I bought my copy of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian in the gift shop at Pompeii, hoping that this novel, which I knew nothing about, might chime with thoughts I’d had while walking through the city’s ruined boulevards. With its cover image of a sad-looking statue, it seemed a more fittingly sombre memento than the other that caught my eye: a small satyr with a gigantic phallus.
That afternoon I’d had the authentic Pompeii experience — my full €11 of rumination upon the transience of mortal things. Traipsing past the remains of a snack bar and the Temple of Apollo, I’d marvelled at how the Roman past seemed in some ways so relatable and in others ways so alien; how this place that seemed so
