ring her name) were
placed here, their urn guarded by two bronze peacocks, the emblems of an
empress.

These peacocks with the pineapple, which crowned the summit of the tomb,
now ornament the Court of the Belvedere of the Vatican, in whose
galleries may be found some of the statues with which Hadrian decorated
the upper colonnade of the mausoleum, and which were wrenched from their
pedestals and toppled upon the heads of the Goths when Totila besieged
Rome.

Gregorovius in his scholarly biography of Hadrian thus sums up his
achievements and estimates his character:

"He ruled the empire like a noble Roman, with prudence and strength. He
enjoyed life with the joy of the ancients. He travelled throughout the
world and found it worth the trouble. He restored it and embellished it
with new beauty. He was lavish on a great scale."

We certainly do not know what he thought of his whole life at the end of
it. He might have agreed with the estimate of Marcus Aurelius: "All that
belongs to the soul is a dream and a delusion; life is a struggle and a
wandering among strangers, and fame after death is forgetfulness."

That he had some vague belief in the immortality of the soul the
well-known poem written shortly before his death certainly shows:

"Animula, vagula, blandula;
Hospes, comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca;
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec ut soles dabis jocos?"

"Celestial spirit, evanescent fay,
Supernal guest and sharer of my might,
Wherefore and whither dost thou fly away,
Exquisite phantom, nude and ghostly white,
Never with me again to flit and play,
Never with me to play?"

Reluctantly, after all our search, we find that archaeology, while it
tells us much of Hadrian, leaves Antinous still a mystery.

The forsaken pleasure palace is silent and empty save for ghosts of the
imagination. We see the imperial barges glide up the Nile as in a
pageant, but it is all a wordless pantomime, though the beautiful
immortal figure stands.

"Still there where he a thousand years hath stood
And watched, with gaze intent, the ages' flood
His graceful limbs reflecting, then as now
His lotus crown the sadness on his brow,
And races new in line unending glide
Along in shells upon the flowing tide;
But aye as they approach and look on him
Athwart their joy there falls a sorrow dim,
The citherns cease that rang as they drew nigh,
On glowing lip