*[The preceding paragraph appeared for the first time six years ago; meanwhile this bas-relief was acquired by a Roman banker, Arturo Oslo, a whimsical man who probably would have stirred the imagination of Stendhal or of Balzac. Signor Osio has lavished upon this fair object the same solicitous attention that he gives to the animals on his property at the edge of Rome, where they run free in their natural state, and to the trees which he has planted by the thousand on his shore estate at Orbetello. A rare virtue, this last, for Stendhal was writing as early as 1828, “The Italians loathe trees;” and what would he say today when real estate speculators, trying to pack more and more colossal apartment houses into Rome, are circumventing the city’s laws to protect its handsome umbrella pines? Their method is simply to kill the trees by injections of hot water. A rare luxury, too, though one which many a man of wealth could enjoy, is this landowner’s animation of woods and fields with creatures at full liberty, and that not for the pleasure of hunting them down, but for reconstituting a veritable Eden. The love for statues of classical antiquity, those great peaceful objects which seem so solid and yet are so easily destroyed, is an uncommon taste among private collectors in these agitated times, cut off from both past and future. The new possessor of the bas-relief of Antonianos, acting on the advice of experts, has just had it cleaned by a specialist whose light, slow rubbing by hand has removed the rust and moisture stains from the marble and restored its soft gleam, like that of alabaster or of ivory.]
* Addition of 1958.
The second of these masterpieces is the famous sardonyx known as the Marlborough Gem, because it once belonged to that family collection, now dispersed. For more than thirty years this fine intaglio seemed to have been lost, or hidden away, but in January of 1952 it came to light in a public sale in London; the informed taste of the great collector Giorgio Sangiorgi has brought it back to Rome. I am indebted to him for the chance to see and to handle this unique gem. A signature, though no longer complete, can be read around the edge; it is thought, and doubtless correctly, to be that of the sculptor of the bas-relief, Antonianos of Aphrodisias. So skilfully has the master-carver enclosed that perfect profile within the narrow compass of a sardonyx that this bit of stone stands as testimony to a great lost art quite as much as does any statue or any relief. The proportions of the work make us forget the dimensions of the object. At some time during the Byzantine period the gem was set in a nugget of solid gold, and in this form passed from collector to collector, none of whose names we know, until it reached Venice; it is mentioned as part of a great seventeenth-century collection there. In the next century it was purchased by the celebrated dealer in antiques, Gavin Hamilton, and brought to England, whence it now returns to Rome, its starting-point. Of all objects still above ground today it is the one of which we can assume with some assurance that it has often been held in Hadrian’s hands.
One has to go into the most remote corners of a subject in order to discover the simplest things, and things of most general literary interest. It is only in studying Phlegon, secretary to Hadrian, that I learned that we owe to this forgotten personage the first, and one of the finest, of the great ghost stories, that somber, sensuous Bride of Corinth which inspired Goethe’s ballad, and likewise the Corinthian Wedding of Anatole France. It must be said, however, that Phlegon also took down, with the same avid and uncritical curiosity for everything beyond ordinary experience, some absurd stories of two-headed monsters, and of hermaphrodites got with child. Such was the stuff of the conversations, on some days, at least, at the imperial table.
Those who would have preferred a Journal of Hadrian to his Memoirs forget that a man of action rarely keeps a journal; it is almost always later on, and in a period of prolonged inactivity, that he does his recollecting, makes his notations, and, very often, has cause for wonder at the course his life has taken.
If all other documents were lacking, the Letter of Arrian to the Emperor Hadrian on the Circumnavigation of the Black Sea would suffice to recreate in broad outline that great imperial figure: the scrupulous exactitude of the chief-of-state who would know all details; his interest in the work both of war and of peace; his concern for good likenesses in statues, and that these should be finely wrought; his passion for the poetry and legend of an earlier day. And that society, rare in any period, but destined to vanish completely after the time of Marcus Aurelius, wherein the scholarly administrator can still address his prince as a friend, however subtly shaded his deference and his respect. Everything is there: the nostalgia for ancient Greece and its ideals, discreet allusion to a lost love and to mystical consolation sought by the bereaved survivor, the haunting appeal of unknown lands and barbarous climes. The evocation of desert wastes peopled only by seabirds, so profoundly romantic in spirit, calls to mind the exquisite vase found in Villa Hadriana, to be seen today in the Museum of the Terme in Rome; there on a field of marble snow a flock of wild heron are spreading their wings to fly away, in utter solitude.
Note of 1949: the more I strive for an exact portrait the farther I diverge from the kind of book, and of man, who would please the public. Only a few students of human destiny will understand.
In our time the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as the medium of expression. This study of the destiny of a man called Hadrian would have been cast in the form of a tragedy in the Seventeenth Century, or of an essay, perhaps, in the period of the Renaissance.
This book is the condensation of a vast work composed for myself alone. I had taken the habit of writing each night, in almost automatic fashion, the result of those long, self-induced visions whereby I could place myself intimately within another period of time. The merest word, the slightest gesture, the least perceptible implications were noted down; scenes now summed up in a line or two, in the book as it is, passed before me in fullest detail, and as if in slow motion. Added all together, these accounts would have afforded material for a volume of several thousand pages, but each morning I would burn the work of the night before. In such fashion I wrote a great number of decidedly abstruse meditations, and several descriptions bordering on the obscene.
He who seeks passionately for truth, or at least for accuracy, is frequently the one best able to perceive, like Pilate, that truth is not absolute or pure. Hence, mingled with his most direct assertions we find hesitations, deviousness, and reservations which a more conventional mind would not evince. At certain moments, though very seldom, it has even occurred to me that the emperor was lying. In such cases I had to let him lie, like the rest of us.
The utter fatuity of those who say to you, “By ‘Hadrian’ you mean yourself!” Almost as unsubtle as those who wonder why one should choose a subject so remote in time and in space. The sorcerer who pricks his thumb before he evokes the shades knows well that they will heed his call only because they can lap his blood. He knows, too, or ought to know, that the voices who speak to him are wiser and more worthy of attention than are his own clamorous outcries.
It did not take me long to realize that I had embarked upon the life of a very great man. From that time on, still more respect for truth, closer attention, and, on my part, ever more silence.
In a sense, every life that is recounted is offered as an example; we write in order to attack or to defend a view of the universe, and to set forth a system of conduct which is our own. It is none the less true, however, that nearly every biographer disqualifies himself by over-idealizing his subject or by deliberate disparagement, by exaggerated stress on certain details or by cautious omission of others. Thus a character is arbitrarily constructed, taking the place of the man to be understood and explained. A human life cannot be graphed, whatever people may say, by two virtual perpendiculars, representing what a man believed himself to be and what he wished to be, plus a flat horizontal for what he actually was; rather, the diagram has to be composed of three curving lines, extended to infinity, ever meeting and ever diverging.
Whatever one does, one always rebuilds the monument in his own way. But it is already something gained to have used only the original stones.
Every being who has gone through the adventure of living is myself.
This Second Century appeals to me because it was the last century, for a very long period of time, in which men could think and express themselves with full freedom. As for us, we are perhaps already very far from such times as that.
On the 26th of December, 1950, on an evening of freezing cold and in the almost polar silence of Mount Desert Island, off the Atlantic shore, I was striving to live again through the smothering heat of a day in July, in the year 138 in Baiae, to feel the weight of a sheet on weary, heavy limbs, and to catch the barely perceptible sound of that tideless sea as from time to time it reached a man whose whole attention was concentrated upon other murmurs, those of his approaching death. I tried to go as far as the last sip of water, the last spasm of pain, the last image in his mind. Now the emperor had but to die.
This book bears no dedication. It ought to have been dedicated to G.F… , and would have been, were there not a kind of impropriety in putting a personal inscription at the opening of a work where, precisely, I was trying to
