Review: Memoirs of Hadrian

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

Wow. What a book. Probably as good as it can get for any book along these lines. The memoirs that Hadrian could (would?) have written on his deathbed, to his successor, Marcus Aurelius.

For an extra treat read the bibliographical note at the end on how it took decades of Yourcenar's life to actually write this book.

I knew very little about this book going in. I had seen it in a used bookstore, and wondered if it really had been written by Hadrian. But then I came across it several times in other pieces, most recently in Qiu Miaojin's "Last words from Montmarte", so I thought I ought to try it.

It starts off as quite heavy, and I supposed it continues like that, but you notice it less and less as you read more and more. This is the story of Hadrian's life and his thoughts surrounding it, as told by him. It draws you in more and more as you keep reading.

Some of my highlighted sections:

"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." (p. 97)

"All nations that have perished up to this time have done so for lack of generosity" (p. 114)

"I was incensed by man's mania for clinging to hypotheses while ignoring facts" (p. 208)

"No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of the divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of the Deity, who contains all" (p. 234)

"Judaea was struck from the map and took the name of Palestine by my order" (p. 249)

"There is some excess in all that, but excess is a virtue at the age of seventeen" (p. 269)



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