughts progress from love to sleep, the guiding thread remains the issue of the self and its relation to otherness. In a passage that seems to allude to the notions about love just evoked, Hadrian comments on the subject of sleep that: "Là, comme ailleurs, le plaisir et l'art consistent à s'abandonner consciemment à cette bienheureuse inconscience, à accepter d'être subtilement plus faible, plus lourd, plus léger, et plus confus que soi"/"There, as elsewhere, the pleasure and the art consist in conscious surrender to that blissful unconsciousness, and in accepting to be slightly less strong, less light, less heavy and less definite than our waking selves." Providing as it does the daily experience of a radical relinquishment of self, sleep also suggests to Hadrian the possibility not just of surrendering to but of being the Other. He recalls that the profound slumbers following the exhaustion of the hunt were abrupt and total departures from the confines of his normal mode of being:

Si totale était l'éclipse, que j'aurais pu chaque fois me retrouver autre, et je m'étonnais, ou parfois m'attristais, du strict agencement qui me ramenait de si loin dans cet étroit canton d'humanité qu'est moi-même. Qu'étaient ces particularités auxquelles nous tenons le plus, puisqu'elles comptaient si peu pour le libre dormeur, et que, pour une seconde, avant de rentrer à regret dans la peau d'Hadrien, je parvenais à savourer à peu près consciemment cet homme vide, cette existence sans passé?

So total was the eclipse that each time I could have found myself to be someone else, and I was perplexed and often saddened by the strict law which brought me back from so far away to reenter this narrow confine of humanity which is myself. What are those particularities upon which we lay so much store, since they count so little for us when we are liberated in sleep, and since for one second before returning, regretfully, into the body of Hadrian I was about to savor almost consciously that new existence without content and without a past?…

[The] narrator of Le coup de grâce [engages] in a desperate attempt to build barriers of difference between himself and the frightening encroachment of the Other. Mémoires d'Hadrien, on the contrary, begins with an effort to break down those barriers. It undermines thus the differences upon which the notion of hierarchy, so crucial to the masculinist mindset of an Erick von Lhomond, depends. Perhaps this is all the more remarkable inasmuch as they are also, of course, the differences upon which reposes the imperial foundation of Hadrian's power: "Endormis, Caïus Caligula et le juste Aristide se valent; je dépose mes vains et importants privilèges; je ne me distingue plus dunoir janiteur qui dort en travers de mon seuil"/"Asleep, Caius Caligula and Aristides the Just are alike; my important but empty privileges are forgotten, and nothing distinguishes me from the black porter who lies guard at my door." Whereas the narrator of Le coup de grâce seeks continually to emphasize differences in his attempt to define himself against a fearsome Otherness, Hadrian actively engages with difference in an effort to integrate himself with alterity of all kinds. The opening reflections of this fictional memoir place Hadrian in a network that connects the animals, the plants, the peoples of his realm, and the heavens, thus forging a sharp distinction between the narrating Hadrian and that other first person narrator…. Erick von Lhomond. At the same time, these pages lay the philosophical foundation for the pyramidal structure of this novel.

Born in the Roman city of Italica, in Spain, the young Hadrian was a cousin of Trajan, successor to Nerva as emperor of Rome. Though Hadrian's own accession to this position was by no means a foregone conclusion, his rise to power was steady and swift. A succession of administrative and military appointments during Trajan's reign, each more demanding than the one before, both developed and demonstrated the qualities that would eventually secure for Hadrian the title of emperor. Despite his reputation for military prowess, it became clear even before his reign began that Hadrian would refuse to continue his predecessor's politics of conquest. He describes his first consulate as a secret, unceasing struggle "en faveur de la paix"/"on behalf of peace." The most important thing, at that time, "c'est que quelqu'un s'opposât à la politique de conquêtes, en envisageât les conséquences et la fin, et se préparât, si possible, à en réparer les erreurs"/"was that someone should be in opposition to the policy of conquest, envisaging its consequences and the final aim, and should prepare himself, if possible, to repair its errors."

Having already been chosen to administer the civil affairs of the empire during Trajan's last campaign against the Parthians, Hadrian succeeded to the throne upon his cousin's death. His reign began with the first fulfillment of that pledge to peace that he had secretly made before his advent and that would continue to guide his development as emperor:

Les négociations reprirent, ouvertement désormais; je fis répandre partout que Trajan luimême m'en avait chargé avant de mourir. Je raturai d'un trait les conquêtes dangereuses: non seulement la Mésopotamie, où nous n'aurions pas pu nous maintenir, mais l'Arménie trop excentrique et trop lointaine, que je ne gardai qu'au rang d'Etat vassal…. Je tâchai de faire passer dans les pourparlers cette ardeur que d'autres réservent pour le champ de bataille; je forçai la paix.

Negotiations were resumed, this time openly; I let it be generally understood that Trajan himself had told me to do so before he died. With one stroke of the pen I erased all conquests which might have proved dangerous: not only Mesopotamia, where we could not have maintained ourselves, but Armenia, which was too far away and too removed from our sphere, and which I retained only as a vassal state…. I tried to put into these diplomatic conversations the same ardor that others reserve for the field of battle; I forced a peace.

As trade flourishes along routes made safe by peace, the pulse of a world that has suffered the convulsions of grave illness begins to beat again its healthy rhythm. Traveling merchants exchange not only goods with their customers but also "un certain nombre de pensées, de mots, de coutumes bien à nous, qui peu à peu s'empareraient du globe plus sûrement que les légions en marche"/"a certain number of thoughts, words, and customs genuinely our own, which little by little would take possession of the globe more securely than can advancing legions."

Having made peace with his Parthian adversary, King Osroës, Hadrian then turns his attention to settling the differences between those "eternal incompatibles," the Greeks and the Jews. A week spent in the boiling heat of an Egyptian tribunal yields a subtly wrought compromise:

Il m'importait assez peu que l'accord obtenu fût extérieur, imposé du dehors, probablement temporaire: je savais que le bien comme le mal est affaire de routine, que le temporaire se prolonge, que l'extérieur s'infiltre au-dedans, et que le masque, à la longue, devient visage. Puisque la haine, la sottise, le délire ont des effets durables, je ne voyais pas pourquoi la lucidité, la justice, la bienveillance n'auraient pas les leurs. L'ordre aux frontières n'était rien si je ne persuadais pas ce fripier juif et ce charcutier grec de vivre tranquillement côte à côte.

It mattered little to me that the accord obtained was external, imposed from without and perhaps temporary; I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself. Since hatred, stupidity, and delirium have lasting effects, I saw no reason why good will, clarity of mind and just practice would not have their effects, too. Order on the frontiers was nothing if I could not persuade a Jewish peddler and a Greek grocer to live peaceably side by side.

It is with just such scrupulous attention to concrete, simple facts of everyday existence that Hadrian approaches every problem he seeks to resolve during the early years of his rule. His repeated successes are proof that his confidence in his methods is well-placed. Hadrian emphasizes the importance of maintaining contact with the elemental forces of life in the meditative pages that open this novel. This example illustrates that same kind of attention to the real in Hadrian's execution of his imperial duties.

Similarly vital to his efforts to pacify and stabilize the empire is Hadrian's ability to open himself to the Other. When, three years after the conclusion of his peace treaty with King Osroës, border incidents in the Orient threaten to erupt into full-scale war, Hadrian travels once again to the Parthian territory. He is determined to reach a negotiated, not a military, settlement that will satisfy both sides and that will last. After making the good-faith gesture of returning the Parthian king's daughter, taken hostage years before, Hadrian proceeds to hammer out with Osroës terms which both sides will be able to abide. The crux of his method is to put himself in Osroës' shoes:

Mes curieuses disciplines mentales m'aidaient à capter cette pensée fuyante: assis en face de l'empereur parthe, j'apprenais à prévoir, et bientôt à orienter ses réponses; j'entrais dans son jeu; je m'imaginais devenu Osroès marchandant Hadrien.

My peculiar mental disciplines helped me to grasp this elusive intelligence: seated facing the Parthian emperor, I learned to anticipate, and soon to direct, his replies; I entered into his game; last, I imagined myself as Osroës bargaining with Hadrian.

When Hadrian narrates these events to his adopted imperial grandson, the agreement concluded between him and his Parthian counterpart had held for fifteen years. All signs suggest that a permanent peace had been won.

It is by virtue of these skills that Hadrian's efforts during the first years of his reign meet almost invariably with success. His accomplishments are legion. He improves the plight of Roman slaves by establishing laws that protect them from common abuses. He enhances the condition of women, granting them legal rights that heretofore have been denied them. He institutes reforms in the realms of economic organization and agriculture. A unionist before the letter, Hadrian counts among his most satisfying days as emperor the one on which he persuades a group of seamen to join together in a kind of corporation. On the island of Britain he puts up a wall, proclaiming to the world that he has renounced the policy of conquest so aggressively pursued by his predecessor. In his beloved Greece, Hadrian sets about repairing the damages done by the invasions of Sulla, proceeding to double the size of Athens. As is always the case in these years of reparation and construction, Hadrian's gaze is constantly trained on the future.

Though I have contrasted the opening meditative pages of Mémoires d'Hadrien with those that follow, the chronological account of Hadrian's ascent to the pinnacle of his achievement is by no means bereft of reflection. Interspersed among the pages of Hadrian's narration are lyrical passages attesting to the depth and beauty of his vision. Under Hadrian's tutelage, Rome will be even more than a flourishing capital city. Rome will come to represent forever those ideals of justice and peace that Hadrian vows to extend to the farthest reaches of the empire:

Elle échapperait à son corps de pierre; elle se composerait du mot d'Etat, du mot de citoyenneté, du mot de république, une plus sûre immortalité. Dans les pays encore incultes, sur les bords du Rhin, du Danube, ou de la mer des Bataves, chaque village défendu par une palissade de pieux me rappelait la hutte de roseaux, le tas de fumier où nos jumeaux romains dormaient gorgés de lait de louve: ces métropoles futures reproduiraient Rome. Aux corps physiques des nations et des races, aux accidents de la géographie et de l'histoire, aux exigences disparates des dieux ou des ancêtres, nous aurions à jamais superposé, mais sans rien détruire, l'unité d'une conduite humaine, l'empirisme d'une expérience sage. Rome se perpétuerait dans la moindre petite ville où des magistrats s'efforcent de vérifier les poids des marchands, de nettoyer et d'éclairer leurs rues, de s'opposer au désordre, à l'incurie, à la peur, à l'injustice, de réinterpréter raisonnablement les lois. Elle ne périrait qu'avec la dernière cité des hommes.

She would no longer be bound by her body of stone, but would compose for herself from the words State, citizenry, and republic a surer immortality. In the countries as yet untouched by our culture, on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, or the shores of the Batavian Sea, each village enclosed within its wooden palisade brought to mind the reed hut and dunghill where our Roman twins had slept content, fed by the milk of the wolf; these cities-to-be would follow the pattern of Rome. Over separate nations and races, with their accidents of geography and history and the disparate demands of their ancestors or their gods, we should have superposed for ever a unity of human conduct and the empiricism of sober experience, but should have done so without destruction of what had preceded us. Rome would be perpetuating herself in the least of the towns where magistrates strive to demand just weight from the merchants, to clean and light the streets, to combat disorder, slackness, superstition and injustice, and to give broader and fairer interpretation to the laws. She would endure to the end of the last city built by man.

As this and other passages demonstrate, in every project undertaken, Hadrian knows he is renewing the traditions of the past so that they will stand the test of time to come: "J'ai beaucoup reconstruit: c'est collaborer avec le temps sous son aspect de passé, en saisir ou en modifier l'esprit, lui servir de relais vers un plus long avenir; c'est retrouver sous les pierres le secret des sources"/"I have done much rebuilding. To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future. Thus beneath the stones we find the secret of the springs." Like the hands-on contact with the real that is a key to Hadrian's diplomatic successes, it is here, once again, an intimate contact with the elemental that provides the foundation upon which the future foreseen is erected.

All indications suggest that Hadrian's successes will be as limitless as they are spectacular. Hadrian compares himself, so many and varied are his triumphs, to a "joueur qui gagne à tout coup"/"player who wins at every throw." It is during this period of his ascending fortunes that the emperor meets up with young Antinous. Their love will be the crowning glory of an already glorious existence.

From the very beginning, Hadrian's liaison with Antinous is shown to partake of that same adhesion to the real that plays such a crucial role in the emperor's realization of his imperial goals. Hadrian meets the Bithynian Antinous for the first time, significantly, "au bord d'une source consacrée à Pan"/"beside a spring consecrated to Pan." Perhaps it is the spring's consecration to this Greek god of forests, flocks, and shepherds that prompts Hadrian to compare Antinous, upon first catching sight of him, to "un berger au fond des bois, vaguement sensible à quelque obscur cri d'oiseau"/"some shepherd, deep in the woods, vaguely aware of a strange bird's cry." In any event, our first view of the youth, seated on the edge of the basin into which flows an underground spring, cannot but recall the early passage in which Hadrian speaks so reverently of the water that "diffuses within us the most secret salt of earth and the rain of heaven," thus heralding that privileged and sensual relation to the primordial that Antinous will incarnate in the pages to follow.

Encountered under the sign of that life-giving element, water, Antinous will also be associated time and again with the earth, with plants, or with wild animals.

Sa présence était extraordinairement silencieuse: il m'a suivi comme un animal ou comme un génie familier. Il avait d'un jeune chien les capacités infinies d'enjouement et d'indolence, la sauvagerie, la confiance. Ce beau lévrier avide de caresses et d'ordres se coucha sur ma vie.

His presence was extraordinarily silent: he followed me like some animal, or a familiar spirit. He had the infinite capacity of a young dog for play and for swift repose, and the same fierceness and trust. This graceful hound, avid both for caresses and commands, took his post at my feet.

Later on, as clouds of doom begin to gather on the horizon, Antinous' connection to the animal world, as well as to the earth and to the emperor, comes once again to the fore. It is the eve of Hadrian's dedication of the Olympieion in Athens. He enters a temple with Antinous where a sacrificial python awaits his fate:

[A]u pied de l'échafaudage, le grand python que j'avais fait chercher aux Indes pour le consacrer dans ce sanctuaire grec reposait déjà dans sa corbeille de filigrane, bête divine, emblème rampant de l'esprit de la Terre, associé de tout temps au jeune homme nu qui symbolise le Génie de l'empereur. Antinoüs, entrant de plus en plus dans ce rôle, servit lui-même au monstre sa ration de mésanges aux ailes rognées.

[A]t the foot of the scaffolding lay the great python brought from India at my order to be consecrated in this Greek sanctuary. Already reposing in its filigree basket, the divine snake, emblem of Earth on which it crawls, has long been associated with the nude youth who symbolizes the emperor's Genius. Antinous, entering more and more into that role, himself fed the monster its ration of wing-clipped wrens.

Of all the passages in which Antinous signifies the intimate contact with primary forces that stands Hadrian in such good stead over the course of his first years as emperor, none is more explicit than this one from the next-to-last segment of the "Saeculum aureum" section. As Hadrian sails with Antinous upon the Nile, he reaches over to caress his young favorite:

Ma main glissait sur sa nuque, sous ses cheveux. Dans les moments les plus vains ou les plus ternes, j'avais ainsi le sentiment de rester en contact avec les grands objets naturels, l'épaisseur des forêts, l'échine musclée des panthères, la pulsation régulière des sources.

My hand passed over his neck, under his heavy hair; thus even in the dullest or most futile moments I kept some feeling of contact with the great objects of nature, the thick growth of the forests, the muscular back of the panther, the regular pulsation of springs.

It is as if Antinous becomes the primary means whereby Hadrian keeps touch with those primordial forces that figure so importantly in the reflections with which his memoirs begin and that are so central to Hadrian's efforts to pacify, rebuild, and amplify the freedoms of the Roman empire he inherited.

Scrupulous attention to the smallest details of his reign played a role in Hadrian's spectacular imperial success. It is to his capacity for engaging in a similarly passionate physical attention to his partner that Hadrian also attributes his felicity as a lover:

Tout bonheur est un chef-d'oeuvre: la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre hésitation l'altère, la moindre lourdeur le dépare, la moindre sottise l'abêtit. Le mien n'est responsable en rien de celles de mes imprudences qui plus tard l'ont brisé: tant que j'ai agi dans son sens, j'ai été sage. Je crois encore qu'il eût été possible à un homme plus sage que moi d'être heureux jusqu'à sa mort.

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.

The importance of this kind of "passionate attention" to all aspects of existence has been stressed in Yourcenar's works time and time again. In "Borges ou le voyant," for example, which appears in the posthumous En pèlerin et en étranger, Yourcenar states that "Les Hindous ont raison de faire de l'Ekagrata, l'attention, l'une des plus hautes qualités mentales"/"The Hindus are right to make Ekagrata, or attention, one of the highest mental qualities." She addresses this issue as well, with specific reference to the emperor Hadrian, in her interviews with Matthieu Galey [in Les yeux ouverts]:

Ce qu'on vous recommande toujours, et ce qui est extraordinairement difficile à acquérir, c'est ce que les sages hindous appelaient l'attention, une attention qui élimine les trois quarts, les neuf dixièmes de ce que l'on croit penser, tandis qu'en réalité on ne pense pas;… C'est extrêmement difficile à réaliser: il y a toute espèce d'astuces, différentes manières d'arriver à cet état, que j'ai fait d'ailleurs décrire à Hadrien lui-même apprenant à vivre….

Generally speaking, one must try against considerable difficulty to achieve what Hindu sages describe as a state of "attentiveness," in which you get rid of three-quarters or nine-tenths of what you seem to think but really don't…. It's extremely difficult to do. There are all sorts of tricks, a whole variety of ways, for arriving at this state of attentiveness, some of which I have Hadrian describe….

In turning to the question of the sacrificial death that ravages Hadrian's world, forming the pivot of this novel's structural pyramid, we must ask to what extent it is a coincidence that that death takes place at a time when the emperor's attention, both to Antinous and to the smallest details of his acts, is at its lowest ebb.

Antinous' death puts an end to that "Age of Gold" chronicled in the fourth section of Mémoires d'Hadrien, entitled "Saeculum aureum." It does not occur without warning. Indeed a series of progressively more ominous incidents prepares the reader, if not the narrated emperor, for the impending catastrophe. Many of these involve acts, either personal or ritual, that are themselves sacrificial in nature.

The first concerns Hadrian's imperial reader, the Stoic philosopher Euphrates. Having suffered for years from a debilitating ailment, Euphrates one day requests permission from Hadrian to put an end to his misery by suicide. "Ce problème du suicide, qui m'a obsédé depuis, me semblait alors de solution facile. Euphratès eut l'autorisation qu'il réclamait"/"The problem of suicide which has obsessed me since seemed then of easy solution. Euphrates received the authorization which he sought." It was Antinous whom the emperor dispatched to bear this news to the Stoic philosopher, who killed himself the following day. The incident was a sobering one for Hadrian's favorite, who could not seem to shake it from his thoughts: "Nous reparlâmes plusieurs fois de cet incident: l'enfant en demeura assombri durant quelques jours. Ce bel être sensuel regardait la mort avec horreur; je ne m'apercevais pas qu'il y pensait déjà beaucoup"/"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."

Two pages thereafter is recounted the first of several sacrificial rites to which Antinous will be witness. Hadrian recalls this event, which takes place in Phrygia, as one that formed "l'image la plus complète et la plus lucide"/"the clearest and most complete idea" of his happiness with the Bithynian youth who had come to occupy such an important place in his affections. As is frequently the case regarding the scenes of his commerce with Antinous that Hadrian recounts in these memoirs, this recollection is set in surroundings untouched by the reach of civilization, so appropriate to the just-barely-tame creature he cherishes. Hadrian had ordered a statue placed on the abandoned tomb of Alcibiades to commemorate this Greek hero who had died on this spot several centuries before. He had also made arrangements for the sacrifice of a young bull to be consumed later during the evening's festivities. The relation between Antinous and this night spent paying homage to Alcibiades is signaled early on by Hadrian's reference to its illustration of their happiness. But this is not the only link. It is surely not hard to imagine a connection between the much-traveled Alcibiades and Hadrian himself—all the more so given the former's reputation for intelligence and statesmanship. Nor is another possibility to be dismissed outright. In light of what is to come, this brief passage on a figure of the past who, in addition to his finer qualities, was also noted for his debauchery and prodigality can be read as foreshadowing an aspect of Hadrian's character that has yet to come to the fore. In any event, there can be little doubt that the site on which this first ritual sacrifice takes place is a meaningful one. Phrygia is located "sur les confins où la Grèce et l'Asie se mélangent"/"on the borderlands where Greece melts into Asia." Antinous is a Greek with Asian blood: "Antinoüs était Grec…. Mais l'Asie avait produit sur ce sang un epu âcre l'effet de la goutte de miel qui trouble et parfume un vin pur"/"Antinous was Greek…. But Asia had produced its effect upon that rude blood, like the drop of honey which clouds and perfumes a pure wine." This first in a series of ritual sacrifices is clearly linked in an intimate way to the evolving destiny of the young man from Bithynia.

I have already evoked the next sacrifice recounted by Hadrian: that of an Indian python offered up as part of the Olympieion festivities in Athens. It is upon this occasion that Hadrian remarks that his young favorite seems to be entering more and more deeply into the role of the emperor's Genius, or attendant spirit. According to the ancients, one's Genius bore the burden of presiding, for good or for ill, over one's destiny. With the perspective of hindsight, Hadrian's text hints that the prayer made by his lover within the walls of that sanctuary already contained at least the seed of the plan that he would later carry out: "Je savais que cette prière, faite pour moi, ne s'adressait qu'à moi seul, mais je n'étais pas assez dieu pour en deviner le sens, ni pour savoir si elle serait un jour ou l'autre exaucée"/"I knew that this prayer, made for me, was addressed to no one but myself, though I was not god enough to grasp its sense, nor to know if it would some day be answered." Shadows begin here to gather, and Hadrian expresses relief upon emerging from the darkness of the temple into the brightly lit Athenian streets.

From this point forward, the sacrifices leading up to that of Antinous take on a more violent character, one following fast upon the other in a kind of bloody spiral. Hadrian describes this period as one in which "la danse devient vertige, où le chant s'achève en cri"/"the dance leaves us reeling and song ends in outcry." He who had years before taken part in the savage initiation rituals connected with certain Asian mystery sects consents to attend, despite having forbidden such practices, the orgies of Cybele. They are gruesome rites of human mutilation. Hadrian's account of the event highlights the morbid fascination that the ceremony holds for the young Antinous:

j'ai vu l'affreux tourbillonnement des danses ensanglantées; fasciné comme un chevreau mis en présence d'un reptile, mon jeune compagnon contemplait avec terreur ces hommes qui choisissaient de faire aux exigences de l'âge et du sexe une réponse aussi définitive que celle de la mort, et peut-être plus atroce.

I witnessed the hideous whirling of bleeding dancers; fascinated as a kid in presence of a snake, my young companion watched with terror these men who were electing to answer the demands of age and of sex with a response as final as that of death itself, and perhaps more dreadful.

Though the "demands of age" might well seem a topic far removed from the thoughts of a still adolescent Antinous, the previous paragraph informs us that this youth, described now as brooding and melancholic, is anxiously concerned that he will shortly turn nineteen.

No sooner do the blood-spattered dancers to the orgiastic glory of Cybele come to rest than another sanguinary ritual begins. As befits the ever more rapidly spinning gyre of sacrifices into whose vortex Antinous will soon leap, this time Hadrian's companion will himself take part in the rite. Harking back to that first ritual offering of a young bull, so pointedly related to Antinous, the taurobolium takes place in a sacred cave. Its dark shadows recall those of the temple in which the boy from Bithynia voiced his prayer for the emperor's welfare, adopting the role of his Genius.

It is the emperor's Syrian host in the city of Palmyra who suggests that Antinous be initiated into the cult of Mithra, as Hadrian himself had done some years before. A rigorous religion, widespread during the second century, Mithraism exacted above all other values an unflinching loyalty among its adepts. There is no wonder, then, that Antinous embraces this chance to join the cult with such fervor. Though the emperor's youthful attraction to such passionate fraternal values and feverish ceremonies is a thing of the past, he agrees to serve as sponsor for his ardent young friend.

Mais quand je vis émerger de la fosse ce corps strié de rouge, cette chevelure feutrée par une boue gluante, ce visage éclaboussé de taches qu'on ne pouvait laver, et qu'il fallait laisser s'effacer d'elles-mêmes, le dégoût me prit à la gorge, et l'horreur de ces cultes souterrains et louches.

But when I saw his body, streaked with red, emerging from the ditch, his hair matted with sticky mud and his face spattered with stains which could not be washed away but had to be left to wear off themselves, I felt only disgust and abhorrence for all such subterranean and sinister cults.

Shortly thereafter, Hadrian issues an order forbidding his troops, which are stationed nearby, to enter the underground chamber of Mithra.

An equally disturbing and equally premonitory sacrifice takes place shortly after the bloody taurobolium of Palmyra. Its setting is the summit of Mount Casius, near Antioch, where Hadrian had often held such ceremonies during his tenure as governor of Syria. As he had done once before in order to witness the much-reputed beauty of dawn from the mountaintop, Hadrian climbs Mount Casius at night with a small group of friends. This time, however, as never before, the emperor experiences a shortness of breath that causes him to stop for a moment and lean on his young lover's shoulder. This unprecedented lapse in Hadrian's vigor is taken as a sign by Antinous that the propitiatory sacrifice that he has perhaps already planned is, in fact, more urgent than he thought.

When the imperial party has nearly reached the summit of the mountain, a thunderstorm breaks out. Both priest and sacrificial victim are struck by lightning a moment before the ceremony can begin. They die instantly. This extraordinary event is immediately seen as propitious. Witnesses proclaim that:

L'homme et le faon sacrifiés par cette épée divine s'unissaient à l'éternité de mon Génie: ces vies substituées prolongeaient la mienne. Antinoüs agrippé à mon bras tremblait, non de terreur, comme je le crus alors, mais sous le coup d'une pensée que je compris plus tard.

The man and fawn thus sacrificed by this divine sword were uniting with the eternity of my Genius; that these lives, by substitution, were prolonging mine. Antinous gripping fast to my arm was trembling, not from terror, as I then supposed, but under the impact of a thought which I was to understand only later on.

We have already seen how frequently the text associates Antinous with various animals. It is surely no coincidence that, only six pages prior to Hadrian's account of the sacrificial thunderbolt, the youth is called precisely a "jeune faon"/"young fawn." Nor can it be denied that the young man who understands himself to embody the emperor's Genius sees this incident as a significant one. Looking back on this part of his past, Hadrian views it as a decisive factor in what was so soon to take place: "L'éclair du mont Cassius lui montrait une issue: la mort pouvait devenir une dernière forme de service, un dernier don, et le seul qui restât"/"The lightning of Mount Casius had revealed to him a way out: death could become a last form of service, a final gift, and the only one which seemed left for him to give." And give it he soon would.

Having traveled first to Jerusalem, then to Alexandria, Hadrian consents to a trip to Canopus where a magician of local repute resides. Both Antinous and Lucius Ceionius, who much earlier in Hadrian's reign had been the emperor's lover for a time, accompany him. Night has fallen over Egypt, as it soon will descend upon Hadrian's life.

The predictions of the sorceress are ominous. Problems of every sort will soon beset the emperor upon whom fate has smiled for so long. Everything can be set straight, however, with a magical sacrifice that the Egyptian prophetess will be only too willing to perform. The victim of choice is an "animal familier" or "pet animal"—designations, of course, recalling similar textual references to Antinous—belonging, if possible, to the emperor. Antinous proposes a much cherished falcon that Hadrian had given him after receiving it himself from the king of Osroëne.

Several aspects of the falcon's death will presently find themselves repeated in that of young Antinous. As was seen to be the case with priest and fawn atop Mount Casius, the bird's years of earthly life will serve to extend that of Hadrian; its soul will unite with the emperor's Genius. After his death, this invisible spirit may appear before Hadrian and continue to serve him. Above all, it is important that

la victime ne se débattît pas et que la mort parût volontaire. Enduite rituellement de miel et d'essence de rose, la bête inerte fut déposée au fond d'une cuve remplie d'eau du Nil; la créature noyée s'assimilait à l'Osiris emporté par le courant du fleuve.

the victim should not struggle, and that the death should appear voluntary. Rubbed over with ritual honey and attar of roses, the animal, now inert, was placed in the bottom of a tub filled with Nile water; in drowning thus it was to be assimilated to Osiris borne along on the river's current.

With the seemingly interminable service completed, the sorceress inters the casketed bird "au bord du canal, dans un cimetière abandonné"/"at the edge of the canal, in an abandoned cemetery." A few days later, Hadrian will find his lover face down in the mud of a similar site at the edge of the same river in whose water his falcon before him had drowned.

The indelible tragedy of Antinous's death is conveyed, before the fact of its narration, in the opening words of the antepenultimate segment of "Saeculum aureum" section. In its agonized length and precision, Hadrian's remembrance of the date that his companion chose to die conveys, perhaps more vividly than any other passage, the grief that would be his from that day forth: "Le premier jour du mois d'Athyr, la deuxième année de la deux cent vingt-sixième Olympiade …"/"The first of the month of Athyr, the second year of the two hundred and twenty-sixth Olympiad …" It is the anniversary of the death of the same god, Osiris, to which Antinous's falcon had so recently been sacrificed.

The night before his death, Antinous joins Hadrian for dinner aboard Lucius's boat. He wears a robe recalling the description, from an earlier period in Hadrian's reign, of "Tellus stabilita, le Génie de la Terre pacifiée"/"Tellus Stabilita, the Genius of the Pacified Earth," represented "sous l'aspect d'un jeune homme couché qui tient des fruits et des fleurs"/"in the guise of a reclining youth who holds fruits and flowers." In a subtle reminder, on the eve of his drowning, of his role as the emperor's Genius, Antinous appears clad in a "longue robe syrienne, mince comme une pelure de fruit, toute semée de fleurs et de Chimères"/"long Syrian robe, sheer as the skin of a fruit and strewn over with flowers and chimeras." In this poetic way, we are alerted once again that Antinous is now the symbol of both a personal and an imperial ideal.

When the fatal day arrives, a ritual wailing has gone on for three days in lamentation for the drowned Osiris. Antinous' disappearance brings Hadrian and Chabrias to a chapel the old tutor once visited with the Bithynian youth. "Sur une table à offrandes, les cendres d'un sacrifice étaient encore tièdes. Chabrias y plongea les doigts, et en retira presque intacte une boucle de cheveux coupés"/"On an offering table lay ashes still warm from a sacrifice; turning them with his fingers, Chabrias drew forth a lock of hair, almost intact." In a basin near a bend in the Nile lies the body of Hadrian's young companion. Antinous, it seems, has sacrificed himself to ensure the good fortune of the man he had loved and the emperor he had worshipped. The consequences of his act, however, are thoroughly contrary to his intentions. With Antinous' death a series of events begins, both public and private, that cause Hadrian to sink, as the years wear on, to an existential nadir.

Antinous' death provides the lamentable climax to a long series of sacrifices that cannot have failed to have their effect on this impressionable youth. He was inclined, moreover, to a certain heroic romanticization of his liaison with Hadrian, as is suggested, for example, by the similarity he saw between them and the legendary Achilles and Patroclus. As we have found to be the case regarding other self-sacrifices, however, there remains a certain equivocality regarding the nature of Antinous' death to which Hadrian refers in the following passage. It affords him a horrible joy to view Antinous' death as a sacrifice made in his honor:

Mais j'étais seul à mesurer combien d'âcreté fermente au fond de la douceur, quelle part de désespoir se cache dans l'abnégation, quelle haine se mélange à l'amour. Un être insulté me jetait à la face cette preuve de dévouement; un enfant inquiet de tout perdre avait trouvé ce moyen de m'attacher à jamais à lui. S'il avait espéré me protéger par ce sacrifice, il avait dû se croire bien peu aimé pour ne pas sentir que le pire des maux serait de l'avoir perdu.

But I was the only one to measure how much bitter fermentation there is at the bottom of all sweetness, or what degree of despair is hidden under abnegation, what hatred is mingled with love. A being deeply wounded had thrown this proof of devotion at my very face; a boy fearful of losing all had found this means of binding me to him forever. Had he hoped to protect me by such a sacrifice he must have deemed himself unloved indeed not to have realized that the worst of ills would be to lose him.

What are the sources and the nature of this bitterness, this hatred, this despair? How had Antinous been so deeply wounded? Why would the beloved youth fear losing all? We must answer these questions, for Antinous' death is not merely the result of a romanticized notion of sacrifice, nor even of the desire to serve the man he loved, however fervently sincere that desire may have been. Mémoires d'Hadrien, after all, recounts Hadrian's life. And there is a sense in which Antinous' fatal gesture can be viewed as the physical enactment of another sacrificial event that had already taken place within Hadrian himself.

The two constitutive elements of Hadrian's personal happiness and political success, keeping in touch with the real and staying open to the Other, were both factors in the intimacy that developed between Hadrian and the youth from Bithynia. In fact, in his role as the emperor's Genius, Antinous comes to serve as the textual symbol of these qualities. But with the dizzying success of his every endeavor, Hadrian begins to betray the principles upon which those successes were erected.

"Peu à peu, la lumière changea"/"Little by little the light changed." The passage of time transforms the child whom Hadrian encountered on the edge of a spring into a young prince. A process of distancing begins that, however slightly at first, attenuates the intimacy of yore:

Durant les chasses organisées dans les domaines de Lucius, en Toscane, j'avais pris plaisir à mêler ce visage parfait aux figures lourdes et soucieuses des grands dignitaires, aux profils aigus des Orientaux, aux mufles épais des veneurs bar-bares, à obliger le bien-aimé au rôle difficile de l'ami.

At the hunts organized in Tuscany, in Lucius' domains, it had pleased me to place this perfect visage in among the heavy and care-laden faces of high officials, or alongside the sharp Oriental profiles and the broad, hairy faces of barbarian huntsmen, thus obliging the beloved to maintain also the difficult role of friend.

In the past, even the humblest and most anonymous of Hadrian's subjects could be assured of the emperor's passionate attention to their plight. At the height of his happiness with Antinous, however, and lost in his own fantasies,

il m'arriva d'oublier la personne humaine, l'enfant qui s'efforçait vainement d'apprendre le latin, priait l'ingénieur Décrianus de lui donner des leçons de mathématiques, puis y renonçait, et qui, au moindre reproche, s'en allait bouder à l'avant du navire en regardant la mer.

I sometimes forgot the purely human, the boy who vainly strove to learn Latin, who begged the engineer Decrianus for lessons in mathematics, then quickly gave up, and who at the slightest reproach used to take himself off to the prow of the ship to gaze broodingly at the sea.

Though the narrating Hadrian continues to protest that he loved his young companion more, rather than less, as time went by, it is increasingly clear that the figure narrated wished to disentangle himself from a commitment that weighed on him more and more heavily. Hadrian started taking other lovers; he frequented brothels. One night in Smyrna, he forced "l'objet aimé à subir la présence d'une courtisane"/"the beloved one to endure the presence of a courtesan." Antinous, whose notion of love included that of exclusivity, was nauseated by this experience.

Several pages earlier, Hadrian describes a trip to Sardinia where he and Antinous take refuge in a peasant's hut during a storm. It is a remembrance of the joy of their early years together. As his young lover helps their host prepare dinner, he reflects on his bliss: "je me crus Zeus visitant Philémon en compagnie d'Hermès. Ce jeune homme aux jambes repliées sur un lit était ce même Hermès dénouant ses sandales; Bacchus cueillait cette grappe, ou goûtait pour moi cette coupe de vin rose; ces doigts durcis par la corde de l'arc étaient ceux d'Eros"/"I felt like Zeus visiting Philemon in company with Hermes. The youth half reclining on a couch, knees upraised, was that same Hermes untying his sandals; it was Bacchus who gathered grapes or tasted for me the cup of red wine; the fingers hardened by the bowstring were those of Eros." The euphoric nature of this vision contrasts sharply with Hadrian's reaction when Antinous, some time later, engages in a similar mythification of their liaison. The emperor had journeyed to Troas. He stopped for a moment to pay his respects at Hector's tomb; Antinous, meanwhile, visited that of Patroclus. "Je ne sus pas reconnaître dans le jeune faon qui m'accompagnait l'émule du camarade d'Achille: je tournai en dérision ces fidélités passionnées qui fleurissent surtout dans les livres; le bel être insulté rougit jusqu'au sang"/"I failed to recognize in the devoted young fawn who accompanied me an emulator of Achilles' friend: when I derided those passionate loyalties which abound chiefly in books the handsome boy was insulted, and flushed crimson."

It was not only at the level of his intimate affairs that the emperor's relations with his world had changed. Hadrian's phenomenal imperial success had multiplied what he once calls his "chances de vertige"/"sense of vertiginous heights"—heights, one might add, from which one risks falling. Not long before Antinous' death, Hadrian and his entourage made a stop in Jerusalem, where the emperor intended to construct a new city on the ruins of the old. To be called Aelia Capitolina, it would be a modern metropolis of the Roman design that had served so well in other locations. But Jerusalem is not a location like any other. The Jews are outraged by Hadrian's plans to violate their sacred ruins; the first workers to raise a pickax are assaulted by an angry crowd. With a disregard for the local population that Hadrian has never shown before, he presses on with his project. Passionate personal attention to every single detail, in the past, has assured the success of Hadrian's endeavors. Before the walls of Jerusalem, however, he not only fails but refuses to see that he has lit a fire of hatred that will not soon be extinguished: "Je refusai de voir, sur ces tas de débris, la croissance rapide de la haine"/"I refused to see in those heaps of rubble the rapid growth of hatred." Three years after Antinous' death, Hadrian will find himself waging war against those he had so heedlessly and thoroughly offended.

He will provoke a similar, though less virulent, animosity from his subjects in Alexandria upon arriving there. In a passage of remarkable hostility, Hadrian criticizes the useless proliferation of Christian sects in that city, referring to two rival leaders as charlatans. As for the dregs of Egyptian society, they amuse themselves by cudgeling foreigners. Those of higher station find their pleasure in religious conversions.

Mais l'or est leur seule idole: je n'ai vu nulle part solliciteurs plus éhontés. Des inscriptions pompeuses s'étalèrent un peu partout pour commémorer mes bienfaits, mais mon refus d'exonérer la population d'une taxe, qu'elle était fort à même de payer, m'aliéna bientôt cette tourbe.

But gold is their only idol: nowhere have I seen more shameless importuning. Grandiose inscriptions were displayed all about to commemorate my benefactions, but my refusal to exempt the inhabitants from a tax which they were quite able to pay soon alienated that rabble from me.

The antipathy that pervades this account could be a sign of increasing arrogance on the part of the narrated Hadrian or else the mark of an impatient narrator rationalizing the mistakes of his past; perhaps both. But in any event, this passage points once again to Hadrian's failure, indeed refusal, to engage with a discontented populace in a meaningful way. Both Lucius and Antinous are subjected to the insults of a scornful people.

These incidents make only too clear that the alienation from his former self upon arriving at the summit of his powers affects Hadrian's actions as emperor in the same unfortunate way that it influences his behavior as a lover. The decline that follows the loss of Antinous will manifest itself similarly in both the personal and the professional spheres.

The section of Mémoires d'Hadrien that follows Antinous' death bears the heading "Disciplina augusta." As this title suggests, from now on it is to a rigorous discipline that Hadrian will make himself adhere. But, while self-discipline may be better than distraction, it is no substitute for that lucid and supple adhesion to the real that underlay the triumphs of a now bygone era. Nor can it restore the joy that once had been his.

Those people and places he had formerly loved are suddenly seen as despicable. Returning to Antioch, where he had governed toward the end of Trajan's reign, he calls the populace stupid, mocking, and frivolous. His plans for reform in Asia are not being properly realized; everyone's concern is for personal gain. No one, in short, can do anything right.

The intellectual pursuits that had previously given him pleasure have also gone sour:

Les trois quarts de nos exercices intellectuels ne sont plus que broderies sur le vide; je me demandais si cette vacuité croissante était due à un abaissement de l'intelligence ou à un déclin du caractère; quoi qu'il en fût, la médiocrité de l'esprit s'accompagnait presque partout d'une etonnante bassesse d'âme.

Three quarters of our intellectual performances are no more than decorations upon a void; I wondered if that increasing vacuity was due to the lowering of intelligence or to moral decline; whatever the cause, mediocrity of mind was matched almost everywhere by shocking selfishness and dishonesty.

Philosophers themselves fare no better. Once respected companions, they now are pedants who revel in malicious remarks. When Hadrian adds what he believes to be the too-long-neglected works of Hesiod and Ennius to the school curriculum, "ces esprits routiniers me prêtèrent aussitôt l'envie de détrôner Homère, et le limpide Virgile que pourtant je citais sans cesse. Il n'y avait rien à faire avec ces gens-là"/"those routine minds promptly attributed to me the desire to dethrone Homer, and the gentle Virgil as well (whom nevertheless I was always quoting). There was nothing to be done with people of that sort."

Hadrian once had been calm and even-tempered. Now he is impatient and easily angered. He indulges as well in a period of morbid suspicion. Someone, he fears, is planning to poison him. In an effort to foreclose an attack upon his life, he stoops to reading personal letters addressed to his friends. They are not amused.

These character changes may seem to be harmless enough, but such is not the case. Depicting the depths to which Hadrian sinks, and explicitly linked to the loss of his favorite, this incident concerns an imperial secretary, perverse and stubbornly set in his outmoded ways: "Ce sot m'irrita un jour plus qu'à l'ordinaire; je levai la main pour frapper; par malheur, je tenais un style, qui éborgna l'oeil droit. Je n'oublierai jamais ce hurlement de douleur, ce bras maladroitement plié pour parer le coup, cette face convulsée d'où jaillissait le sang"/"This fool irritated me one day more than usual; I raised my hand to slap him; unhappily, I was holding a style, which blinded his right eye. I shall never forget that howl of pain, that arm awkwardly bent to ward off the blow, that convulsed visage from which the blood spurted." When Hadrian asks him to fix a compensation for the harm he has been done, the only thing he wants is another right eye. The passage concludes, revealingly, thus: "Je n'avais pas voulu éborgner ce misérable. Mais je n'avais pas voulu non plus qu'un enfant qui m'aimait mourût à vingt ans"/"I had not wished to injure the wretch. But I had not desired, either, that a boy who loved me should die in his twentieth year."

Many incidents reveal the negative changes in Hadrian's outlook and person after Antinous' death. The structural symmetry of Hadrian's rise and fall shows through most clearly, however, in those contrapuntal scenes that, echoing the period of Hadrian's ascension, punctuate that of his decline. The first of these concerns the founding of a city in honor of the emperor's companion.

During his early years as ruler, Hadrian had taken great joy in the building or rebuilding of imperial cities. We have already observed the lyrical manner in which he describes constructing city after city where Roman culture will flourish. Much more than mere structures of stone, every new metropolis provides the terrain upon which the values of Humanitas, Felicitas, Libertas can take root and thrive. Here is a typical passage from "Tellus stabilita," in which Hadrian addresses the value of those "ruches de l'abeille humaine"/"human beehives" that he did his best to multiply:

Dans un monde encore plus qu'à demi dominé par les bois, le désert, la plaine en friche, c'est un beau spectacle qu'une rue dallée, un temple à n'importe quel dieu, des bains et des latrines publiques, la boutique où le barbier discute avec ses clients les nouvelles de Rome, une échoppe de pâtissier, de marchand de sandales, peut-être de libraire, une enseigne de médecin, un théâtre où l'on joue de temps en temps une pièce de Térence.

In a world still largely made up of woods, desert, and uncultivated plain, a city is indeed a fine sight, with its paved streets, its temple to some god or other, its public baths and toilets, a shop where the barber discusses with his clients the news from Rome, its pastry shop, shoestore, and perhaps a bookshop, its doctor's sign, and a theatre, where from time to time a comedy of Terence is played.

When the time comes to build Antinoöpolis, however, Hadrian's hymn to the life of the city becomes a bitter dirge:

La mort est hideuse, mais la vie aussi. Tout grimaçait. La fondation d'Antinoé n'était qu'un jeu dérisoire: une ville de plus, un abri offert aux fraudes des marchands, aux exactions des fonctionnaires, aux prostitutions, au désordre, aux lâches qui pleurent leurs morts avant de les oublier.

Death is hideous, but life is too. Everything seemed awry. The founding of Antinoöpolis was a ludicrous endeavor, after all, just one more city to shelter fraudulent trading, official extortion, prostitution, disorder, and those cowards who weep for a while over their dead before forgetting them.

Grief, of course, is no small factor in the so marked transformation of this man. It alone does not explain, however, the long, steep slope down which Hadrian continues to hurtle.

At the beginning of "Disciplina augusta," Hadrian returns to Athens, his spiritual home. Here he embarks on another endeavor that reveals the growing contrast between his present and his former selves: the rereading of history. There had once been a time when Hadrian discerned eternal order beneath the surface chaos of human events. He evokes it in connection with his initiation to the Eleusian mysteries. The Eleusis ritual, according to an earlier Hadrian, explained "chacun de nos gestes en termes de mécanique éternelle"/"each of our motions in terms of celestial mechanism." Because of these ritual practices, "J'avais entendu les dissonances se résoudre en accord; j'avais pour un instant pris appui sur une autre sphère, contemplé de loin, mais aussi de tout près, cette procession humaine et divine où j'avais ma place, ce monde où la douleur existe encore, mais non l'erreur"/"I had heard the discords resolving into harmonies; for one moment I had stood on another sphere and contemplated from afar, but also from close by, that procession which is both human and divine, wherein I, too, had my place, this our world where suffering existed still, but error was no more." In his passionate study of astronomy as well, Hadrian looked for and found laws governing the movement of the stars. Though the constellations may appear to wander aimlessly across the heavens, scientists can, in fact, predict their cycles. He sees equally orderly forces presiding over human affairs.

These are not the conclusions that emerge from Hadrian's return to the authors of history after Antinous' death: "leur oeuvre, commentée par ma propre expérience, m'emplit d'idées sombres; l'énergie et la bonne volonté de chaque homme d'Etat semblaient peu de chose en présence de ce déroulement à la fois fortuit et fatal, de ce torrent d'occurrences trop confuses pour être prévues, dirigées, ou jugées"/"their works, judged in the light of my own experience, filled me with somber thoughts; the energy and good intentions of each statesman seemed of slight avail before this flood so fortuitous and so fatal, this torrent of happenings too confused to be foreseen or directed, or even appraised." Where hidden order once had reigned, now there was naught but a fatal flood of anarchy.

And fatal indeed the flood would prove to be—most disastrously so in the campaign of Palestine. The people of Jerusalem were already opposed, as we have seen, to the reconstruction of their city. Certain insults to their faith, though inadvertent, were enough to ignite a rebellion. Revolt then turned into full-scale war. So the emperor who had devoted his life to bringing peace to his realm spent his last active years on the Judaean front.

It is a protracted, guerrilla-type war, which Hadrian's troops are ill-equipped to fight. To make matters worse, living conditions are such that disease claims almost as many soldiers' lives as does the fighting. Though the Romans eventually overcome the fierce resistance of the Jewish partisans, Hadrian counts this war among his failures: "Je ne le nie pas: cette guerre de Judée était un de mes échecs. Les crimes de Simon et la folie d'Akiba n'étaient pas mon oeuvre, mais je me reprochais d'avoir été aveugle à Jérusalem, distrait à Alexandrie, impatient à Rome"/"There is no denying it; that war in Judaea was one of my defeats. The crimes of Simon and the madness of Akiba were not of my making, but I reproached myself for having been blind in Jerusalem, heedless in Alexandria, impatient in Rome." He also notes that it was almost as if the war-torn times that had preceded his reign were beginning all over again.

This is not the only way that the Judaean campaign serves to recall that era of ascent to happiness and glory that ended on the banks of the Nile. The war provides as well the backdrop for a nocturnal meditation, symphonic in its thematic complexity, which is the last and in many ways the bleakest of those contrapuntal passages undergirding the structure of this novel.

In both "Tellus stabilita," which precedes the account of his "Age of Gold," and "Disciplina augusta," which comes after, the narrative dwells for several vivid pages on the late-night reflections of a solitary Hadrian. The first scene takes place in the Syrian desert after the emperor's successful peace negotiations with king Osroës. We have already noted his fervent passion for the stars. Upon this particular occasion, he decides to offer "aux constellations le sacrifice d'une nuit tout entière"/"sacrifice to the constellations of an entire night." Hadrian calls these dark hours of crystalline lucidity "le plus beau de mes voyages"/"the most glorious of all my voyages." It was during that same time of his life that he began to feel himself a kind of god, divine and eternal. Both the passage describing his night beneath the stars and "Tellus stabilita" come to an end with an emphatic affirmation of his part in eternity: "la nuit syrienne représente ma part consciente d'immortalité"/"the Syrian night remains as my conscious experience of immortality."

Things are turned around, however, in "Disciplina augusta." Whereas the emperor's nocturnal voyage in the Syrian desert had taken place under the sign of a recently established peace, its companion scene is set amidst the death and desolation of the Palestine campaign. Unable to sleep, Hadrian leaves his tent for a breath of fresh air. His senses are accosted instead by the stench of dysentery that emanates from the camp hospital. No night of lucidity this, with not a star in sight. The emperor who once had known himself to be a god now declares such notions null and void: "On me suppose depuis quelques années d'étranges clairvoyances, de sublimes secrets. On se trompe, et je ne sais rien"/"For some years now people have credited me with strange insight, and with knowledge of divine secrets. But they are mistaken; I have no such power." The statesman who had once believed that good could triumph over evil and do so in a manner that would last now renounces that faith:

Nos faibles efforts pour améliorer la condition humaine ne seraient que distraitement continués par nos successeurs la graine d'erreur et de ruine contenue dans le bien même croîtrait monstrueusement au contraire au cours des siècles. Le monde las de nous se chercherait d'autres maîtres; ce qui nous avait paru sage paraîtrait insipide, abominable ce qui nous avait paru beau. Comme l'initié mithriaque, la race humaine a peut-être besoin du bain de sang et du passage périodique dans la fosse funèbre.

Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man's lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave.

The man who once had taken the "most glorious of voyages" beneath a star-studded Syrian sky is now "irrité contre moi-même d'avoir consacré à de creuses méditations sur l'avenir une nuit que j'aurais pu employer à préparer la journée du lendemain, ou à dormir"/"provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next day, or to sleep."

It is no doubt clear by now that Hadrian's affairs, both imperial and personal, are in precipitous decline. Yet they have not reached their nadir. This they will do as a result, at least in part, of his physical health, which, over the course of the events just related, has progressively deteriorated.

We have already observed Hadrian's shortness of breath upon climbing Mount Casius for the last time. This incident was a harbinger of things to come. Just before visiting the sorceress from Canopus he experienced a brief fainting spell. At the encampment in Judaea he becomes seriously ill. A persistent nosebleed saps his strength, and, shortly thereafter, Hadrian suffers the first attack of what his doctor diagnoses as an hydropic heart. As time goes by, his sickness gets worse. The last years of Hadrian's life are spent in almost total confinement.

It is in this state of infirmity that the emperor hits bottom. He decides to put an end to his life. As fear of murder had obsessed him in a healthier time, now suicide obsesses him. Afraid he lacks the strength to stab himself to death, Hadrian implores his young doctor Iollas to provide him with a mortal toxin. Though he indignantly refuses at first, Iollas finally promises to seek out the requested dose of poison. "Je l'attendis vainement jusqu'au soir. Tard dans la nuit, j'appris avec horreur qu'on venait de le trouver mort dans son laboratoire, une fiole de verre entre les mains. Ce coeur pur de tout compromis avait trouvé ce moyen de rester fidèle à son serment sans rien me refuser"/"I awaited him in vain until evening. Late in the night I learned with horror that he had just been found dead in his laboratory, with a glass phial in his hands. That heart clean of all compromise had found this means of abiding by his oath while denying me nothing." Having fallen so far, Hadrian finally sees that his life is not his own to dispose of. He agrees to submit to the painful exigencies of his fate:

Je ne refuse plus cette agonie faite pour moi, cette fin lentement élaborée au fond de mes artères, héritée peut-être d'un ancêtre, née de mon tempérament, préparée peu à peu par chacun de mes actes au cours de ma vie. L'heure de l'impatience est passée: au point où j'en suis, le désespoir serait d'aussi mauvais goût que l'espérance. J'ai renoncé à brusquer ma mort.

I no longer refuse the death agony prepared for me, this ending slowly elaborated within my arteries and inherited perhaps from some ancestor, or born of my temperament, formed little by little from each of my actions throughout my life. The time of impatience has passed; at the point where I now am, despair would be in as bad taste as hope itself. I have ceased to hurry my death.

The next and final chapter of Mémoires d'Hadrien recounts nothing less than a renascence. It begins and continues, as had his long-ago paeon to the virtues of Rome in a brisk present tense that looks toward the future: "Tout reste à faire"/"There is still much to be done." No fewer than thirteen imperial projects are listed in rapidfire succession. These are not the only signs of renewal. Having rejected the idea of his divinity during the period of decline, Hadrian now embraces it again: "Comme au temps de mon bonheur, ils me croient dieu; ils continuent à me donner ce titre au moment même où ils offrent au ciel des sacrifices pour le rétablissement de la Santé Auguste. Je t'ai déjà dit pour quelles raisons cette croyance si bienfaisante ne me paraît pas insensée"/"As in the days of my felicity, people believe me to be a god; they continue to give me that appellation even though they are offering sacrifices to the heavens for the restoration of the Imperial Health. I have already told you the reasons for which such a belief, salutary for them, seems to me not absurd." Such prodigious powers do his subjects attribute to their emper-or-god that Hadrian finds himself curing the sick by virtue of their faith in him.

Though he is nearing the end of his life, Hadrian returns to that passionate attention to his acts that had informed his past successes. It is not by chance that the latter are recalled in this last chapter of Mémoires d'Hadrien, nor that the passage that does so highlights Hadrian's unmediated contact with his work, recalling as well his openness to alterity. These are the emperor's comments on the verses of an Alexandrian Jew who, once an adversary, is now a friend:

[J]'ai accueilli sans sarcasmes cette description du prince aux cheveux gris qu'on vit aller et venir sur toutes les routes de la terre, s'enfonçant parmi les trésors des mines, réveillant les forces génératrices du sol, établissant partout la prospérité et la paix, de l'initié qui a relevé les lieux saints de toutes les races, du connaisseur en arts magiques, du voyant qui plaça un enfant au ciel.

[W]ithout irony I welcomed that description of an elderly prince who is seen going back and forth over all the roads of the earth, descending to the treasures of the mines, reawakening the generative forces of the soil, and everywhere establishing peace and prosperity; the initiate who has restored the shrines of all races, the connoisseur in magic arts, the seer who raised a youth to the heavens.

Having lost his moorings for several long years, Hadrian succeeds at the end of his reign at reconstructing himself as, in times past, he had succeeded at rebuilding Roman cities. The footsteps of wisdom in which he follows are those of his own former self. They cut a path of fervent attachment to every aspect of the real, a path that Hadrian will walk, as in his finest moments, until his final breath is drawn. "Tâchons,"/"Let us try, if we can," he ends his lengthy letter, "d'entrer dans la mort les yeux ouverts …"/"to enter into death with open eyes …".