Thanks to Hadrian and Marguerite my life is better now than before.
There's a sequence of about 65 pages (±20%) I did not enjoy because of being too descriptive and enumerative, but everything surrounding it is elucidating and invigorating.

http://sphinxou.wordpress.com/2014/07/14/memoires-dhadrien-_-marguerite-yourcenar/

I am disappointed to say that I couldn't read not even 10% of this book that people have been going nuts about. It's a classic masterpiece they say and I can't find it attractive because it doesn't seem like fiction. It's the writing style and the ramblings and musings that I hated from the start. I would have liked it if it were written like an actual fiction story.

This slow, elegiac faux memoir was written in 1951, purporting to be Hadrian musing on his life as his body gives out and death is imminent.

Its pacing is slow, contemplative, with stately sentences that I guess are to evoke the classics (though maybe not Catullus and the rest who were very far from stately); it's mostly narrated after the fact, so that the frequently quite dramatic details of Hadrian's life seem distant, muted.

But the kernel, I think, is a highly romanticized view of Hadrian's relationship with Aninous, a youth who was Hadrian's close companion during his teen years, and who died under mysterious circs while they were traveling down the Nile after an Egyptian ritual dedicated to Thoth.

It's very intelligent, extremely well researched, but not exactly a page turner. It leaves me wondering if it inspired Mary Renault--another highly intelligent writer who did due diligence with research--to embark on her romanticized fiction about Alexander the Great and his relationship with Hephaestion, et al.

Memoirs of Hadrian, translated from French by Grace Frick in collaboration with Yourcenar, is a fictionalized autobiography of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from 117 to 138. He was one of the Five Good Emperors praised by Niccolò Machiavelli. Edward Gibbon, in his famous work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, characterized their rule as an era when "the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of wisdom and virtue." Hadrian did in fact write an autobiography but it has since been lost. Yourcenar portrays him as the quintessential "enlightened despot": a deep thinker and well-rounded, experienced statesman who directed his power toward the public good.

At times he seems almost too perfect, but such is probably in keeping with his personality as he composes the history of his own life. Hadrian's appreciation for the highest gifts of civilization - art, philosophy, rule of law - combines with breathtaking prose to recreate an Elysium that reigned briefly before the Dark Ages. The lost world of the Roman elite is one of palatial villas on the shores of the Mediterranean, deeds of daring on the barbarian frontier, and the ancient cults of Egypt and the Near East. Hadrian's conception of divinity extends from his secular knowledge, imagining the gods as innately connected to the various facets of human life. He is especially enamored of beauty in all of its forms, from poetry to soaring architecture to the vitality of youth. The climax of his story is the early death of his lover Antinous by suicide, although for all his rhapsodizing it appears that Hadrian loved him physically but not quite as a full individual. Antinuos was a Tadzio who manifested an ideal or exalted concept. Hadrian had him deified after his death, a megalomaniacal move that nevertheless transcends mere egotism and becomes poetry itself - an epic tale of love lost and the death of beauty in full bloom.

The breadth of Hadrian's lifetime, extending from far-off battles and travels to the depth of his learning, gave Marguerite Yourcenar a large canvas with which to work. She takes maximum advantage of the material offered to her and the result is a brilliant book and homage to what was seen centuries afterwards as one of the Golden Ages of Western civilization. A fascinating and rewarding read.

Original Review