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.