Following Hadrian, by Elizabeth Speller
What history fails to tell us about the Emperor Hadrian, novelists and myth-makers supply.
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Your support makes all the difference.A funny thing has happened to the Emperor Hadrian: his life has been overtaken by fiction. The power of a novel to capture our imagination has scarcely ever been better demonstrated than by Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, a sophisticated monologue in which the dying emperor, imbued with humanistic sensitivities, dissects his life and love. Yourcenar made Hadrian a homoerotic icon, whose passion for the young Antinous, drowned in the Nile, caused him to found cities and create a divinity.
From publication in 1951, this intimate version of the Emperor took the world by storm. As the great classical scholar Ronald Syme noted, it affected the academic community. The chief demand upon any modern biography of Hadrian is to prioritise the private life.
Elizabeth Speller is no exception. But she also emphasises an aspect of Hadrian for which he was famous pre-Yourcenar: as a traveller who undertook restless circuits of his empire, from Britain to Asia Minor. To combine a biography with a travel book is an attractive idea, although this work is a bit muddled between the two. The more factual sections are interspersed with a fictitious account by the aristocrat Julia Balbilla, who accompanied the imperial train and is presumably included to eke out the little we know about Hadrian's wife, Sabina. But the travel genre is more tolerant of anecdote and speculation than history, and this book contains many agreeable word-pictures.
However, the episode which would be of most interest to British readers – the building of his Wall – receives the barest of mentions. The omission is even odder because there is now evidence, described in Anthony Birley's splendid 1997 biography, that the Emperor made a visit to the fort of Vindolanda.
There are enticing accounts of ports and cities in Asia Minor, but the wonderful creation of Tivoli gets cursory treatment. How did the vaunted hydraulic mechanisms work? I enjoyed Speller's descriptions of the Pantheon and Pincian gardens, but her Roman topography seems a bit bizarre. The Pyramid of Cestius is nowhere near Termini station. The Pincian Obelisk requires more detailed treatment, because its inscriptions are not simply "Hadrianic", but in all probability partly composed by Hadrian.
The serious historian flashes out now and again, but Speller is in an insoluble dilemma. The sources for Hadrian's life are so flimsy that, if she turned her sharp historical mind to analysing their veracity, they would melt away. The Emperor would have no clothes. If Hadrian as a creation of novelists and historians were ever stripped of myth and fiction, that would truly be a funny thing to happen on the way to the Forum.
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