Memoirs of Hadrian Read online

  [Hadrian 015a.jpg] The Mondragone Antinous Paris, Louvre

  [Hadrian 016.jpg] The Boar Hunt Hadrianic Medallion from the Arch of Constantine, Rome

  The Lion Hunt Hadrianic Medallion from the Arch of Constantine, Rome

  [Hadrian 018.jpg] The Farnese Antinous Naples, National Archeological Museum

  glance of a slave at my thanks for the tray which he brings me, or the appreciative grimace of an old friend to whom a rare cameo is given. The slightest and most superficial of contacts are enough for us with most persons, or prove even too much. But when these contacts persist and multiply about one unique being, to the point of embracing him entirely, when each fraction of a body becomes laden for us with meaning as overpowering as that of the face itself, when this one creature haunts us like music and torments us like a problem (instead of inspiring in us, at most, mere irritation, amusement, or boredom), when he passes from the periphery of our universe to its center, and finally becomes for us more indispensable than our own selves, then that astonishing prodigy takes place wherein I see much more an invasion of the flesh by the spirit than a simple play of the body alone.

  Such views on love could lead to the career of seducer. If I have not fulfilled that role it is doubtless because I have done something else, if no better. Short of genius, such a career demands attentions and even stratagems for which I was little suited. Those set traps, always the same, and the monotonous routine of perpetual advances, leading no further than conquest itself, have palled on me. 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. I used once to believe that a certain feeling for beauty would serve me in place of virtue, and would render me immune from solicitations of the coarsest kind. But I was mistaken. The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores; by handling fragmentary masterpieces, though stained or broken, he comes to know a collector’s pleasure in being the sole seeker after pottery which is commonly passed by. A problem more serious (for a man of taste) is a position of eminence in human affairs, with the risks from adulation and lies which are inherent in the possession of almost absolute power. The idea that anyone should sham in my presence, even in the slightest degree, is enough to make me pity and despise or even hate him. Indeed I have suffered from the inconveniences of my fortune as a poor man does from those of his privations. One step more and I could have accepted the fiction of pretending that one is a seducer when one knows oneself to be merely the master. But that is the road to disgust, or perhaps to fatuity.

  One would end by preferring the plain truths of debauchery to the outworn stratagems of seduction if there, too, lies did not prevail. In principle I am ready to admit that prostitution is an art like massage or hairdressing, but for my part I find it hard to get much enjoyment from barbers or masseurs. There is nothing more crude than an accomplice. The sidelong glance of the tavernkeeper who would reserve the best wine for me (and consequently deprive some other customer) sufficed even in my younger days to dull my appetite for the amusements of Rome. It displeases me to have some creature think that he can foresee and profit from my desire, automatically adapting himself to what he supposes to be my taste. At such moments the absurd and deformed reflection of myself which a human brain returns to me would almost make me prefer the ascetic’s sorry state. If legend does not exaggerate the excesses of Nero and the erudite researches of Tiberius, those two great consumers of pleasure must have had inert senses indeed to put themselves to the expense of so complicated a machinery, and must have held mankind in singular disdain to let themselves in for such mockery and extortion. And nevertheless, if I have virtually given up these too mechanical forms of pleasure, or have never indulged in them at too great length, I owe it more to chance than to impregnable virtue. I could well fall back into such habits in growing old, just as into any kind of confusion or fatigue, but sickness and approaching death will save me from monotonous repetition of the same procedures, like droning through a lesson too long known by rote.

  Of all the joys which are slowly abandoning me, sleep is one of the most precious, though one of the most common, too. A man who sleeps but little and poorly, propped on many a cushion, has ample time to meditate upon this particular delight. I grant that the most perfect repose is almost necessarily a complement to love, that profound rest which is reflected in two bodies. But what interests me here is the specific mystery of sleep partaken of for itself alone, the inevitable plunge risked each night by the naked man, solitary and unarmed, into an ocean where everything changes, the colors, the densities, and even the rhythm of breathing, and where we meet the dead. What reassures us about sleep is that we do come out of it, and come out of it unchanged, since some mysterious ban keeps us from bringing back with us in their true form even the remnants of our dreams. What also reassures us is that sleep heals us of fatigue, but heals us by the most radical of means in arranging that we cease temporarily to exist. There, as elsewhere, the pleasure and the art consist in conscious surrender to that blissful unconsciousness, and in accepting to be slightly less strong, less light, less heavy and less definite than our waking selves. I shall return later to the strange world of our dreams, for I prefer to speak here of certain experiences of pure sleep and pure awakening which border on death and resurrection. I am trying to recapture the exact sensation of such overpowering sleep as that of boyhood where, still fully clad, one toppled over one’s books, transported as if by lightning out of mathematics and the law into the midst of a deep and substantial sleep so filled with unused energy that one tasted, as it were, the very essence of being through the closed eyelids. I evoke the short, sudden snatches of slumber on the bare ground, in the forest after tiring days of hunts; the barking of the dogs would awaken me, or their paws planted on my chest. So total was the eclipse that each time I could have found myself to be someone else, and I was perplexed and often saddened by the strict law which brought me back from so far away to re-enter this narrow confine of humanity which is myself. What are those particularities upon which we lay such store, since they count so little for us when we are liberated in sleep, and since for one second before returning, regretfully, into the body of Hadrian I was about to savor almost consciously that new existence without content and without past?

  On the other hand, sickness and age have also their prodigies and receive from sleep other forms of benediction. About a year ago, after a singularly exhausting day in Rome, I experienced one of those respites wherein the depletion of one’s forces serves to work the same miracle as did the unexploited reserves of former days. I go but rarely to the City now; once there I try to accomplish as much as possible. The day had been disagreeably full: a session at the Senate had been followed by a session in court, and by an interminable discussion with one of the quaestors; then by a religious ceremony which could not be cut short, and upon which it steadily rained. I myself had fitted all these different activities closely together, crowding them in so as to leave between them the least time possible for importunate requests and idle flatteries. The return on horseback was one of my last trips of the kind. I reached the Villa sickened and chilled as we are only when the blood actually refuses, and no longer works in our veins. Celer and Chabrias rushed to my aid, but solicitude can be wearing even when it is sincere. Retiring to my apartment I swallowed a few spoonfuls of a hot broth which I prepare myself, not out of suspicion, as is surmised, but because I thus procure for myself the luxury of being alone. I lay down: sleep seemed as far removed from me as health itself, and as youth or vigor. I dozed off. The sandglass proved to me that I had slept barely an hour, but a brief moment of c
omplete repose, at my age, is equal to sleep which formerly lasted throughout half a revolution of the stars; my time is measured from now on in much smaller units. An hour had sufficed to accomplish the humble and unexpected prodigy: the heat of my blood was rewarming my hands; my heart and my lungs had begun to function with a kind of good will, and life was welling up like a spring which, though not abundant, is faithful. Sleep, in so short a time, had repaired my excesses of virtue with the same impartiality which it would have applied to the repair of my vices. For the divinity of the great restorer consists in bestowing his benefits upon the sleeper without concern for him, exactly as water charged with curative powers cares not at all who may drink from its source.

  But if we think so little about a phenomenon which absorbs at least a third of every life it is because a certain modesty is needed to appreciate its gifts. Asleep, Caius Caligula and Aristides the Just are alike; my important but empty privileges are forgotten, and nothing distinguishes me from the black porter who lies guard at my door. What is our insomnia but the mad obstinacy of our mind in manufacturing thoughts and trains of reasoning, syllogisms and definitions of its own, refusing to abdicate in favor of that divine stupidity of closed eyes, or the wise folly of dreams? The man who cannot sleep, and I have had only too many occasions for some months to establish the point for myself, refuses more or less consciously to entrust himself to the flow of things. Brother of Death… . Isocrates was wrong, and his sentence is a mere exercise in rhetoric. I begin to have some acquaintance with death; it has other secrets, more alien still to our present condition as men. And nevertheless, so intricate and so profound are these mysteries of absence and partial oblivion that we feel half assured that somewhere the white spring of sleep flows into the dark spring of death. I have never cared to gaze, as they slept, upon those I loved; they were resting from me, I know; they were escaping me, too. And every man feels some shame of his visage in the sully of sleep; how often, when I have risen early to read or to study, have I replaced the rumpled pillows myself, and the disordered covers, those almost obscene evidences of our encounters with nothingness, proofs that each night we have already ceased to be.

  Little by little this letter, begun in order to tell you of the progress of my illness, has become the diversion of a man who no longer has the energy required for continued application to affairs of state; it has become, in fact, the written meditation of a sick man who holds audience with his memories. I propose now to do more than this: I have formed a project for telling you about my life. To be sure, last year I composed an official summary of my career, to which my secretary Phlegon gave his name. I told as few lies therein as possible; regard for public interest and decency nevertheless forced me to modify certain facts. The truth which I intend to set forth here is not particularly scandalous, or is so only to the degree that any truth creates a scandal. I do not expect your seventeen years to understand anything of it. I desire, all the same, to instruct you and to shock you, as well. Your tutors, whom I have chosen myself, have given you a severe education, well supervised and too much protected, perhaps; from it I hope that eventually great benefit will accrue both to you and to the State. I offer you here, in guise of corrective, a recital stripped of preconceived ideas and of mere abstract principles; it is drawn wholly from the experience of one man, who is myself. I am trusting to this examination of facts to give me some definition of myself, and to judge myself, perhaps, or at the very least to know myself better before I die. Like everyone else I have at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide their secrets from us, or to make us believe that they have secrets where none exist; and books, with the particular errors of perspective to which they inevitably give rise. I have read nearly everything that our historians and poets have written, and even our story-tellers, although the latter are considered frivolous; and to such reading I owe perhaps more instruction than I have gathered in the somewhat varied situations of my own life. The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.

  But books lie, even those that are most sincere. The less adroit, for lack of words and phrases wherein they can enclose life, retain of it but a flat and feeble likeness. Some, like Lucan, make it heavy, and encumber it with a solemnity which it does not possess; others, on the contrary, like Petronius, make life lighter than it is, like a hollow, bouncing ball, easy to toss to and fro in a universe without weight. The poets transport us into a world which is vaster and more beautiful than our own, with more ardor and sweetness, different therefore, and in practice almost uninhabitable. The philosophers, in order to study reality pure, subject it to about the same transformations as fire or pestle make substance undergo: nothing that we have known of a person or of a fact seems to subsist in those ashes or those crystals to which they are reduced. Historians propose to us systems too perfect for explaining the past, with sequence of cause and effect much too exact and clear to have been ever entirely true; they rearrange what is dead, unresisting material, and I know that even Plutarch will never recapture Alexander. The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up for sale morsels of meat attractive to flies. I should take little comfort in a world without books, but reality is not to be found in them because it is not there whole.

  Direct observation of man is a method still less satisfactory, limited as it frequently is to the cheap reflections which human malice enjoys. Rank, position, all such hazards tend to restrict the field of vision for the student of mankind: my slave has totally different facilities for observing me from what I possess for observing him, but his means to do so are as limited as my own. Every morning for twenty years, old Euphorion has handed me my flask of oil and my sponge, but my knowledge of him ends with his acts of service, and his knowledge of me ends with my bath; any effort on the part of either emperor or slave to learn more straightway produces the effect of an indiscretion. Almost everything that we know about anyone else is at second hand. If by chance a man does confess, he pleads his own cause and his apology is made in advance. If we are observing him, then he is not alone. They have reproached me for liking to read the police reports of Rome, but I learn from them, all the time, matter for amazement; whether friends or suspects, familiars or persons unknown, these people astound me; and their follies serve as excuse for mine. Nor do I tire of comparing the clothed and the unclothed man. But these reports, so artlessly detailed, add to my store of documents without aiding me in the least to render a final verdict. That this magistrate of austere appearance may have committed a crime in no way permits me to know him better. I am henceforth in the presence of two phenomena instead of one, the outer aspect of the magistrate and his crime.