hem; he was one of the best read men of the day; he was
poet, painter, sculptor, musician, erudite and emperor in one. Of
course he enjoyed it. The world, over which he travelled, was his, not
by virtue of the purple alone, but because of his knowledge of it. The
prince is not necessarily cosmopolitan; the historian and antiquarian
are. Hadrian was an early Quinet, an earlier Champollion; always the
thinker, sometimes the cook. And to those in his suite it must have
been a sight very unique to see a Caesar who had published his volume
of erotic verse, just as any other young man might do; who had hunted
lions, not in the arena, but in Africa, make researches on the plain
where Troy had been, and a supreme of sow's breast, peacock, pheasant,
ham and boar, which he called Pentapharmarch, and which he offered as
he had his Catacriani--the erotic verse--as something original and nice.

Insatiably inquisitive, verifying a history that he was preparing in
the lands which gave that history birth, he passed through Egypt and
Asia, questioning sphinxes, the cerements of kings, the arcana of the
temples; deciphering the sacred books, arguing with magi, interrogating
the stars. For the thinker, after the fashion of the hour, was
astrologer too, and one of the few anecdotes current concerning him is
in regard to a habit he had of drawing up on the 31st of December the
events of the coming year. After consulting the stars on that 31st of
December which occurred in the twenty-second year of his reign, he
prepared a calendar which extended only to the 10th of July. On that
day he died.

The calendar does not seem to have been otherwise serviceable. It was
in Bithynia he found a shepherd whose appearance which, in its
perfection, was quite earthly, suggested neither heaven nor hell, but
some planet where the atmosphere differs from ours; where it is pink,
perhaps, or faintly ochre; where birth and death have forms higher than
here.

Hadrian, captivated, led the lad in leash. The facts concerning that
episode have been so frequently given that the repetition is needless
here. Besides, the point is elsewhere. Presently the lad fell
overboard. Hadrian lost a valet, Rome an emperor, and Olympus a god.
But in attempting to deify the lost lackey, the grief of Hadrian was so
immediate, that it is permissible to fancy that the lad's death was not
one of those events which the emperor-astrologer noted beforehand on
his calendar. The lad was