An Emperor Goes to the Doctor

Today I went to see my physician Hermogenes, who has just returned to the Villa from a rather long journey in Asia. No food could be taken before the examination, so we had made our appointment for the early morning hours. I took off my cloak and tunic and lay down on a couch. I spare you details which would be as disagreeable to you as to me, the description of the body of a man who is growing old, and is about to die of a dropsical heart. Let us say only that I coughed, inhaled, and held my breath according to Hermogenes’ directions. He was alarmed, in spite of himself, by the rapid progress of the disease. …It is difficult to remain an emperor in the presence of a physician, and difficult even to keep one’s essential quality as man. The professional eye saw in me only a mass of humors, a sorry mixture of blood and lymph.. This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master. But enough. …I like my body, it has served me well, and in every way, and I do not begrudge it the care it now needs. It will fall to my lot, as a sick man, to have the best of care. But no one can go beyond prescribed limits; my swollen limbs no longer sustain me through the long Roman ceremonies; I fight for breath, and I am now sixty.

In such elegant language, so began a book-length epistle meant for his heir and -- farther down the line by nearly two thousand years -- for us, by one of the masters of the ancient world, a "good" Roman emperor, as imagined by Marguerite Yourcenar in her wondrous 1957 "meditation on history," Hadrian's Memoirs.

It is interesting and enlightening to see how, over such long stretches of time, things change greatly in their outline but hardly at all in their basic substance. Contrary to what is commonly thought, this is why it is not in any way a waste of time to minor, in college, in Classics.