to Eros, that god who is wisest of all.
The ship lent me by Erastos, the merchant of Ephesus, to sail the Archipelago, idled at anchor in Phaleron Bay;
[Hadrian 158a.jpg] Hadrianic Cuirass with High Relief of Roman Wolf Supporting Athena Torso Standing in Agora, Athens
[Hadrian 158bc.jpg] Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens
[Hadrian 158d.jpg] Antinous of Eleusis Museum of Eleusis (Found in Ruins of Eleusis)
I had come back to Athens like a man coming home. I ventured to add to the beauty of this city, trying to perfect what was already admirable. For the first time Athens was to grow again, taking on new life after long decline. I doubled the city in extent: along the Ilissus I planned a new Athens, the city of Hadrian joined to the city of Theseus. Everything had to be rearranged, or constructed anew. Six centuries earlier the great temple consecrated to the Olympian Zeus had been left abandoned almost as soon as the structure was started. My workmen took up the task and Athens again felt the joy of activity such as she had not known since the days of Pericles: I was completing what one of the Seleucids had aspired in vain to finish, and was making amends in kind for the depredations of our Sulla. To inspect the work I went daily in and out of a labyrinth of machines and intricate pulleys, of half-dressed columns and marble blocks haphazardly piled, gleaming white against the blue sky. There was something of the excitement of the naval shipyards; a mighty vessel had been salvaged and was being fitted out for the future.
In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible. I am somewhat practiced in all the arts, but music is the only one to which I have steadily kept and in which I profess to some skill. At Rome I had to dissemble this taste, but could indulge it with discretion in Athens. The musicians used to gather in a court where a cypress grew, near a statue of Hermes. There were only six or seven of them, an orchestra of reeds and lyres; to these we sometimes added a professional with a cithara. My instrument was chiefly the long flute. We played ancient tunes, some almost forgotten, and newer works as well, composed for me. I liked the hard vigor of the Dorian airs, but certainly had no aversion to voluptuous or passionate melodies, or to the poignant, subtly broken rhythms which sober, fearful folk reject as intoxicating for the senses and the soul. Through the strings of his lyre I could see the profile of my young companion, gravely absorbed in his part in the group, his fingers moving with care along the taut cords.
That perfect winter was rich in friendly intercourse: the opulent Atticus, whose bank was financing my constructions (though not without profit therefrom), invited me to his gardens in Kephissia where he lived surrounded by a court of lecturers and writers then in fashion; his son, young Herod, a subtle wit, proved indispensable at my Athenian suppers. He had certainly lost the timidity which once left him speechless before me, on the occasion of his embassy to the Sarmatian frontier on behalf of the youth of Athens to congratulate me on my accession; but his growing vanity now seemed to me no more than mildly ridiculous. Herod’s rival in eloquence, and in wealth, was the rhetorician Polemo, glory of Laodicea, who beguiled me by his Oriental style, shimmering and full as the gold-bearing waves of Pactolus; this clever craftsman in words lived as he discoursed, with splendor.
But the most precious of all these encounters was that with Arrian of Nicomedia, the best of my friends. Younger than I by some twelve years, he had already begun that outstanding political and military career in which he continues to distinguish himself and to serve the State. His experience in government, his knowledge of hunting, horses, and dogs, and of all bodily exercise, raised him infinitely above the mere word-mongers of the time. In his youth he had been prey to one of those strange passions of the soul without which, perhaps, there can be no true wisdom, nor true greatness: two years of his life had been passed at Nicopolis in Epirus in the cold, bare room where Epictetus lay dying; he had set himself the task of gathering and transcribing, word for word, the last sayings of that aged and ailing philosopher. That period of enthusiasm had left its mark upon him; from it he retained certain admirable moral disciplines, and a kind of grave simplicity. In secret he practiced austerities which no one even suspected. But his long apprenticeship to Stoic duty had not hardened him into self-righteousness; he was too intelligent not to realize that the heights of virtue, like those of love, owe their special value to their very rarity, to their quality of unique achievement and sublime excess. Now he was striving to model himself upon the calm good sense and perfect honesty of Xenophon. He was writing the history of his country, Bithynia; I had placed this province, so long ill governed by proconsuls, under my personal jurisdiction; Arrian advised me in my plans for reform. This assiduous reader of Socratic dialogue treated my young favorite with tender deference, for he knew full well the rich stores of heroism, devotion, and even wisdom, on which Greece has drawn to ennoble love between friends. These two Bithynians spoke the soft speech of Ionia, where word endings are almost Homeric in form. I later persuaded Arrian to employ this dialect in his writings.
At that period Athens had its philosopher of the frugal life: in a cabin of the village of Colonus, Demonax was leading an exemplary but merry existence. He was no Socrates, for he lacked both the subtlety and the ardor, but I relished his waggish good humor. Another of these good-hearted friends was the actor Aristomenes, a spirited performer of ancient Attic comedy. I used to call him my Greek partridge; short, fat, happy as a child (or a bird), he was better informed than anyone else on religious rituals, poetry, and cookery of former days. He was long a source of amusement and instruction to me. At about that time Antinous chose as his tutor the philosopher Chabrias, a Platonist with leanings toward Orphic teachings, and the most innocent of men; he developed a kind of watchdog fidelity to the boy which was later transferred to me. Eleven years of court life have not changed him; he is still the same honest, pious creature, chastely absorbed in his dreams, blind to all intrigue and deaf to rumor. He annoys me at times, but I shall part with him only at my death.
My relations with the Stoic philosopher Euphrates were of shorter duration. He had retired to Athens after brilliant successes in Rome. I engaged him as my reader, but the suffering which he had long endured from a liver abscess, and the resulting weakness, convinced him that his life no longer offered him anything worth the living. He asked my permission to quit my service by suicide. I have never been opposed to voluntary departure from life, and had considered it as a possible end in my hour of crisis before Trajan’s death. The problem of suicide which has obsessed me since seemed then of easy solution. Euphrates received the authorization which he sought; I had it carried to him by my young Bithynian, perhaps because it would have pleased me myself to receive from the hands of such a messenger this final response. The philosopher came to the palace that same evening for a conversation which differed in no respect from all preceding visits; he killed himself the next day. We talked over the incident several times; the boy remained somber for some days thereafter. This ardent young creature held death in horror; I had not observed that he already gave it much thought. For my part I could ill conceive that anyone would willingly leave a world which seemed to me so fair, or fail to exhaust to the end, despite all its evils, its utmost possibility of thought and of contact, and even of seeing. I have indeed changed since that time.
The years merge: my memory forms but a single fresco whereon are crowded the events and travels of several seasons. The luxuriously fitted bark of the merchant Erastos turned its prow first toward the Orient, then to the south, and only at last toward Italy, which was fast becoming for me the Occident. We twice touched Rhodes; Delos, blinding white, was visited on an April morning, and later on under full moon of the summer solstice; storms on the coast of Epirus allowed me to prolong a stay in Dodona. In Sicily we delayed a few days to explore the mystery of the Syracusan springs, Arethusa and Cyane, fair nymphs of blue waters. There I thought again of Licinius Sura, the statesman devoting his scant leisure to study of the marvels of hydraulics. They had told me much of the curious colors of dawn on the Ionian Sea, when beheld from the heights of Aetna. I decided to make the ascent of the mountain. We passed from the region of vines to the beds of lava, and on to the snow; the agile youth fairly ran on those steep slopes, but the scientists who went with me climbed by muleback. At the summit a shelter had been built for us to await the dawn. It came: an immense rainbow arched from horizon to horizon; on the icy crest strange fires blazed; earth and sea spread out to view as far as Africa, within sight, and as Greece, which we merely guessed at. That was truly an Olympian height in my life. All was there, the golden fringe of cloud, the eagles, and the cupbearer of immortality.
Halcyon seasons, solstice of my days… . Far from exaggerating my former happiness, I must struggle against too weak a portrayal; even now the recollection overpowers me. More sincere than most men, I can freely admit the secret causes of this felicity: that calm so propitious for work and for discipline of the mind seems to me one of the richest results of love. And it puzzles me that these joys, so precarious at best, and so rarely perfect in the course of human life, however we may have sought or received them, should be regarded with such mistrust by the so-called wise, who denounce the danger of habit and excess in sensuous delight, instead of fearing its absence or
