Mary Beard is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS. Her books include a Life of Jane Ellen Harrison and The Parthenon.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
2 April 1998
On expression under Nero
28 April 1994
Stage Emperor
21 February 2008
Roman Victory!
22 February 2007
Rome versus Jerusalem
2 July 1998
On the story of Beatrice Cenci
22 January 2004
Tacitus and the Emperors
16 September 1999
Pompeii
RELATED CATEGORIES
Biography and memoirs, Biography, Europe, Southern Europe, Italy, Rome, 500 BCE-500 CE, 1 CE-499, 1 CE-199, Classics, Classical civilisation
Vol. 20 No. 12 · 18 June 1998
pages 12-13 | 3130 words
One of the Lads
Mary Beard
- Hadrian: The Restless Emperor by Anthony Birley
Routledge, 424 pp, £40.00, October 1997, ISBN 0 04 151654 0
The Emperor Hadrian once went to the public baths and saw an old soldier rubbing his back against a wall. Puzzled, he asked the old man what he was doing. ‘Getting the marble to scrape the oil off,’ the old man explained, ‘because I can’t afford a slave.’ The Emperor immediately presented him with a team of slaves and the money for their upkeep. A few weeks later, he was in the baths again. Predictably, perhaps, he found a whole group of old men ostentatiously rubbing their backs against the wall, trying to cash in on his generosity. He asked the same question and got the same response. ‘But haven’t you thought,’ replied the canny Emperor, ‘of rubbing each other down?’
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 20 No. 14 · 16 July 1998
From Simon Frazer
Mary Beard, in her review of Anthony Birley’s Hadrian: The Restless Emperor (LRB, 18 June), does not mention Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémories d’Hadrian, first published in Paris in 1951, or its sensitive translation into English by Grace Frick in collaboration with Yourcenar, published in 1955. As the author put it in her Note, ‘a reconstruction of a historical figure and of the world of his time in the first person borders on the domain of fiction, and sometimes of poetry; it can therefore dispense with formal statements of evidence for the historical facts concerned. Its human significance, however, is greatly enriched by close adherence to the facts.’ She goes on to consider her sources on eight pages. Her intention was to ‘approach inner reality, if possible, through careful examination of what the documents themselves afford’. Having continued to enjoy Memoirs of Hadrian as autobiography, I would despair, in the absence of significant fresh source material (manifestly not available to Birley), of trying to improve on it in a biography.
Simon Frazer
Powys
