Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This epistle of Hadrian to his successor, imagined and composed by Marguerite Yourcenar, is a perfect book in very many ways, yet proceeds so quietly about its work that the author nearly vanishes. She submerges herself in the persona of Hadrian and speaks with authority in a voice that is easy to imagine as his own. The writing is never showy; I have read that it is very like good Latin in its rhythm and its austerity; it is rendered into a beautiful English by Grace Frick, who worked in collaboration with the author. This is the sort of book I would like to have written, though I lack the confidence of an historian to speak on behalf of an emperor who ruled a goodly portion of the known world. Yourcenar, however, is equal to the task. Her Hadrian has the wisdom we would wish for in a king of the world; he also has the cruelty, though it is not the malice of a Caligula or the madness of a Nero. There is a temptation to speak in platitudes about the decisions that are forced onto such a person by the fact of immense power over others; to do so would be to cheapen a reflection on this novel, which is so wonderfully composed that it avoids such pitfalls. Hadrian simply speaks, and since his audience is the person he has trained to be his successor, he lays bare all that he has become in the course of his long reign. His love of men in preference to women is a feature of the book but one could not call it a romance. I don’t think it’s appropriate to use the word “gay” in connection with him. The concept of sexual identity of this kind did not exist in this world. There was simply what he wanted and what he did not want. There is also, in this depiction of him, the measured control of the man, who could have had anything he wanted and as much of it as he could command, and yet lived in a kind of balance. If your only image of Rome is that of endless decline – a word which always crops up in connection with imperial Rome thanks to Gibbons – then this book offers a convincing contrast. A moving meditation on history, power, and heartache.