Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Different persons have ruled me in turn, though none of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power.  Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment's rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman.  But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor's table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade.  And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some eternal hum of a bee.

Machiavelli called Hadrian one of the "Five Good Emperors": a stretch of Roman emperors also including Nerva, Trajan, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, each of whom used power effectively and wisely, and who were distinguished from those who came before and after them by adopting a successor they thought deserving of leadership, rather than letting the role fall to their biological heirs.  Hadrian, if he's remembered at all today, is probably remembered for Hadrian's Wall, the defensive battlement that stretches across the narrowest part of Britain, and which still stands.  That's  a pretty good monument for Hadrian, who was a builder above all else, and who wisely fortified the edges of the empire.  Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Memors of Hadrian imagines the emperor toward the end of his life, crippled by disease, reflecting on his achievements and missteps in a long missive to the emperor-to-be Marcus Aurelius.

The obvious analog to Memoirs of Hadrian is John Williams' terrific novel Augustus.  Both mine the last days of the emperor's life, and the approach of terminal illness, for incredible pathos.  But Williams was interested in the way that myths and legends accrete around a person, and how the subject beneath them remains true to is own human weakness.  For that reason, Williams keeps Augustus from speaking on his own behalf until the end of the novel; it becomes the pulling away of a veil.

Hadrian is no Augustus: his achievements, while far-reaching, are hardly the stuff of legend.  He discards many of the territorial gains under his predecessor Trajan, knowing that they only make the empire more vulnerable to attack.  He builds cities and public works projects: temples, aqueducts, stadia, defensive battlements.  He spends much of his time away from Rome, visiting the far-flung places that Rome has conquered, seeking ways to incorporate these strange new lands into the body politic.  These achievements are not flashy, and they gain Hadrian little support in the Senate or fame in Rome, and yet they are more permanent than any of the bloodthirsty conquest perpetrated by Hadrian.  Hadrian's greatest gift is his far-reaching sense of time; he seeks a Rome that will endure for centuries, even while he's aware that nothing can endure forever.  This is a difficult wisdom that, in his last days, he applies to the realization of his own mortality.

Yourcenar imagines this mindset with great subtlety and generosity; the 20th century never filters through ironically.  It's not hard to imagine, with some concession to the language itself, that you're really reading the private thoughts of a 2nd century emperor.  Even privately, Hadrian can be wonkish and aloof, but from time to time the emperor lets great emotions bubble up.  The most convincing and tragic part of the book is when Hadrian's young lover Antinous has himself killed in a ritual sacrifice for Hadrian's good fortune without the emperor realizing it:

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 seem 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.

I'd never heard this story, and I was affected by it here.  Yourcenar is able to do something extraordinary here: she bridges a gap of 1800 years to allow us to feel the pain of someone who would ordinarily seem impossibly remote.  In her afterword, Yourcenar emphasizes that the expanse of time is not as great as we think: "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 this--the ability to compress the immensity of time, and make it seem not so immense--Yourcenar shares a gift with Hadrian himself.