Books: Stoic Emperor

HADRIAN’S MEMOIRS (313 pp.]—Marguerite Yourcenar—Farrar, Straus & Young ($4).

This book has about as much in common with the run of historical novels as a Roman bust with Marilyn Monroe’s. The novel deals with the turbulent second century, but French Author Yourcenar shuns sex and sadism, keeps the defenseless slave maidens in the background and the Saturnalia under control. She allows the sick and aging Emperor Hadrian, ruler of the Western world, to tell his own story in a letter to his 17-year-old adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian enjoys a good orgy from time to time as much as the next Roman, and he practices the empire’s fashionable perversions. But he is far more deeply interested in the uses of power and the nature of the soul.

As a young soldier he has courage, stamina and ambition. He admits: “I desired the supreme power … to become my full self before I died.” As emperor he proves ruthless and gifted, fighting the imperial wars, defending the Roman peace, reorganizing Britain and the Rhine frontier. Above all, the book shows how the soldier-monarch, despite his successes in holding together the large, unwieldy empire, turns inward and becomes more and more the scholarly stoic, meditating on history, immortality and death. His last words are: “Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes.”

Author Yourcenar’s portrait is chiseled in stone. An expertly researched novel, it has won two literary prizes in France. What it lacks in pace, it makes up in stateliness and thoughtful writing about the man who first called Rome eternal and did his share to make her so.