Memoirs of Hadrian

Memoirs of Hadrian, published in French as Mémoires d'Hadrien, is a historical novel by the Belgian-born French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, first published in 1951, with an English translation by Grace Frick following in 1954. Written in the first person as an extended letter from the aging Roman emperor Hadrian to his young adoptive grandson and eventual successor Marcus Aurelius, the novel moves chronologically through Hadrian's life and reign as he approaches death at around sixty years old, recounting his military campaigns, his deep devotion to Greek culture and philosophy, his relationship with the young man Antinous, and his own extended meditations on mortality, power, and the legacy he will leave behind. Yourcenar chose Hadrian deliberately, she later explained, because he lived at a cultural turning point when the old Roman polytheistic order had begun to lose its hold but Christianity had not yet become established in its place, a moment she saw as carrying real parallels to the uncertain, transitional Europe that emerged after the Second World War. The novel achieved substantial critical and popular success on its English publication and has retained a lasting reputation ever since; in a 2019 poll of fifty French literary critics and specialists, it was ranked the sixth-best French-language book of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.