HADRIAN AND THE WORLD THAT BECAME TURKEY
Frank WHITE
Turkish Daily News
July 21 2008
A much-awaited exhibition is opening in London at the British
Museum on July 24, called "Hadrian: Empire and Conflict" (closes
Oct. 26). Hadrian has many connections with Turkey – that is, with
the lands he governed that Turks now inhabit, Anatolia and Thrace,
or that as Ottomans they also governed: Egypt, Syria, Palestine,
Armenia, North Africa, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe.
Hadrian’s own dominion, that he ruled as Roman Emperor, 117-138 Common
Era, extended northwesterly to the Scottish border of England, where
he inaugurated the massive 80-mile long wall (in 122) bisecting the
island like a cinch at the waist. Ostensibly it was to protect Roman
British towns and villages and farms from the raids of Celts and other
northern tribes. But some of them may have rather wanted to place
themselves under the shelter of the pax Romana and its system of laws.
Hadrian’s Gate at Antalya:
The monumental edifice is still a showpiece of British sightseeing
and archaeological heritage. The millions who have been schooled on
Hadrian’s Wall or have seen parts of it are a natural target audience
for the colossal summer show at the sprawling Museum in Bloomsbury. One
of the few extant bronze heads of Hadrian was found (without its torso)
in the mud of the River Thames nearby only in the 19th century. Other
surviving sculptures and friezes related to him are mostly of marble,
and have been gathered from collections far-flung.
In Turkey perhaps the most beautiful remaining monument to Hadrian
is the triple marble arch, called Hadrian’s Gate, in Antalya,
to commemorate the emperor’s visit there in 130. The inscription,
in Greek, naming Hadrian and linking him with his predecessor and
adoptive father, Trajan, survives in part in the Ashmoleon Museum at
Oxford. Stone towers still standing on either side of the arches go
back to the founding of the city several hundred years earlier.
Turkey also has its Hadrian’s Walls – one at Samandag in Cukurova
near Antakya/Antioch. Of course in Trakya (Thrace) the city of Edirne
was founded by Hadrian, who gave it his own name, (H)Adrianopolis
(Edirne being a corruption of that Greek appellation). I once supposed
the Adriatic Sea must have been named – or re-named – for Hadrian,
but of course it is more nearly the other way round. His forebears
and family had long been in Roman Spain, but had gone there from the
little city of Hadria on the northeast Italian coast of the Adriatic,
and gave their scion and emperor-to-be the name of their ancestral
seat 300 years later.
Hadrian’s grandfather (one tradition says uncle) actually divined
by oneiromancy (dream revelation) when the lad was but 11 that he
would one day "rule the world." So Marguerite Yourcenar has him do
in the highly critically researched yet most rapturously believable
"self"-presentation of Hadrian in literary form: Mémoires d’Hadrien,
1951; the noble and vigorous English version is by Grace Frick in
collaboration with the author: Hadrian’s Memoirs, 1954; the expressive
Turkish translation (from the English) is by Nili Bilkur: Hadrianus’un
Anıları, 1984; Nili Hanım includes (some English editions don’t)
both the detailed "Author’s Note" on historical sources and the
even more fascinating "Thoughts on the Writing of Hadrian’s Memoirs"
on how she came to conceive and compose – and several times nearly
despaired of completing – the distinguished work.
A woman of prominence:
Largely on the strength of it, Yourcenar (1903-87; her nom de plume,
an almost-anagram of her family name, de Crayencour) became the first
woman ever to be elected to the Forty Immortals of the Académie
Francaise, 1980. For the costume in which to deliver her inaugural
lecture she commissioned the designer Yves St. Laurent – so French
was she (though born in Belgium and living half her life with her
American partner, Frick, on Mt. Desert Island, Maine).
Her masterpiece invents for Hadrian a first-person point of view, as
if writing to his adopted son and imperial heir, Mark (yes, Marcus
Aurelius, who indeed became the famous Stoic philosopher, author,
and emperor, 161-180). By this ruse she can impersonate Hadrian in
the last months or weeks of his 62 years, reviewing his entire life
and lifting out its lessons for the young princeps-in-training. This
Hadrian has no reason or wish to dissimulate – at least no more than
is necessary where self-knowledge is at issue. Yet he has incentive
to articulate both to himself and to his precocious protégé the
mature wine of a life distilled from such choice grapes.
Once you have read – and re-read – Yourcenar’s Hadrian, you can
entertain any other work-up of the figure only as an academic
exercise. Hers is the one that gets under your skin – his skin. Of
course, the book is a prodigy of historical ventriloquism. The rich
and penetrating inner ruminations are as much hers as "his" – rather,
are some unlikely fusion of both "personalities," each investing the
other with a voice. She knows the sources, artifacts, and locations
so well and so shrewdly that she perpetrates no implausibilities,
but building on what can reasonably be known of Hadrian she provides
him with flesh and self-consciousness, a (fictional) coherence that
evades even the most scrupulous biographer-historian. (One full and
careful account in English is Royston Lambert’s Beloved and God: The
Story of Hadrian and Antonius, 1984, with generous illustrations of
the statues, coins, sites, et alia.)
An ‘almost wise’ man:
Yourcenar says her Hadrian is a man "almost wise." He was rare in
individual gifts and application of them, but his outlook and life
were possible only because he came at a brief window in time between
the dying glimmers of the Greek and Roman cults of the gods and just
before one of the eastern salvation-mystery movements, Christianity,
was to transmute the humanism of the classical world into a new
amalgam of it with a purged Hebrew spirituality and morality – an
uneasy yoking the world is still struggling with – or riding on.
Something essentially human expressed itself in Hadrian – and in
the world that produced him, the world he re-shaped, that succeeded
him. It must be sifted and reappropriated in every period.
–Boundary_(ID_m5GAeydMbaANoWpTLxD6IA)–