Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Finished July 3, 2026

I wasn’t so sure about this when I first started; I didn’t know if I could do a whole book presented as “letters” to Marcus Aurelius.

Turned out it was totally fine. More than fine, even.

Lots of gems in this one. Before Hadrian even becomes emperor:

An incident of our personal lives soon threatened to be my undoing. A handsome face was my conqueror. I became passionately attached to a youth whom the emperor also fancied.

This is actually relevant because most of the quotes I saved relate to this. While he was pretty philosophical and seemed like a pretty good ruler, Hadrian was a sucker for a pretty face. (Just not his wife’s).

And while most of the…interests…mentioned are male, there were a few ladies in the mix. I present without any further context:

Her need for money was fantastic.

My need for money is also fantastic.

Okay, before I get into the lovey dovey stuff (or get back to it) have some philosophy:

This Indian, more logically, was rejecting life itself. There was much to learn from such pure-hearted fanatics, but on the condition of turning the lesson from the meaning originally intended. These sages were trying to rediscover their god above and beyond the ocean of forms, and to reduce him to that quality of the unique, intangible, and incorporeal which he had foregone in the very act of becoming universe. I perceived differently my relations with the divine. I could see myself as seconding the deity in his effort to give form and order to a world, to develop and multiply its convolutions, extensions, and complexities. I was one of the segments of the wheel, an aspect of that unique force caught up in the multiplicity of things; I was eagle and bull, man and swan, phallus and brain all together, a Proteus who is also a Jupiter.

I did enjoy the philosophy/spiritual takes and occasional dissection of other religions. But what did I enjoy most? The same thing Hadrian did: Antinous.

His voice was low, and his Greek had the accent of Asia. Suddenly aware of my attention, or of my gaze, perhaps, he grew confused, flushed, and fell back into one of those stubborn silences to which I was soon to become accustomed. An intimacy gradually developed. He accompanied me thereafter in all of my voyages, and the fabulous years began.

And the fabulous years began. Wow. But it gets better:

I marveled at his gentleness, which had aspects of hardness, too, and the somber devotion to which he gave his whole being. And yet this submission was not blind; those lids so often lowered in acquiescence or in dream were not always so; the most attentive eyes in the world would sometimes look me straight in the face, and I felt myself judged. But I was judged as is a god by his adorer: my harshness and sudden suspicions (for I had them later on) were patiently and gravely accepted. I have been absolute master but once in my life, and over but one being.

But even with that Hadrian didn’t always appreciate how good he had it:

I did not love less; indeed I loved more. But the weight of love, like that of an arm thrown tenderly across a chest, becomes little by little too heavy to bear.

Antinous, lying in the bottom of the boat, had leaned his head on my knees, pretending to sleep in order to keep apart from conversation which did not include him. 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; but no caress goes so deep as the soul.

Antinous dies (the book goes the “he sacrificed himself” route which apparently history is divided on). Hadrian handles it totally normally:

I descended the slippery steps; he was lying at the bottom, already sunk in the river’s mud. With Chabrias’ aid I managed to lift the body, which had suddenly taken on the weight of stone. Chabrias hailed some boatmen who improvised a stretcher from sail cloth. Hermogenes, called in haste, could only pronounce him dead. That body, once so responsive, refused to be warmed again or revived. We took him aboard. Everything gave way; everything seemed extinguished. The Olympian Zeus, Master of all, Saviour of the World—all toppled together, and there was only a man with greying hair sobbing on the deck of a boat.

Two days went by before Hermogenes could get me to think of the funeral.

No, seriously, he handled it well. By embalming him, having a bazillion statues made of him, a city named/built after him, a cult formed to worship him…the usual.

On the return I visited the temple near which the sacrifice had been consummated; I spoke with the priests. Their sanctuary would be renovated to become a place of pilgrimage for all Egypt; their college, enriched and augmented, would be consecrated hereafter to the service of my god. Even in my most obtuse moments I had never doubted that young presence was divine. Greece and Asia would worship him in our manner, with games and dances, and with ritual offerings placed at the feet of a nude, white statue. Egypt, who had witnessed the death agony, would have also her part in the apotheosis: it would be the most secret and somber part, and the harshest, for this country would play the eternal role of embalmer to his body. For centuries to come priests with shaven heads would recite litanies repeating that name which for them had no value, but for me held all.

Okay, this is a long one, but I really wanted to reiterate how perfectly normal Hadrian was about this whole thing:

The journey up the river continued, but my course lay on the Styx. In prisoners’ camps on the banks of the Danube I had once seen wretches continually beating their heads against a wall with a wild motion, both mad and tender, endlessly repeating the same name. In the underground chambers of the Colosseum I had been shown lions pining away because the dog with which their keepers had accustomed them to live had been taken away. I tried to collect my thoughts: Antinous was dead. As a child I had wept and wailed over the corpse of Marullinus torn to shreds by crows, but had cried as does a mere animal, in the night. My father had died, but a boy orphaned at the age of twelve noticed no more than disorder in the house, his mother’s tears, and his own terror; he knew nothing of the anguish which the dying man had experienced. My mother had died much later, about the time of my mission in Pannonia; I do not recall the exact date. Trajan had been only a sick man who must be made to make a will. I had not seen Plotina die. Attianus had died; he was old. During the Dacian wars I had lost comrades whom I had believed that I loved ardently; but we were young, and life and death were equally intoxicating and easy. Antinous was dead. I remembered platitudes frequently heard: “One can die at any age,” or “They who die young are beloved by the gods.” I myself had shared in that execrable abuse of words; I had talked of dying of sleep, and dying of boredom. I had used the word agony, the word mourning, the word loss. Antinous was dead.

Love, wisest of gods…But love had not been to blame for that negligence, for the harshness and indifference mingled with passion like sand with the gold borne along by a stream, for that blind self-content of a man too completely happy, and who is growing old. Could I have been so grossly satisfied? Antinous was dead. Far from loving too much, as doubtless Servianus was proclaiming at that moment in Rome, I had not been loving enough to force the boy to live on. Chabrias as a member of an Orphic cult held suicide a crime, so he tended to insist upon the sacrificial aspect of that ending; I myself felt a terrible kind of joy at the thought that that death was a gift. 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 to not have realized that the worst of ills would be to lose him.

One evening Chabrias called me to show me a star, till then hardly visible, in the constellation of the Eagle; it flashed like a gem and pulsated like a heart. I chose it for his star and his sign. Each night I would follow its course until utterly wearied; in that part of the sky I have seen strange radiance. Folk thought me mad, but that was of little consequence.

So in case you haven’t noticed, I am sucker for people going crazy with grief at the death of a beloved. If there’s like a 30 year age gap and gross power imbalance, all the better.

Except then Hadrian slips this one in there:

Pleasure had regained its place in my life; my secretary Onesimus served me as purveyor. He knew when to avoid certain resemblances, or when, just the reverse, it was better to seek them out. But such a hurried and half attentive lover was hardly loved in return. Now and then I met with a being finer and gentler than the rest, someone worth hearing talk, and perhaps worth seeing again. Those happy chances were rare, though I may have been to blame. Ordinarily I did no more than to appease (or deceive) my hunger. At other times my indifference to such games was like that of an old man.

But no sooner am I reading this and thinking, “Hadrian, you hypocritical old bastard” than he follows this up with talking about how “in my wakeful hours I took to pacing the corridors of the Villa” going from room to room, caressing the plethora of statues he’d commissioned of Antinous.

Anyway, things go on as they do, and Hadrian gets older (though not too old) and sicker/weaker and waits for death and speculates about the future of the Roman empire. Which kind of applies to any empire, I think:

Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man’s periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods of war; the words humanity, liberty, and justice will here and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and other pediments will arise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.

All in all a wonderful balance between history, philosophy, and all-consuming grief.

Rating: Antinous was dead. Four stars that “flashed like a gem and pulsated like a heart.”

I should add (or maybe I shouldn’t) that I didn’t read the Bibliographical Note section at the end of the book but I did flip through the “Reflections on the Composition” section and there were a few things there that were just too good not to share. They really resonated with me as someone who writes for fun, but I’m sure they apply to other things too:

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.

And this banger:

The lapse into despair of a writer who does not write.

I might have to up my rating based on these Reflections alone.