He slowly gains Trajan's favor and secures his position for the throne with the help of Plotina, the emperor's wife, and also by marrying Sabina, Trajan's grandniece.ĭuring his military service, the outcome of the Sarmatian wars strongly affects him due to the appalling bloodshed and atrocities committed. Hadrian, who is around thirty years old at the end of the war, describes his successes in the army and his relationship with Trajan who is initially cold towards him. He eventually joins the army and participates in the Dacian campaign. He visits Athens to study, travels to Rome for the first time, and witnesses the accession of Trajan. He also talks of his early interest in astrology and his lifelong passion for the arts, culture, and philosophy of Greece themes which he revisits throughout the book. His earliest memories are his boyhood years in Italica. He therefore wishes to recount important events in his life before his death. The story begins with Hadrian, who is around sixty years of age, describing his incurable illness. The other chapters form a loose chronological narrative which he often breaks with various insights and recollections. The novel is told in the first person by Hadrian and is framed as a letter to Marcus Aurelius in the first chapter, Animula Vagula Blandula. She states that while she based her account of Hadrian on the two most principal sources, Historia Augusta and Cassius Dio's Historia Romana, her goal was to reinterpret the past but also strive for historical authenticity. She did not resume work on the book in earnest until December 1948, as she lived between Hartford, Connecticut, and New York. The notion of writing the book from the point of view of a dying Hadrian occurred to her after reading a sentence in a draft from 1937 stating: "I begin to discern the profile of my death." She then worked on various drafts intermittently between 19. Yourcenar first thought of the idea for the book between 19.
This intrigued her for what she saw as parallels to her own post-war European world. Yourcenar noted in her postscript "Carnet de note" to the original edition, quoting Flaubert, that she had chosen Hadrian as the subject of the novel in part because he had lived at a time when the Roman gods were no longer believed in, but Christianity was not yet established. The emperor meditates on military triumphs, love of poetry and music, philosophy, and his passion for his lover Antinous, all in a manner similar to Gustave Flaubert's "melancholy of the antique world."
The book takes the form of a letter to Hadrian's adoptive grandson and eventual successor "Mark" ( Marcus Aurelius). Although the historical Hadrian wrote an autobiography, it has been lost. First published in France in French in 1951 as Mémoires d'Hadrien, the book was an immediate success, meeting with enormous critical acclaim. Memoirs of Hadrian (French: Mémoires d'Hadrien) is a novel by the Belgian-born French writer Marguerite Yourcenar about the life and death of the Roman Emperor Hadrian.
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