Memoirs of Hadrian

Paperback, 347 pages

English language

Published May 18, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-52926-0
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5 stars (11 reviews)

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.

4 editions

Review of 'Memoirs of Hadrian' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Ms. Yourcenar worked on this fictional memoir of the Roman emperor Hadrian for at least 20 years and it is considered a classic of historical fiction. I found it fine, but its greatness may be beyond me. I was very interested in the postscript in which the author describes how she wrote the book, her literary and human sources, which characters were real and which were created, and how and why she made various decisions about content. The only thing that caught my eye was a mention of Jesus which seemed to be an anachronism for someone born in the year 76 CE who was not a Christian.

I read a Kindle version of this book which is not listed in the Goodreads database. It lists illustrations with what looks like an associated dead internet link; so, I saw no figures. Many of the described figures are easily found on …

Review of 'Memoirs of Hadrian' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

“It is in Latin that I have administered the empire; my epitaph will be carved in Latin on the walls of my mausoleum beside the Tiber; but it is in Greek that I shall have thought and lived.”

“‘Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.’”

Hadrian has always been one of my favorite Roman emperors, so a big thank you to a dear friend for choosing this for my Yule book exchange! It was a well-timed choice, as this book has been on my TBR since… 2012. I am glad I read this now and not a decade earlier, though; like Yourcenar writes in her postscript, this book requires a certain maturity of perspective to appreciate. I definitely have gotten more out of it now than …

Review of "Mémoires d'Hadrien" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Il était temps que je lise cette oeuvre acclamée par la critique. Je n'ai pas été déçu par ces pseudo-mémoires de l'empereur romain Hadrien, à qui Marguerite Yourcenar donne vie pour nous relater sa vie et notamment son histoire d'amour avec un jeune homme mort trop tôt. C'est à la fois une belle histoire d'amour et un récit passionnant sur l'Empire romain.