Recommendations
Books Like Mémoires d'Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar
Books for readers who loved Hadrian's letter and Yourcenar's portrait of power, beauty, and the approach of death
Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951) is Yourcenar's masterpiece — the dying Roman Emperor writing to Marcus Aurelius about a life of power, beauty, the love of Antinous, and the meditation on what endures. These 8 books share its historical depth, its portrait of a great man's consciousness approaching death, and its meditation on the meaning of a life of power.
- 1
Buy on AmazonL'Œuvre au noir
by Marguerite Yourcenar
The companion historical novel — a sixteenth-century alchemist across the religious wars, the same psychological depth and historical scope as Mémoires d'Hadrien in a different period.
- 2
Buy on AmazonAlexis
by Marguerite Yourcenar
The short debut — the same scrupulous psychological honesty in a very concentrated form; shows the full range of the Yourcenar method.
- 3Buy on Amazon
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's great novella about a man confronting death — the most concentrated literary predecessor to Hadrian's meditation on dying and the meaning of a life; read alongside for the contrast between Hadrian's acceptance and Ivan Ilyich's terror.
- 4
Buy on AmazonI, Claudius
by Robert Graves
The other great Roman Emperor memoir-novel — Claudius narrating the whole of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with similar historical depth; where Yourcenar's Hadrian is meditative and philosophical, Graves's Claudius is satirical and political.
- 5
Buy on AmazonJulian
by Gore Vidal
Vidal's novel about the Emperor Julian (the Apostate) — the most direct companion to Mémoires d'Hadrien: another Roman Emperor writing from a position of power and loss about what it meant to rule the world.
- 6
Buy on AmazonMarcus Aurelius: A Life
by Frank McLynn
The biography of the man to whom Hadrian writes — reading about the actual Marcus Aurelius enriches the relationship between writer and addressee that Yourcenar imagines.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
The actual inner life of the man Hadrian addresses — reading Hadrian's letter and Marcus Aurelius's own private reflections together gives the full picture of the Antonine age that Yourcenar imagines.
- 8
Buy on AmazonOn the Nature of Things
by Lucretius
The Epicurean poem that shapes Hadrian's sensibility — Hadrian was deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, and Lucretius's meditation on death and matter ('Death is nothing to us') is the philosophical background to Hadrian's equanimity in the face of dying.
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