A Death-Bed Agony
Hadrian, one of the greatest Roman emperors, wanted a quick knife-stab to quit the world. No slave had the courage to deliver it, as he writhed in agony. He did not notice the blind girl and the old man who claimed he cured them, or how the slaves took his scribbling as if it were a sacred text. Yet that is what it almost came to be.
The Poets Dumbfounded
These are his words:
Animula, vagula,blandula,
Hospes comeque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec ut soles dabis jocos.
Nobody knows what they mean, yet everybody has an intuition. Poets as diverse as Byron and Pope have attempted it. Here are their attempts. First Pope in 1712
Ah fleeting Spirit! wand'ring fire
That long hast warmed my tender breast
Must thou no more this flame inspire.
No more a pleasing cheerful guest
Whither ah whither art thou flying
To what dark, undiscovered shore
Thou seem'st all trembling, shiv'ring, dying
And Wit and Humour are no more.
And now Byron, written in 1806, when he was nineteen.
Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite,
Friend and associate of this clay!
To what unknown region borne,
Wilt thou now wing thy distant flight?
No more with wonted humour gay,
But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.
Both are wildly inaccurate and wander off the point. Both add lines of their own.
Pope was annoyed with Addison for having printed it in under his name. He felt the sentiment was too pagan and later wrote his own Dying Christian to his Soul. Byron probably thought it not pagan enough.
Much later, Christina Rossetti seemed to get closer.
Soul rudderless, unbraced
The body's friend and guest
Whither away to-day?
Unsuppled, pale,dis-cased
Dumb to thy wonted jest.
The Spell of Death.
At first it seems close, but two major mysteries are posed at once in the original. Animula means "little soul." Why does a serious Stoic and Epicurean Emperor treat himself so lightly ?
Was Hadrian a closet Christian, who understood the soul to be immortal? Hardly, as he asked for death. Hadrian seems to have believed that pleasure was the aim of life and indifference to pain the way to gain that aim. This was the end of pleasure then and its jokes.
The other mystery is the reference to jokes at the end. What are the jokes? And why is this philosopher so unsure. Some consider the poem to be a spell with a hidden meaning which Hadrian invoked for his soul. Is the levity a disguise?
Emperors were usually declared to be Gods after their departure. Did Hadrian want to dispel the election from his own soul?
The soul is little because it is an no more than an atom. The regions are not new as the atoms make up the world. Yet the joke did not end there, as Commodus, much later decided to declare Hadrian a god, as he felt he was one himself.
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