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whelming sense of H adrian's physical presence, of our having been put
directly into his mind.
Now this is a remarkable feat; and it is one that could have been
accomplished only as a feat of love itself. For the sense of Hadrian's
physical existence, of the working of his consciousness, is so strong that
one can virtually see the hair on his arms and accept the strange com–
bination of soldierliness and narcissism (after the suicide of his favorite,
Antinous, he tells us how he stifled his tears in a cushion), of cultural
piety and Roman brutality. We even have the sense of being inside him,
of seeing the world entirely through his eyes, so that we assent to his
prejudices not because we agree with them but because, since we are
in his mind, it is only nature to have them. Hadrian, in this book,
dominates the center of the world, he bestrides our consciousness, like
one of those statues of the beloved Antinous which, as he tells us, he
was always ordering his sculptors to make more and more lifelike, but
which he kept hollow inside, so that they would be portable. The char–
acterization is all in the limner's art, in the look of the face, and this,
caught in the wonderful portrait on the jacket by Marshall Lee–
voluptuary, reserved, sad, literally double-sexed-this is the look of the
statue in the museum, of the wisdom in the anthology. It is the look
of someone who calmly bears all our love for him, our hunger for
his stability, his calm, his
classicism.
Here everything fits into place as in life it never does; here all ex–
perience is transfigured into memory and all memory into intelligence;
here convicts die in the stadium dressed in coats of gold that Hadrian
had contemptuously cast away when presented to him by a fawning
courtier-and we assent, we assent to everything. H ere the dead take
their place among the living. There is one marvelous scene where
Hadrian, mourning the dead Antinous, wanders up and down the
sculpture court, lighting up and touching the statues as if to interrogate
the dead. So we walk up and down with Hadrian, and know that even
our sighs are wise, and that everything that has been said well has
been said best in Greek. The dead tempt us with their secret, and inter–
rogating them, we try endlessly, as Hadrian says, to look behind the
curtain. Though we must desist-these are the classic tears-still, there
is something proud about this effort; we are content to grope in the
dark, as compared with the illusions of the Christians and the fanaticism
of the J ews. This ripe bereft skepticism, which knows that it may be
backing a loser in the great lottery of death, nevertheless sees itself, in
endless mirrors, preparing its own portrait for posterity. This is what
one gets from the book. And even though Antinous the beloved may be
