Hadrian's Ode to His Soul

I READ in a newspaper, not long ago, the sufficiently remarkable statement that the hymn beginning,

was written by the Emperor Hadrian. That a hymn in the English of Dryden and Addison, containing phrases out of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, should have been written by a pagan philosopher, who ruled Britain when Pict and Caledonian contended with “ Icenian, Catieuchlanian, Coritanian, Trinobant,” is a conception worthy of that singular hash of half-correct knowledge which does duty for scholarship in so many of our publications. That Alexander Pope had the emperor’s ode in mind when he wrote his hymn is reasonable enough, though the connection between them has been grossly exaggerated. We know Pope’s ideas of translation were free ; but his Messiah is really nearer a version of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue than his hymn is of Hadrian’s ode.

What Hadrian really wrote was this :

This strange lyric has been the wonder of all readers, for its melody, so fascinating, yet so utterly past metrical analysis, hovering as it does on the confines of quantity and rhyme, its strange combination of skepticism and belief, and the still stranger petting tenderness of the phrases. It cannot help suggesting to an English reader a parallel to Mrs. Barbauld’s “ Life, we’ve been long together,’ much more than to Pope’s rich and edifying but more artificial and Scriptural hymn.

It may seem to some a cold anatomizing of this frail and gentle stanza if we subject it to anything like philological and antiquarian analysis. Yet this, I venture to think, is an error. There are peculiar depths of language and meaning in Hadrian’s farewell which will be missed by a superficial reader. I hope, through the path of what may seem at first a pedantic discussion, to lead the way to an attempt at translation which shall preserve something of the original softness and perfume.

These five lines constitute one of the most perfectly Latin strains in all Roman literature. Every one knows that Latin poetry, for its six centuries from Plautus to Claudian, was a singularly exotic growth. It borrowed its metrical forms, it largely borrowed its subjects, and it recast the ancient language of Camillas and Fabius in almost servile admiration of Greek models. We are offended when Dryden introduces into his masculine English such needless French words as “ flambeau ” and “ fraîcheur ” to please an imported taste. Yet really great poets like Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace condescend to very similar Hellenic insults on their own more ancient tongue. There was a whole vocabulary and grammar of household Latin — for the Romans were the most domestic of nations — that is almost wiped out in the court Latin of the early empire.

Now, it will be noticed that Hadrian’s little poem is purely national in every word and construction ; but it bears one especial mark of the old home Latin which we find nowhere else except in the writings of that transcendent genius, Catullus, at once the Burns and Byron of Rome. This is the free use of diminutives, both of nouns and adjectives. It is the language of petting, the language used only to one’s precious home companions. Here it shows

and brings Hadrian, perhaps the most complete cosmopolite who ever lived, back to the very inmost recesses of the plain but devoted Roman home.

But, beautiful and homelike as the language is, it must be regarded as something of a tour de force. The very fact that between Catullus and Hadrian there are two hundred years without a single poem in this style shows what an effort it was for a literary man to write in that strain. It was as hard for a Roman poet, a hundred and fifty years after Christ, to cast a Greek strain out of his lines, and adopt a purely Latin one, as for Byron to write in the style of Spenser. As I have said. Hadrian was the most cosmopolitan of men ; he had absolutely absorbed the characteristics of every quarter of his vast empire till he had become at home in all its parts. A Spaniard by descent, he was equally a fellow-citizen of the Briton, the Athenian, and the Egyptian, as well as the Roman. Hence, his ode, though in imitation of the most distinctively Latin models, is artificial, a tour de force, and should have a touch of the same artifice in a version.

But, deeper than the language, there is in the sentiment the most singular because unconscious revelation of the ancient theory of death, exhibited to the full in Homer, and abundantly illustrated in a score of authors since, — perhaps nowhere better than in some of Horace’s odes. The strange language of Hadrian’s fourth line tells the story with an unsuspected accuracy, which I fear will only be marred by developing it.

Homer’s conception of man is wholly material. He is a body. When he himself is prostrate on the ground, a prey to the birds and beasts, his soul, whatever that may be, flies to the unseen world. The man, a solid structure of bones and flesh, derives his warm, sentient, hearty life from the liquid part, the blood, and His shape from the viewless air. This shaping breath is not the man, but only an empty shade, which, when it flies to Hades, utters a thin shriek, like air escaping from a jet. In that unseen world it still keeps its form, but no real conscious life. This it can recover only by drinking blood. The solid part, the bones and flesh, being no longer kept in continuity and life by the blood and shaped by the breath, falls into dust, and mingles with the earth from whence it came. But if offerings of blood and of generous liquid food — milk, honey, and wine — are poured on the grave, the poor, thin, airy, bloodless ghost may draw in a portion of sentient life, may recognize anti speak to those it knew, and recover at least a longing memory of that strong, real, solid body which it formerly inhabited and to which it gave form.

Now, the real, generous, warm life being in the blood, when the blood is shed, the breath or spirit which parts is not merely naked by the loss of the flesh, but cold by loss of blood ; and to an inhabitant of south Europe, cold is in itself horror and death. The frame without warm red blood seemed to the ancients no life at all; it was a mere shivering copy of existence. When the Stoic suicides, just before Hadrian’s time, let the blood run from their veins, there was a solemn symbolism in that method of death. This notion of the chill that attends the end of life is that so delicately and richly expressed by Gray in the lines, —

Hadrian thinks of his spirit,as it leaves the companionship and hospitality of the body, as shivering and have. But it is also pallidula. Now, the meaning of pallidus is simply “ bloodless.” When the blood leaves the cheek of a Teuton, his face becomes white ; not so with a south European. The dark complexion of the sunny land shows yellow ; and that is the meaning of the Latin palleo in all its derivatives. To translate it by “ pale ” wholly loses the force of a word which Propertius adopts as giving the color of the metal gold when opposed to silver. But there is no idea of color in Hadrian’s lyric. It is the thought of the poor little unclothed hungry spirit going forth into unknown places, —

Bearing in mind all these characteristics in this poem, so slight yet so profound, — its metrical character with just one touch of rhyme, its perfectly native Latin, demanding as native English, the petting tone of its diminutives, the slightly artificial air that their construction indicates, — and anxious to preserve the ancient materialism without a hint of the coarseness which hangs round the very purest songs of Rome, I offer with diffidence the following translation : —

William Everett.