![]() ![]() ![]() It reads - as is intended- like documentary evidence, and has an odd sort of fascination. So all of Rome's Empire is mirrored in this book, designed as a watchword for a boy who was to become Emperor. Hadrians health begins to break down and, after a brief flirtation with suicide, he decides to meet death with open eyes and an appreciation of what beauty the world can fleetingly offer. He visited every part, from crude Britain to cultured Spain, from rude Gaul to ancient Egypt and Asia Minor with decadent civilizations, and again and again to Greece, which epitomized for him what he wanted to preserve. The reader is assumed to be knowledgeable about Hadrian. But the fact remains that he wove into the very fabric of Rome and her farflung frontiers the best he found in what then constituted the known civilized world. Marguerite Yourcenar presents the novel Memoirs of Hadrian as an extended letter written by the dying emperor to his adopted grandson Marc. Hadrian is accused by today's critics of never initiating, always copying. First published in France in French in 1951 as Mémoires dHadrien, the book was an immediate success, meeting with enormous critical acclaim. The final part of Hadrian's career was virtually directed by his determination to leave the memory of Antinous alive in creation of monuments, buildings, cities. The Augustan History (Latin: Historia Augusta) is a late Roman collection of biographies, written in Latin, of the Roman Emperors, their junior colleagues, designated heirs and usurpers of the period 117 to 284. Memoirs of Hadrian (French: Mémoires dHadrien) is a novel by the Belgian-born French writer Marguerite Yourcenar about the life and death of Roman Emperor Hadrian. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, Grace Frick (Translator) 4.24 Rating details 24,271 ratings 2,103 reviews Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. Throughout, there are moments of philosophical musings, analyses of his own imbalance, preparation for the supreme emotional experience of his life, his all-obsessive love for the youth Antinous - and then Antinous' suicide, at a moment when Hadrian had been indoctrinating him with some of the mysticism which fascinated Hadrian. In what purports to be a ""letter"" to the adopted grandson who was to become the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian reviews his rather rugged boyhood in Spain, his schooling, his initiation into the military, the political life of Rome's world citizens, his administrative training in the provinces, his last moment election has heir to the title of Emperor. Yourcenar has attempted an even more difficult thing, she has actually used Hadrian's own writings and the writing of his contemporaries to recreate in the form of a philosophical autobiography- the life of the Emperor of the Romans. Inevitably analogies will be sought to that other evocation of the classic past, Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March. ![]()
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