Following Hadrian
A Second-Century Journey through the Roman Empire
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
One of the greatest--and most enigmatic--Roman emperors, Hadrian stabilized the imperial borders, established peace throughout the empire, patronized the arts, and built an architectural legacy that lasts to this day: the great villa at Tivoli, the domed wonder of the Pantheon, and the eponymous wall that stretches across Britain. Yet the story of his reign is also a tale of intrigue, domestic discord, and murder.
In Following Hadrian, Elizabeth Speller captures the fascinating life of Hadrian, ruler of the most powerful empire on earth at the peak of its glory. Speller displays a superb gift for narrative as she traces the intrigue of Hadrian's rise: his calculated marriage to Emperor Trajan's closest female relative, a woman he privately tormented; Trajan's suspicious deathbed adoption of Hadrian as his heir, a stroke some thought to be a post-mortem forgery; and the ensuing slaughter of potential rivals by an ally of Hadrian's. Speller makes brilliant use of her sources, vividly depicting Hadrian's bouts of melancholy, his intellectual passions, his love for a beautiful boy (whose death sent him into a spiral), and the paradox of his general policies of peace and religious tolerance even as he conducted a bitter, three-year war with Judea.
Most important, the author captures the emperor as both a builder and an inveterate traveler, guiding readers on a grand tour of the Roman Empire at the moment of its greatest extent and accomplishment, from the barren, windswept frontiers of Britain to the teeming streets of Antioch, from the dangers of the German forest to the urban splendor of Rome itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is an odd if appealing amalgam, which the publisher describes as"part travelogue, biography and fictional memoir," recounting the life of second-century Roman emperor Hadrian when the empire was at its peak of power. The memoir is not Hadrian's (though he did in fact write an autobiography that has been lost to us), but that of Julia Balbilla, an aristocratic woman, poet and good friend of Hadrian's wife. Inspired by Marguerite Yourcenar's novel about the emperor, and attempting to flesh out the skimpy historical record and give readers a taste of real life during the Roman Empire, Speller, a classics scholar, entwines excerpts from the fictional diary with historical narrative to relate the life of Hadrian,"a great and brilliant emperor" and"a passionate and incessant traveler." Through the imagined words of Julia, Hadrian becomes a man of flesh and blood:"his hair was more brown than golden and the poetry rather better than the wits gave him credit for. It was the same with his alleged cowardice in the wars and his womanising." This is a pleasing introduction to the ancient world.
