The brief sketch of the family background of Antinous is not historical, but attempts to take into consideration the social conditions which prevailed at that time in Bithynia. On certain controversial points, such as the cause for enforced retirement of Suetonius, the origin of Antinous, whether slave or free, the active participation of Hadrian in the Palestinian war, the dates of apotheosis of Sabina and of interment of Aelius Caesar in the Castel Sant Angelo, it has been necessary to choose between hypotheses of historians, but the effort has been to make that choice only with good reason. In other cases, like that of the adoption of Hadrian by Trajan, or of the death of Antinous, the author has tried to leave that very incertitude which before it existed in history doubtless existed in life itself.
REFLECTIONS ON THE COMPOSITION OF MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN
To G.F.
The idea for this book and the first writing of it, in whole or in part, and in various forms, date from the period between 1924 and 1929, between my twentieth and twenty-fifth year. All those manuscripts were destroyed, deservedly.
In turning the pages of a volume of Flaubert’s correspondence much read and heavily underscored by me about the year 1927 I came again upon this admirable sentence: “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.” A great part of my life was going to be spent in trying to define, and then to portray, that man existing alone and yet closely bound with all being.
I resumed work on the book in 1934; after prolonged research some fifteen pages were written which seemed to me final in form. Then the project was abandoned, only to be taken up again several times between 1934 and 1937.
There was a long period in which I thought of the work in the form of a series of dialogues, where all the voices of those times would be heard. But whatever I did, the details seemed to take undue precedence; the parts threatened the balance of the whole; Hadrian’s voice was drowned out by all the others. I was not succeeding in my attempt to reconstruct that world as seen and heard by one man.
From the version of 1934 only one sentence has been retained: “I begin to discern the profile of my death.” Like a painter who has chosen a landscape, but who constantly shifts his easel now right, now left, I had at last found a point from which to view the book.
Take a life that is known and completed, recorded and fixed by History (as much as lives ever can be fixed), so that its entire course may be seen at a single glance; more important still, choose the moment when the man who lived that existence weighs and examines it, and is, for the briefest span, capable of judging it. Try to manage so that he stands before his own life in much the same position as we stand when we look at it.
Mornings spent at the Villa Adriana; innumerable evenings passed in small cafés around the Olympieion; the constant back and forth over Greek seas; roads of Asia Minor. In order to make full use of these memories of mine they had first to recede as far from me as is the Second Century.
Experiments with time: eighteen days, eighteen months, eighteen years, or eighteen centuries. The motionless survival of statues which, like the head of the Mondragone Antinous in the Louvre, are still living in a past time, a time that has died. The problem of time foreshortened in terms of human generations: some five and twenty aged men, their withered hands interlinked to form a chain, would be enough to establish an unbroken contact between Hadrian and ourselves.
In 1937, during a first stay in the United States, I did some reading for this book in the libraries at Yale; I wrote the visit to the physician, and the passage on renunciation of bodily exercise. These fragments, re-worked, are still part of the present version.
In any case, I was too young. There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty. Earlier than that one may well fail to recognize those great natural boundaries which from person to person, and from century to century, separate the infinite variety of mankind; or, on the contrary, one may attach too much importance to mere administrative barriers, to the customs houses or the sentry boxes erected between man and man. It took me years to learn how to calculate exactly the distances between the emperor and myself.
I ceased to work on the book (except for a few days, in Paris) between 1937 and 1939.
Some mention of T. E. Lawrence reminded me that his tracks in Asia Minor cross and recross those of Hadrian. But the background for Hadrian is not the desert; it is Athens and her hills. The more I thought of these two men, the more the adventure of one who rejects life (and first of all rejects himself) made me desirous of presenting, through Hadrian, the point of view of the man who accepts all experience, or at least who refuses on one score only to accept elsewhere. It goes without saying, of course, that the asceticism of the one and the hedonism of the other are at many points interchangeable.
In October of 1939 the manuscript was left behind in Europe, together with the greater part of the notes; I nevertheless took with me to the United States the several resumes of my former readings at Yale and a map of the Roman Empire at the time of Trajan’s death which I had carried about with me for years; also the profile photograph of the Antinous of the Archaeological Museum in Florence, purchased there in 1926, the young face gravely sweet.
From 1939 to 1948 the project was wholly abandoned. I thought of it at times, but with discouragement, and almost with indifference, as one thinks of the impossible. And with something like shame for ever having ventured upon such an undertaking.
The lapse into despair of a writer who does not write.
In the worst hours of apathy and dejection I would go for solace to Hartford’s fine museum, seeking out a Canaletto painting of Rome, the Pantheon standing brown and gold against the blue sky of a late afternoon in summer; and each time I would come away from it comforted, and once again at peace.
About the year 1941 I had discovered by chance, in an artists’ supply shop in New York, four Piranesi engravings which G … and I bought. One of them, a View of Hadrian’s Villa which I had not known before, is an interior of the chapel of Canopus, from which were taken in the Seventeenth Century the Antinous in Egyptian style and the accompanying basalt statues of priestesses, all to be seen today in the Vatican. The foreground shows a round structure, burst open like a skull, from which fallen trees and brush hang vaguely down, like strands of hair. The genius of Piranesi, almost mediumistic, has truly caught the element of hallucination here: he has sensed the long-continued rituals of mourning, the tragic architecture of an inner world. For several years I looked at this drawing almost daily, without a thought for my former enterprise, which I supposed that I had given up. Such are the curious detours of what is called oblivion.
In the spring of 1947, while sorting over some papers I burned the notes taken at Yale; they seemed to have become by that time completely useless.
Still, Hadrian’s name appears in an essay on Greek myth which I wrote in 1943 and which Roger Caillois published during those war years in Les Lettres Franfaises, in Buenos Aires. Then in 1945 the figure of the drowned Antinous, borne along somehow on that Lethean current, came again to the surface in an unfinished essay, Canticle of the Soul and its True Freedom, written just before the advent of a serious illness.
Keep in mind that everything recounted here is thrown out of perspective by what is left unsaid: these notes serve
[Hadrian 324a.jpg] Interior of the Pantheon, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi