Memoirs of Hadrian in On Paths Unknown

Nov 22, 2015 Paul rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction

This ought not to work on a number of levels and ought not to be as good as it is. A historical novel about the Romans (there is so much temptation to go into Life of Brian mode at this point), indeed about one of their emperors. Hadrian dominated Marguerite Yourcenar’s life for many years with rewrites, abandonments, acres of notes and thoughts, and an immense amount of research (including travel to places Hadrian had been). The novel is in the form of a letter from Hadrian to his adopted grand This ought not to work on a number of levels and ought not to be as good as it is. A historical novel about the Romans (there is so much temptation to go into Life of Brian mode at this point), indeed about one of their emperors. Hadrian dominated Marguerite Yourcenar’s life for many years with rewrites, abandonments, acres of notes and thoughts, and an immense amount of research (including travel to places Hadrian had been). The novel is in the form of a letter from Hadrian to his adopted grandson Marcus Aurelius. It is in the first person. Hadrian is in his final illness and is looking back over his life. If you are looking for snappy dialogue then this is not the book for you, nor is there any “action”. It is a series of musings, reflections, philosophizing and making comment as Hadrian works through his life.
The novel is essentially interior and Yourcenar does say why she selected this particular interior to focus on. It stems from a quote she found by Flaubert;
“Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone”
This seems to have been the attraction of Hadrian. The novel was published in 1951 and there may also be some connection between the post Second World War situation and Hadrian’s time.
Hadrian’s musings are wide ranging and cover love (especially Antinous his teenage lover), administration (managing and empire), war, religion, philosophy (especially Greek), food, marriage, pastimes (hunting et al), politics, friends and enemies, travel and much more. Hadrian is a great liker of things and generally quite positive, not afraid to compromise to get things done.
Yourcenar puts into Hadrian’s mouth all sorts of aphorisms and wise words. For example;
"Men adore and venerate me far too much to love me,"
"Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die."
“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.”
“I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.”
“The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.”

There are dozens more like that, usually making the book a joy to read, occasionally irritating or provoking. You can tell this novel has really been polished and honed, worked on over and over again.
This is so good a novel that it is easy to forget this isn’t real history. Mary Beard’s Guardian article explodes some of those myths;
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008...
This is fiction, but its great stuff and a great novel. I am also interested in reading more by Yourcenar, her life was also very interesting. ...more

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Nov 15, 2014 Dolors rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-in-2014, best-ever

Margerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian is not only the Roman Emperor, citizen of the world and deified ruler, whose heart throbbed at the cadence of Greek poetry, whose resilient physique conquered the barbarian borders of northern Britannia, whose strategic mind enforced groundbreaking laws to regulate the use of slaves and to promote culture in the Pantheon, whose modesty silenced insurgent voices and whose excesses intimidated allied ones.

“I have come to think that great men are characterized by the
Margerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian is not only the Roman Emperor, citizen of the world and deified ruler, whose heart throbbed at the cadence of Greek poetry, whose resilient physique conquered the barbarian borders of northern Britannia, whose strategic mind enforced groundbreaking laws to regulate the use of slaves and to promote culture in the Pantheon, whose modesty silenced insurgent voices and whose excesses intimidated allied ones.

“I have come to think that great men are characterized by the extreme position which they take, and that heir heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives. They are our poles, or our antipodes.”

Underneath the imposing greatness of the historical figure that Yourcenar pens with unfaltering dexterity, a moribund man exhales his last breath prostrated on his deathbed and confronts his contradictory selves. Drowned in erotic ambiguity, haunted by idyllic remembrances of platonic love and superfluous infatuation, Hadrian drops the mask of formidable Emperor and shows himself as a vulnerable man plagued by his remorse, aggressive pride and reckless ambition who can’t impede the upcoming dissolution of the world he has so meticulously constructed with obsessive discipline and bloodstained sacrifice.

Combining prodigious refinement with erudite depth, Yourcenar masters the first person narrative and becomes a multifaceted ventriloquist that deconstructs the layers of Hadrian’s overpowering personality while unfolding his intimate ponderings about ageing and death, friendship and true love, art and philosophy, justice and social order with academic rigorousness and aesthetic excellence, creating a dramatic tension that reaches its peak through self-absorbed observation rather than galloping action.

And when the last line is avidly consumed and the confessor meets its nemesis, no historical grandeur or remarkable feat will be imprinted on the reader's ephemeral memory. The intoxicating scent of literary perfection is what will linger in anonymous nostrils, the texture of velvety words is what will invade mental taste buds, and a wave of disarming tenderness and stunned regret will choke the humbled witness of the remnants of two thousand years of magnificence, folly and debatable progress that meander the moors of remote lands that once yielded to one of the greatest men of ancient history.

Hadrian's Wall, November 2014
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Dec 27, 2013 Garima rated it it was amazing

Shelves: my-2-cents, favorites, sing-a-song, to-re-read, remember-me-with-words

I stepped on deck; the sky, still wholly dark, was truly the iron sky of Homer's poems, indifferent to man's woes and joys alike.

But the man looking at the limitless space above him was not indifferent. He knew the woes of his people and joys of his imperium sine fine. He knew he was both human and supremely divine. Hadrian the Good. Hadrian the ‘Almost Wise’.

I didn’t know much about Hadrian. Only his name along with some cursory details occupied a negligible space of my knowledge bank. I didn I stepped on deck; the sky, still wholly dark, was truly the iron sky of Homer's poems, indifferent to man's woes and joys alike.

But the man looking at the limitless space above him was not indifferent. He knew the woes of his people and joys of his imperium sine fine. He knew he was both human and supremely divine. Hadrian the Good. Hadrian the ‘Almost Wise’.

I didn’t know much about Hadrian. Only his name along with some cursory details occupied a negligible space of my knowledge bank. I didn’t know Marguerite Yourcenar or Grace Frick either. So to read about a Roman Emperor by way of fictional memoirs was an unlikely venture for me. I was curious rather than interested as to what exactly this book has achieved which made several of my friends here to write some really exceptional paean in its honor. And now, here I am adding another voice in telling others that no matter how big or small your library is; it is essentially incomplete without Memoirs of Hadrian.

The traces of a golden era which existed centuries ago can be found among the walls of royal palaces, the colors of timeless paintings and the magnificence of stationary sculptures. They not only tell about the artist’s muse but the artist themselves. But every so often a thick curtain of those very centuries comes in between the creator and the creation. It is then that a need arises of transcending the margins of history books, of crossing the vanished borders, of being a different person altogether. The insight required in depicting a time period other than one is born into and the love required in capturing the beauty of an important individual one has never met becomes the steadfast foundation of an unparalleled wonder. Marguerite Yourcenar has given us one such wonder which would stay by your side both in this lifetime and beyond.
When useless servitude has been alleviated as far as possible, and unnecessary misfortune avoided, there will still remain as a test of man's fortitude that long series of veritable ills, death, old age and incurable sickness, love unrequited and friendship rejected or betrayed, the mediocrity of a life less vast than our projects and duller than our dreams; in short, all the woes caused by the divine nature of things.
Being a dying person and still feeling a sense of tremendous responsibility towards the mankind is a mark of a true leader. Hadrian while on his death bed bequeathed a small package of valuable reflections in the form of a lovely letter to young Marcus Aurelius but behind the salutation of ‘Dear Mark’ one can imagine their own name being addressed. These are the most beautiful and honest thoughts I have ever laid my eyes on. This is how Yourcenar has given us a memorable trip to a glorious world which was and where Hadrian still is. She hasn’t presented her hero in the shining bright light of perfection and righteousness. Hadrian was fallible but he knew how to strike that difficult balance between the different philosophies of life. If his conquests had humility, his losses contained prudent lessons. If he had immense love for his empire, he had deep respect for other cultures. If he cultivated virtues of his men, he mitigated his own vices too. He was not God, but he was Godlike.

With mesmerizing writing, exquisite translation and the portrait of a majestic ruler, everything here is much more than what their title suggest- Hadrian was more than an Emperor, Marguerite was more than a writer, Grace was more than a translator and this book, it is much more than a book.

Hospes Comesque.
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Aug 28, 2012 knig rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2012, favourites

‘Just when the Gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone’ Flaubert to La Sylphide.

This then is the Weltanschauung Yourcenar pays encomium to, panegyrically oded in Memoirs, yet tempered with subdued ‘pragnanz’: Hadrian’s bios is nothing if not temporal Dukkha extrapolated through the measured cadence of a praxeological study of human actions and their consequences, a teological affirmation ‘Just when the Gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone’ Flaubert to La Sylphide.

This then is the Weltanschauung Yourcenar pays encomium to, panegyrically oded in Memoirs, yet tempered with subdued ‘pragnanz’: Hadrian’s bios is nothing if not temporal Dukkha extrapolated through the measured cadence of a praxeological study of human actions and their consequences, a teological affirmation of the cause-effect modality which seems to have informed Hadrian’s ethos.

One of the ‘Five Good Emperors’, (Machiavelli, 1503, who noted all five succeeded as ‘adopted’ sons and seemed to rule more wisely and judiciously than those of ‘royal blood’), Hadrian was a ‘humanist’ and philhellene, interested more in art, architecture, public governance and jurisprudence rather than war, despite his formidable military campaigning. Of his twenty years as emperor, he barely engaged in military battle, and spent scarcely five in Rome: the rest were travelling throughout the empire, mostly overseeing construction and consolidation projects, collecting art and writing poetry.

Fertile grounds indeed for Yourcenar’s indomitable quest to search out the humanist-philosopher, who endaimonologically refines and consolidates the qualia of Rome’s greatest cultural achievements to pinnacled Greco-Roman heights.

‘Rome....was needed for the full realisation of what was for Greece only an admirable idea. Plato had written the Republic and glorified the Just, but we were the ones who were striving to make the State a machine fit to serve man....The word philanthropy was Greek,but we are the ones who are working to change the wretched conditions of the slave’.

A beautiful acclamation of Rome significant as ‘doer’ whereas Greece was Rodin’s ‘thinker’: and if Hadrian did not serve in terms of philosophical originality and advancement, surely his contribution, of making concrete the ‘ideal’, was no less an achievement. For what is a strategist without his tactician?

I wonder if the intervening years of relative peace devoted to the pursuit of public works did not open up a lacunae for Hadrian, allowing him to indulge the personal to an extraordinary extent. Who doesn’t know of his eromenos Antinous, a boy of twelve who becomes, effectively 50 year old Hadrian’s consort . His (debated) suicide at nineteen at the river Nile sparks Hadrian into occult and vainglorious endeavours to deify the boy, thus breaching some unspoken protocol about keeping the personal ‘private’ when you are emperor. Yourcenar handles this episode magnificently. At a moment in between Gods, when Hadrian conceptualises he is divine himself, as any other man might be, the issues of personal responsibility become acute and forefrontal. If human qualia takes on divine proportion, and if that qualia is underpinned by reveration of youth specifically, then its understandable if at nineteen Atinous conceives his currency as spent: by sacrificing himself in full bloom of youth he thus ensures his perpetuality ad infinitum: and perhaps it was this notion which spurred Hadrian into ‘conceptually’ immortalising him. Wise, is Yourcenar.

Not too long ago VS Naipaul made a big hue and cry about how women authors haven’t got it in them to write anything more scopic than domestic dramas and fluffy bunny romcoms:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...

I need to find that man and smack him over the head with this book.
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Jul 25, 2013 Sean DeLauder rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: rome, biography

Name-dropping, ghostwritten memoir of self-proclaimed average guy, Emperor Hadrian, nevertheless stuffed with useful anecdotes and aphorisms pertaining to power, human nature, etc. Purportedly addressed to fellow normal guy/Emperor-to-be, Marcus Aurelius.

Pretty brilliant stuff.

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