Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

Author: Anthony Everitt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178185209X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 550

Book Description
Born and bred in what is now northern Spain to a family of olive-oil magnates, Hadrian was lucky enough to benefit from the patronage of his maternal cousin, Trajan, who would later become emperor, and who named Hadrian his successor on his death in AD 117. After suppressing the Jewish revolt that had started under Trajan (memorably depicted in Josephus' Jewish War), Hadrian brought years of turbulence to an end. He presided over Rome's expansion to its greatest extent, travelling all over his empire to fortify its borders and, notably, building a wall to demarcate its northern extreme in the island of Britain (as well as another in Germany). Hadrian also 'Hellenized' the cultural life of the empire, and left an extraordinary legacy, yet he remains one of the least-known of Rome's emperors. Using exhaustive research, Anthony Everitt unveils the private life and character of this most successful of emperors, in the most vivid and exciting retelling of his story to date.

Oriental Tales

Author: Marguerite Yourcenar
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374519978
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
This collection includes: How Wand-fo was Saved, Marko's Smile, The Milk of Death, The Last Love of Princess Genji, The Man Who Loved the Nereids, Our Lady of the Swallows, Aphrodissia; the Widow, Kali Beheaded, The End of Marko Kraljevic, The Sadness of Cornelius Berg, and a Postscript by the Author. "From China to Japan, the Balkans to India, Oriental Tales addresses love, conquest, betrayal, murder, religion, and passion in an eloquent and exquisite telling."--Kirkus Reviews.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Author: Josyane Savigneau
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226735443
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Book Description
One of the most respected writers in the French language and best known as the author of Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss, Yourcenar received countless literary honors and became the first woman to be elected to the Academie Francaise. An uncompromising and intimate portrait. 50 halftones.

Hadrian

Author: Anthony R Birley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135952264
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Book Description
Hadrian's reign (AD 117-138) was a watershed in the history of the Roman Empire. Hadrian abandoned his predecessor Trajan's eastern conquests - Mesopotamia and Armenia - trimmed down the lands beyond the lower Danube, and constructed new demarcation lines in Germany, North Africa, and most famously Hadrian's Wall in Britain, to delimit the empire. The emperor Hadrian, a strange and baffling figure to his contemporaries, had a many-sided personality. Insatiably ambitious, and a passionate Philhellene, he promoted the 'Greek Renaissance' extravagantly. But his attempt to Hellenize the Jews, including the outlawing of circumcision, had disastrous consequences, and his 'Greek' love of the beautiful Bithynian boy Antinous ended in tragedy. No comprehensive account of Hadrian's life and reign has been attempted for over seventy years. In Hadrian: The Restless Emperor, Anthony Birley brings together the new evidence from inscriptions and papyri, and up-to-date and in-depth examination of the work of other scholars on aspects of Hadrian's reign and policies such as the Jewish war, the coinage, Hadrian's building programme in Rome, Athens and Tivoli, and his relationship with his favourite, Antinous, to provide a thorough and fascinating account of the private and public life of a man who, though hated when he died, left an indelible mark on the Roman Empire.

Following Hadrian

Author: Elizabeth Speller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195176131
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book 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 illuminates the fascinating life of Hadrian, rule 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, making brilliant use of her sources and 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.

Hadrian

Author: Thorsten Opper
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030954
Category : Emperors
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
"Hadrian, a Roman emperor, the builder of Hadrian's Wall in the north of England, a restless and ambitious man who was interested in architecture and was passionate about Greece and Greek culture. Is this the common image today of the ruler of one of the greatest powers of the ancient world?" "Published to complement a major exhibition at the British Museum, this wide-ranging book rediscovers Hadrian. The sharp contradictions in his personality are examined, previous concepts are questioned and myths that surround him are exploded." --Book Jacket.

Memoirs of Hadrian

Author: Marguerite Yourcenar
Publisher: New York, Farrar
ISBN:
Category : Emperors
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
Fictionalized letter from the Roman Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 76 - 138) to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius.

Fires

Author: Marguerite Yourcenar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226965287
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Fires consists of nine monologues and narratives based on classical Greek stories. Antigone, Clytemnestra, Phaedo, Sappho are all mythical figures whose stories are mingled with contemporary themes. Interspersed are highly personal narratives, reflecting on a time of profound inner crisis in the author's life. "The unwritten novel among the fantasies and aphorisms of Fires is a classic tale."—Stephen Koch, New York Times Book Review

The Abyss

Author: Marguerite Yourcenar
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374516669
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
The story of the fate of two cousins in sixteenth century northern France. The younger, sixteen-year-old Henry Maximilian, has set out to become a soldier and a poet. The elder, twenty-two-year-old Zeno, has left the seminary to make himself an alchemist-philosopher.

"We Met in Paris"

Author: Joan E Howard
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274048
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Book Description
Grace Frick introduced English-language readers all over the world to the distinguished French author Marguerite Yourcenar with her award-winning translation of Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian in 1954. European biographies of Yourcenar have often disparaged Frick and her relationship with Yourcenar, however. This work shows Frick as a person of substance in her own right, and paints a portrait of both women that is at once intimate and scrupulously documented. It contains a great deal of new information that will disrupt long-held beliefs about Yourcenar and may even shock some of her scholars and fans.