كان جلال الدين مسلما مؤمناً بتعاليم الإسلام السمحة لكنه استطاع جذب اشخاص من ديانات وملل أخرى وذلك بسبب تفكيره المرن المتسامح. فطريقته تشجع التساهل اللامتناهي مع كل المعتقدات والأفكار. كما كان يدعو إلى التعليل الإيجابي، الخير والإحسان وادراك الأمور عن طريق المحبة. وبالنسبة اليه والى أتباعه، فإن كل الديانات خيرة وحقيقية بمفاهيمها. لذلك كانوا يعاملون المسلمين والمسيحيين واليهود معاملة سواسية [7].
وككل الصوفيين، آمن الرومي بالتوحيد مع حبه، أي الله. هذا الحب الذي يبتعد عن الإنسان، والإنسان في مهمة ايجاده والعودة اليه. وبطلب من مريديه، وضع الرومي أفكاره ومبادئه في كتاب سماه "المثنوي" الذي استعمل فيه حياكته خيوط من قصص يومية وإرشادات قرآنية وحكمة من خبرته لينسج كتابا ثمينا ممتلئ بمعان عميقة منتقاة بحذر وعناية.
أمن الرومي بالموسيقى والشعر والرقص كسبيل أكيد للوصول إلى الله. فالموسيقى الروحية بالنسبة له، تساعد المريد على التركيز على الله بقوة لدرجة أن المريد يفنى ثم يعود إلى الواقع بشكل مختلف. ومن هذه المنطلق، تطورت فكرة الرقص الدائري الذي وصلت إلى درجة الطقوس. وقد شجع الرومي على الإصغاء للموسيقى فيما سماه "سمع" فيما يقوم الشخص بالدوران حول نفسه. فعند المولويين، التنصت للموسيقى هي رحلة روحية تأخذ الإنسان في رحلة تصاعدية من خلال النفس والمحبة للوصول إلى الكمال. والرحلة تبداء بالدوران التي تكبر المحبة في الإنسان فتخفت أنانيته ليجد الحق الطريق للوصول إلى الكمال. وحين يعود المريد إلى الواقع، يعود بنضوج أكبر وممتلئ بالمحبة ليكون خادما للغيره من البشر دون تمييز أو مصلحة ذاتية.
بعد وفاته، حول ابنه سلطان ولد تعاليم الرومي إلى سلوك للمريد والذي عُرف بالطريقة المولوية. وانتشرت هذه الطريقة في مختلف أصقاع العالم وخاصة في العالم الغربي في يومنا هذا.

Medea (Greek: Μήδεια, Mēdeia, Georgian: მედეა, Medea) is a Colchian woman in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis,[1] niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children, Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides's play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of Corinth, offers him his daughter, Glauce.[2] The play tells about how Medea avenges her husband's betrayal.
The myths involving Jason have been interpreted by specialists[3] as part of a class of myths that tell how the Hellenes of the distant heroic age, before the Trojan War, faced the challenges of the pre-Greek "Pelasgian" cultures of mainland Greece, the Aegean and Anatolia. Jason, Perseus, Theseus, and above all Heracles, are all "liminal" figures, poised on the threshold between the old world of shamans, chthonic earth deities, and the new Bronze Age Greek ways.[4]
Medea figures in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a myth known best from a late literary version worked up by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century BC and called the Argonautica. However, for all its self-consciousness and researched archaic vocabulary, the late epic was based on very old, scattered materials. Medea is known in most stories as an enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of the goddess Hecate or a witch. The myth of Jason and Medea is very old, originally written around the time Hesiod wrote the Theogony. It was known to the composer of the Little Iliad, part of the Epic Cycle.

Medea's role began after Jason arrived from Iolcus to Colchis, to claim his inheritance and throne by retrieving the Golden Fleece. In the most complete surviving account, the Argonautica of Apollonius, Medea fell in love with him and promised to help him, but only on the condition that if he succeeded, he would take her with him and marry her. Jason agreed. In a familiar mythic motif, Aeëtes promised to give him the fleece, but only if he could perform certain tasks. First, Jason had to plough a field with fire-breathing oxen that he had to yoke himself. Medea gave him an unguent with which to anoint himself and his weapons, to protect him from the bulls' fiery breath. Then, Jason had to sow the teeth of a dragon in the ploughed field (compare the myth of Cadmus). The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors. Jason was forewarned by Medea, however, and knew to throw a rock into the crowd. Unable to determine where the rock had come from, the soldiers attacked and killed each other. Finally, Aeëtes made Jason fight and kill the sleepless dragon that guarded the fleece. Medea put the beast to sleep with her narcotic herbs. Jason then took the fleece and sailed away with Medea, as he had promised. Apollonius says that Medea only helped Jason in the first place because Hera had convinced Aphrodite or Eros to cause Medea to fall in love with him. Medea distracted her father as they fled by killing her brother Absyrtus. In some versions, Medea is said to have dismembered his body and scattered his parts on an island, knowing her father would stop to retrieve them for proper burial; in other versions, it is Absyrtus himself who pursued them, and was killed by Jason. During the fight, Atalanta, a member of the group helping Jason in his quest for the fleece, was seriously wounded, but Medea healed her.
According to some versions, Medea and Jason stopped on her aunt Circe's island so that she could be cleansed after the murder of her brother, relieving her of blame for the deed.
On the way back to Thessaly, Medea prophesied that Euphemus, the helmsman of Jason's ship, the Argo, would one day rule over all Libya. This came true through Battus, a descendant of Euphemus.
The Argo then reached the island of Crete, guarded by the bronze man, Talos (Talus). Talos had one vein which went from his neck to his ankle, bound shut by a single bronze nail. According to Apollodorus, Talos was slain either when Medea drove him mad with drugs, deceived him that she would make him immortal by removing the nail, or was killed by Poeas's arrow (Apollodorus 1.140). In the Argonautica, Medea hypnotized him from the Argo, driving him mad so that he dislodged the nail, ichor flowed from the wound, and he bled to death (Argonautica 4.1638). After Talos died, the Argo landed.
While Jason searched for the Golden Fleece, Hera, who was still angry at Pelias, conspired to make Jason fall in love with Medea, who Hera hoped would kill Pelias. When Jason and Medea returned to Iolcus, Pelias still refused to give up his throne. So Medea conspired to have Pelias' own daughters kill him. She told them she could turn an old ram into a young ram by cutting up the old ram and boiling it. During her demonstration, a live, young ram jumped out of the pot. Excited, the girls cut their father into pieces and threw him into a pot. Having killed Pelias, Jason and Medea fled to Corinth. This is much like what she did with Aeson, Jason's father.

In Corinth, Jason abandoned Medea for the king's daughter, Glauce. Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a dress and golden coronet, covered in poison. This resulted in the deaths of both the princess and the king, Creon, when he went to save her. According to the tragic poet Euripides, Medea continued her revenge, murdering her two children by Jason. Afterward, she left Corinth and flew to Athens in a golden chariot driven by dragons sent by her grandfather Helios, god of the sun.
Before the fifth century BC, there seem to have been two variants of the myth's conclusion. According to the poet Eumelus to whom the fragmentary epic Korinthiaka is usually attributed, Medea killed her children by accident.[5] The poet Creophylus, however, blamed their murders on the citizens of Corinth.[6] Medea's deliberate murder of her children, then, appears to be Euripides' invention although some scholars believe Neophron created this alternate tradition.[7] Her filicide would go on to become the standard for later writers.[8] Pausanias, writing in the late 2nd century, records five different versions of what happened to Medea's children after reporting that he has seen a monument for them while traveling in Corinth.[9]
Fleeing from Jason, Medea made her way to Thebes where she healed Heracles (the former Argonaut) for the murder of Iphitus. In return, Heracles gave her a place to stay in Thebes until the Thebans drove her out in anger, despite Heracles' protests.
She then fled to Athens where she met and married Aegeus. They had one son, Medus, although Hesiod makes Medus the son of Jason.[10] Her domestic bliss was once again shattered by the arrival of Aegeus' long-lost son, Theseus. Determined to preserve her own son's inheritance, Medea convinced her husband that Theseus was a threat and that he should be disposed of. As Medea handed Theseus a cup of poison, Aegeus recognized the young man's sword as his own, which he had left behind many years previous for his newborn son, to be given to him when he came of age. Knocking the cup from Medea's hand, Aegeus embraced Theseus as his own.
Medea then returned to Colchis and, finding that Aeëtes had been deposed by his brother Perses, promptly killed her uncle, and restored the kingdom to her father. Herodotus reports another version, in which Medea and her son Medus fled from Athens to the Iranian plateau and lived among the Aryans, who then changed their name to the Medes.[11]

King Aeetes' most valuable possession was a golden ram's fleece. When Jason and the crew of the Argo arrived at Colchis seeking the Golden Fleece, Aeetes was unwilling to relinquish it and set Jason a series of seemingly impossible tasks as the price of obtaining it. Medea fell in love with Jason and agreed to use her magic to help him, in return for Jason's promise to marry her.
Jason fled in the Argo after obtaining the golden fleece, taking Medea and her younger brother, Absyrtis, with him. King Aeetes pursued them. In order to delay the pursuit, Medea killed her brother and cut his body into pieces, scattering the parts behind the ship. The pursuers had to stop and collect Absyrtis' dismembered body in order to give it proper burial, and so Jason, Medea and the Argonauts escaped.
After the Argo returned safely to Iolcus, Jason's home, Medea continued using her sorcery. She restored the youth of Jason's aged father, Aeson, by cutting his throat and filling his body with a magical potion. She then offered to do the same for Pelias the king of Iolcus who had usurped Aeson's throne. She tricked Pelias' daughters into killing him, but left the corpse without any youth-restoring potion.
After the murder of Pelias, Jason and Medea had to flee Iolcus; they settled next in Corinth. There Medea bore Jason two children before Jason forsook her in order to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. Medea got revenge for Jason's desertion by killing the new bride with a poisoned robe and crown which burned the flesh from her body; King Creon died as well when he tried to embrace his dying daughter. Medea fled Corinth in a chariot, drawn by winged dragons, which belonged to her grandfather Helios. She took with her the bodies of her two children, whom she had murdered in order to give Jason further pain.
Medea then took refuge with Aegeus, the old king of Athens, having promised him that she would use her magic to enable him to have more children. She married Aegeus and bore him a son, Medus. But Aegeus had another son, Theseus. When Theseus returned to Athens, Medea tried to trick her husband into poisoning him. She was unsuccessful, and had to flee Athens, taking Medus with her. After leaving Athens, Medus became king of the country which was later called Media.

ميديا في الأساطير الإغريقية
هي ساحرة شهير وكانت ابنة أيتس ملك كولخيس، وكان أبوها قد رماها في السجن بعد أن خاف من سحرها الذي استخدمته في الهرب وهربت إلى معبد هيليوس إله الشمس وهو جدها كما يزعم. ووقعت في حب جاسون زعيم الأرغونوت الذي وصل لكولخيس في ذلك الوقت، وقعت في حبه وساعدته على الهرب، وعندما عاد إلى ثيساليا خدعت عم جاسون المدعو بيلياس وقتلته بعد أن وعدته برد شبابه.
انزعج جاسون من زوجته الهمجية فتزوج عليها لكنها قتلت زوجته الثانية وأولادها في نوبة غضب، فهربت من كورنث، في عربتها التي تقودها التنانين التي كانت هدية هيليوس، ووصلت إلى أثينا حيث تزوجت الملك أوغيوس وأنجبت منه ابنا سمي ميدوس ولكن عندما اكتشف أنها تخطط لقتل ابن الملك الآخر ثيسيوس اضطرت لترك أثينا والهرب. في رحلة هروبها رافقها ابنها وعادت لكولخيس وأعادت أبيها للعرش والذي أخذه منه أخوه بيرسس.
ابنها يدوس كتان يعتبر سمي وسلف الميديين، وكرمت ميديا كربة كورنث وقيل أنها أصبحت زوجة أخيل، وكان مركز عبادتها موجودا في ثيساليا والتي كانت تعد مركز السحر. ومع مرور الوقت كانت تفضيل شخصيتها يقل، وفي حكاية جاسون كانت طيبة وسليمة النية بينما يوربيدس جعلها الكاهنة الهمجية في هيكاتي، بينما الكتاب في عهد الإسكندر صوروها بصورة قاتمة، وبعض الكتابات تعتبرها إلهة القمر لكن الفكرة القديمة عنها كساحرة ثيسالية هو على الأغلب الأصح فيها.
شعبية قصة جاسون وميديا قديما تظهر في كمية كبيرة من الأعمال الأدبية، والقصة الأصلية كانت على الأغلب موجودة في قصيدة ملحمية نسبت لبرودسيكوس من فوكايا. وهي موجودة بشكل أطول في القصيدة البيثية الرابع لبيندار، وهي تشكل موضوع قصة أرغونوتيكا لأبولودوروس روديوس. وكانت موضوع رسالة مؤثرة (ميديا إلى جاسون) في كتاب هيريودس لأوفيد، وهي بطلة تراجيديات ليوربيديس وسينيكا، وهناك مسرحيات ضائعة لأيسخيلوس وإنيوس (والتي تبناها عن يوربيدس)، كذلك كتب نيوفرون السيكيوني وميلانثيوس مسرحيات عنها بالاسم نفسه.
موت غلاوكي ومقتل لأبنائها على يد ميديا مصور في الفن القديم، وهناك صورة لها رسمها توموماخوس البيزنطي حيث تمعن التفكير إن كان يجب أن تقتل أبناءها أم لا، ونسخ لهذه اللوحة موجودة في جداريات بومبي وهيركولانوم.

Euripides

(Ancient Greek: Εὐριπίδης) (c. 480 – 406 BC) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived complete (there has been debate about his authorship of Rhesus, largely on stylistic grounds)[1] and there are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined[2][3]—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.[4]
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. Yet he also became "the most tragic of poets",[nb 1] focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown.[5][6] He was "the creator of...that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "...imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates",[7] and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.[8]
He was also unique among the writers of ancient Athens for the sympathy he demonstrated towards all victims of society, including women.[5][9] His conservative male audiences were frequently shocked by the 'heresies' he put into the mouths of characters, such as these words of his heroine Medea:
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism, both of them being frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Whereas Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence, Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia.[11] Recent scholarship casts doubt on ancient biographies of Euripides. For example, it is possible that he never visited Macedonia at all,[12] or, if he did, he might have been drawn there by King Archelaus with incentives that were also offered to other artists.[13]

This biography is divided into three sections corresponding to the three kinds of sources.

Tragic poets were often mocked by comic poets during the dramatic festivals Dionysia and Lenaia and Euripides was travestied more than most. Aristophanes scripted him as a character in at least three plays: The Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae and The Frogs. Yet Aristophanes borrowed rather than just satirized some of the tragedian's methods; he was once ridiculed by a colleague, Cratinus, as "a hair-splitting master of niceties, a Euripidaristophanist".[19] According to another comic poet, Teleclides, the plays of Euripides were co-authored by the philosopher Socrates.[20] According to Aristophanes, the alleged co-author was a celebrated actor, Cephisophon, who also shared the tragedian's house and his wife,[21] while Socrates taught an entire school of quibblers like Euripides:
And making us all talk ROT.[22]
In The Frogs, composed after Euripides and Aeschylus were both dead, Aristophanes imagines the god Dionysus venturing down to Hades in search of a good poet to bring back to Athens. After a debate between the two deceased bards, the god brings Aeschylus back to life as more useful to Athens on account of his wisdom, rejecting Euripides as merely clever. Such comic 'evidence' suggests that Athenians admired Euripides even while they mistrusted his intellectualism, at least during the long war with Sparta. Aeschylus had written his own epitaph commemorating his life as a warrior fighting for Athens against Persia, without any mention of his success as a playwright, and Sophocles was celebrated by his contemporaries for his social gifts and contributions to public life as a state official, but there are no records of Euripides's public life except as a dramatist—he could well have been "a brooding and bookish recluse".[23] He is presented as such in The Acharnians, where Aristophanes shows him to be living morosely in a precarious house, surrounded by the tattered costumes of his disreputable characters (and yet Agathon, another tragic poet, is discovered in a later play, Thesmophoriazusae, to be living in circumstances almost as bizarre). Euripides's mother was a humble vendor of vegetables, according to the comic tradition, yet his plays indicate that he had a liberal education and hence a privileged background.[15]

Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia, the famous Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BC, one year after the death of Aeschylus, and it was not until 441 BC that he won a first prize. His final competition in Athens was in 408 BC. The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were performed after his death in 405 BC and first prize was awarded posthumously. Altogether his plays won first prize only five times.
His plays and those of Aeschylus and Sophocles indicate a difference in outlook between the three men—a generation gap probably due to the Sophistical enlightenment in the middle decades of the fifth century: Aeschylus still looked back to the archaic period, Sophocles was in transition between periods, and Euripides was fully imbued with the new spirit of the classical age.[24] When Euripides's plays are sequenced in time, they also reveal that his outlook might have changed, providing a "spiritual biography" along these lines:

One of his earliest extant plays, Medea, includes a speech that he seems to have written in defence of himself as an intellectual ahead of his time, though he has put it in the mouth of the play's heroine:[11]

Euripides



Born about 480 B.C., somewhere in the vicinity of Athens, Euripides, the son of Mnesarchides, was destined from the beginning to be a misunderstood poet. He presented his first set of tragedies at the Great Dionysia in 455 B.C., but did not win his first victory until 441. In fact, he won only five awards--and the fifth of these was not awarded until after his death. This lack of recognition might seem a bit odd when one considers that Euripides wrote about 92 plays and was compared, even during his lifetime, to the likes of Aeschylus and Sophocles. But Euripides was ignored by the judges of the Greek festival because he did not cater to the the fancies of the Athenian crowd. He did not approve of their superstitions and refused to condone their moral hypocrisy. He was a pacifist, a free thinker, and a humanitarian in an age when such qualities were increasingly overshadowed by intolerance and violence. Perhaps that is why he chose to live much of his life alone with his books in a cave on the island of Salamis.
Euripides was exposed early to the religion he would so stubbornly question as an adult. As a child, he served as cup-bearer to the guild of dancers who performed at the altar of Apollo. The son of an influential family, he was also exposed to the great thinkers of the day--including Anaxagoras, the Ionian philosopher who maintained that the sun was not a golden chariot steered across the sky by some elusive god, but rather a fiery mass of earth or stone. The radical philosopher had a profound effect on the young poet, and left with him a passionate love of truth and a curious, questioning spirit.
Always a lover of truth, Euripides forced his characters to confront personal issues, not just questions of State. In many ways, he is the forerunner of the modern psychological dramatist. In Hippolytus and The Bacchae, he explores the psyche of men attempting to deny a natural life-force such as sexuality or emotional release. In another timeless classic, Medea, he takes a penetrating look at the frenzied jealousy of a woman who has lost the interest of her middle-aged husband. Perhaps his finest contribution to world drama, however, was the introduction of the common man to the stage. Even his traditional nobles such as Agamemnon and Menelaus were anti-heroic, almost as if he wanted to show the Athenian people what their beloved military heroes were really like.
Although many of Euripides' plays dealt with personal issues, he did not shy away from the social issues of the time. His Trojan Women was written in response to an Athenian expedition in 416 B.C. which destroyed the city of Melos and slaughtered its men. As the play begins, Troy has fallen, its men have been murdered, its shrines desecrated, and its women bound and enslaved. Ten years earlier, he had written another stinging indictment of war in Hecuba which documents the cruelty of Greek warriors who enslave the Trojan queen and sacrifice her daughter at the tomb of Achilles.
However, while Euripides was busy exposing the evils of his society, others were having a good laugh at his expense. The strange, secluded little man was an easy target, and thus was the continual butt of the comic poets, especially Aristophanes. Meanwhile, the playwright's life was beginning to fall apart around him. It was public knowledge that his wife had cuckolded him. One by one, his closest friends were banished and murdered by the State for their liberal views. The only thing that saved Euripides from the same fate was the fact that it was his characters who spoke heresy, not he. In the end, however, he was finally tried for impiety and left Athens in a cloud of controversy. Although he found a temporary respite at the court of King Archelaus in Macedonia, he could not escape the Fates. In less than eighteen months, the tragic playwright was torn to pieces by the King's hounds in a tragic accident.
Euripides' outlook was not a cheerful one. He insisted on emphasizing the uncertanties of life and the fact that "many things we thought could never be, yet the gods contrive." His final play, Iphigenia at Aulis, an attack on superstition and cowardice, tells the story of Agamemnon's unfortunate daughter Iphigenia who was lured to the Greek camp under the pretext of marrying the hero Achilles only to find that, instead, she was to be sacrificed by her father and his fleet in order to appease the gods.
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As one of the darkest and most disturbing of the Greek dramatists, Euripides questions authority, and, in his plays, he reveals a fascination with the oppressed, including women, barbarians, and slaves.
His complex representations of perverse, violent, and monstrous women demonstrate his interest in the role of women in society. He further questions hollow or hypocritical ideals. While Aeschylus depicts a vision of history and teleology and Sophocles portrays heroes, Euripides creates real men with all-too human weaknesses. His is a voice of conscience, unafraid to reveal the world underneath Athens’ veneer of cultural and social advancement. The views expressed in Euripides’ tragedies seem almost prescient. After years of warfare (the Second Peloponnesian War began in 431 B.C.E.) and internal political strife, Athens fell to Sparta in 404 B.C.E., two years after the death of Euripides.

In her magnificent novel, Marguerite Yourcenor recreates the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world. The Emperor Hadrian, aware his demise is imminent, writes a long valedictory letter to Marcus Aurelius, his future successor. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing his accession, military triumphs, love of poetry and music, and the philosophy that informed his powerful and far-flung rule. A work of superbly detailed research and sustained empathy, "Memoirs of Hadrian" captures the living spirit of the Emperor and of Ancient Rome.
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Memoirs of Hadrian (French: Mémoires d'Hadrien) is a novel by the FrenchwriterMarguerite Yourcenar about the life and death of Roman EmperorHadrian. First published in France in French in 1951 as Mémoires d'Hadrien, the book was an immediate success, meeting with enormous critical acclaim. Although the historical Hadrian wrote an autobiography, it has been lost.
The book takes the form of a letter to Hadrian's cousin and eventual successor "Mark" (Marcus Aurelius). The emperor meditates on military triumphs, love of poetry and music, philosophy, and his passion for his lover Antinous, all in a manner similar to Gustave Flaubert's "melancholy of the antique world."
Yourcenar noted in her postscript "Carnet de note" to the original edition, quoting Flaubert, that she had chosen Hadrian as the subject of the novel in part because he had lived at a time when the Roman gods were no longer believed in, but Christianity was not yet established. This intrigued her for what she saw as parallels to her own post-war European world.[1]

Yourcenar first thought of the idea for the book between 1924 and 1929. She then worked on various drafts intermittently between 1934 and 1937. The notion of writing the book from the point of a view of a dying Hadrian occurred to her after reading a sentence in a draft from 1937 stating: “I begin to discern the profile of my death.”[2]
She did not resume work on the book in earnest until December 1948. She states that while she based her account of Hadrian on the two most principal sources, Historia Augusta and Cassius Dio's Historia Romana, her goal was to reinterpret the past but also strive for historical authenticity.[3]

The novel is told in the first person by Hadrian and is framed as a letter to Marcus Aurelius in the first chapter, Animula Vagula Blandula. The other chapters form a loose chronological narrative which he often breaks with various insights and recollections. He directly addresses Marcus again only in the penultimate chapter, Disciplina Augusta. The story begins with Hadrian, who is around sixty years of age, describing his incurable illness. He therefore wishes to recount important events in his life before his death.
His earliest memories are his boyhood years in Italica. He also talks of his early interest in astrology and his lifelong passion for the arts, culture, and philosophy of Greece; themes which he revisits throughout the book. He visits Athens to study, travels to Rome for the first time, and witnesses the accession of Trajan. He eventually joins the army and participates in the Dacian campaign. Hadrian, who is around thirty years old at the end of the war, describes his successes in the army and his relationship with Trajan who is initially cold towards him. He slowly gains Trajan’s favor and secures his position for the throne with the help of Plotina, the emperor’s wife, and also by marrying Sabina, Trajan's grandniece.
During his military service, the outcome of the Sarmatian wars strongly affects him due to the appalling bloodshed and atrocities committed. He also begins to question the value of Trajan’s policy of military expansion. Trajan, in old age, begins an unsuccessful military campaign in Parthia after his successes over Dacia and Sarmatia. After a major defeat, Trajan hastily names Hadrian as his successor in a will shortly before his death. Following the death of Trajan, he hesitantly has his rivals executed and makes peace with Parthia. He travels frequently throughout the provinces of the Roman Empire while undertaking numerous economic and military reforms, promoting in his words: “humanitas, libertas, felicitas.” During a visit to Britain, he describes the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, which represents part of his vision of curbing the military expansion of his predecessor and promoting peace.
Hadrian’s administration is a time of peace and happiness which he regards as his “Age of Gold.” He attributes this happiness to his love for Antinous, a beautiful Bithynian youth he meets in Nicomedia. He also feels genuinely loved by Antinous compared to the fleeting passions of his youth and the loveless relationship with his wife Sabina. While visiting Egypt, he despairs over the sudden and mysterious death of Antinous who drowns in the Nile. He ultimately believes that Antinous sacrificed himself in order to alter the outcome of troubling portents that both had witnessed earlier. In his grief, he devises the cult of Antinous and makes future plans to dedicate a new city to him in an effort to eternalize his memory.
Hadrian begins reflecting upon his advancing age and his change in temperament, recalling one incident where he accidentally blinds his secretary out of rage. Further troubling him is the outbreak of rebellion in Judea, which forces him to travel and take command of the troops. During an important siege, he despairs over the unraveling of his plans for peace, his ailing heart condition, and later over the rampant destruction in Judea. He states, “Natura deficit, fortuna mutatur, deus omnia cernit. Nature fails us, fortune changes, a god beholds all things from on high…"[4]
During his final years in Rome and at his villa in Tibur, he ponders his succession and his thoughts turn to a memory of Marcus Aurelius as a virtuous and kind-hearted boy. Hadrian, now in advanced age and very poor health, begins to fear death and contemplates suicide through various means. He finally accepts his fate with resignation, or patientia, while reflecting on his newfound divine status throughout the Empire. Near death, he contemplates what the future may hold for the world, Rome, and for his soul.

Marguerite Yourcenar
(8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3.

Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels, Belgium to Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, of French bourgeoisie descent, and a Belgian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, of Belgian nobility, who died ten days after her birth. She grew up in the home of her paternal grandmother.
Yourcenar's first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. She translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves over a 10-month period in 1937.
In 1939 Yourcenar's intimate companion at the time, a translator named Grace Frick, invited the writer to the United States to escape the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Yourcenar lectured in comparative literature in New York City and Sarah Lawrence College.[1] Yourcenar was bisexual and she and Frick became lovers in 1937, and would remain so until Frick's death in 1979. They bought a house together in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine and lived there for decades.[2][3]
In 1951 she published, in France, the novel Mémoires d'Hadrien, which she had been writing with pauses for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim. In this novel Yourcenar recreated the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world, the Roman EmperorHadrian, who writes a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, the son and heir of Antoninus Pius, his successor and adoptive son. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing both his triumphs and his failures, his love for Antinous, and his philosophy. This novel has become a modern classic, a standard against which fictional recreations of antiquity are measured.
Yourcenar was elected as the first female member of the Académie française, in 1980. An anecdote tells of how the bathroom labels were then changed in this male-dominated institution: (Messieurs (Men) and Yourcenar). "One of the respected writers in French language, she published many novels, essays, and poems, as well as three volumes of memoirs.
Yourcenar's house on Mount Desert Island, Petite Plaisance, is now a museum dedicated to her memory. She is buried across the sound in Somesville, Maine
French novelist, essayist, and short story writer, who gained international fame with her metaphysical historical novels. In these works Yourcenar drew psychologically penetrating portraits of people from the distant past, but she also dealt with modern issues such as homosexuality and deviance.
Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislane in Brussels, Belgia, into a Franco-Belgian family. Yourcenar's Bergian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, died of puerperal fever and peritonitis shortly after giving birth. Yourcenar spent her summer months from 1903 to 1912 at the château of Mont-Noir, "a small brick manor house, built with a great many superadded turrets, in that Louis XIII style so cherished during the Romantic era. The date 1824 was engraved on the façade..." She began to write as a teenager, when she lived traveling and aristocratic life with her father, Mechel de Crayencour. Her pen-name she later created from the surname of her father; Yourcenar is a nearly perfect anagram. Her first books he had published at his own expense. Much of his time he spent gambling, hoping to win back the fortune he had lost.
The inheritance Yourcenar received after the death of his father, allowed her to devote herself to traveling and literary pursuits and love affairs on the Paris lesbian scene. In the story 'How Wang-Fo Was Saved' from Oriental Tales (1938), a collection of short stories from several countries, Yourcenar studied the artist's role in the world. Algernon Blackwood also had used the same Chinese legend in 'The Man Who Was Milligan' and M.R. James in 'The Mezzotint'. In a version told in the classic Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, a famous poet is thrown into prison by an angry king. To escape he calls his creations to help him - they break into the poet's cell and set him free. The protagonist in Yourcenar's tale is an old painter, who loves the image of things and not the things themselves. The painter is imprisoned by an Emperor, who sees his autocracy threatened by the power and beauty of art.
At the outbreak of World War II, Yourcenar moved to the United States. To support herself, she worked as professor of French literature at Sarah-Lawrence-College in New York. One of her students has recalled, that she was not a professor like the others, her "way of teaching was not that of a classical teacher but someone who is crazy about literature." Though quiet and retiring by nature, she had love affairs with both men and women. When she left her private papers to the Houghton Manuscript Library she stipulated that her private journal not be made available for the public until fifty years after her death.
Yourcenar shared her time between France and the USA, where she lived with her partner, Grace Frick, who came from Kansas City. Orphaned early on, she had been raised by her uncle. Grace earned her Master's in English literature in 1927; Frick was the translator of several of her works. After 1950 Yourcenar's home was on Mount Desert Island, Maine. In 1980 she became the first woman to be elected to the Academie Française. Frick died from cancer in 1979. Yourcenar then entered into a stormy relationship with Jerry Wilson (1949–1986), a gay photographer, with whom he travelled around the world. He died of AIDS. In an interview, published in The Paris Review, Yourcenar said that "certainly all the physical evidence points to our total annihilation, but if one also considers all the metaphysical données, one is tempted to say that it is not as simple as that." Yourcenar continued traveling but also kept on writing Quoi ? L'éternité (1988), the final volume of her autobiographical trilogy. Its title was taken from Rimbaud: "Elle est retrouvée! / Quoi? l'éternite. / C'est la mer mêlée / Au soleil..." Disappointing many readers, Yourcenar focused on her father – guarding her privacy as she had done throughout her literary career, she had no intentions to tell about her own life after WW II in the United States. Yourcenar died in Northeast Harbor, Maine on December 17, 1987.
Among Yourcenar's best-known books is Memoirs of Hadrian. The emperor is portrayed on the eve of his death, absorbed in his reflections. Hadrian, who built the famous wall, was one of the last great Roman imperial leaders. He recounts his memories in his testament letter to his chosen successor, Marcus Aurelius. "There is but one thing in which I feel superior to most men: I am freer, and at the same time more compliant, than they dare to be. Nearly all of them fail to recognise their due liberty, and likewise their true servitude. They curse their fetters, but seem to find them matter for pride. Yet they pass their days in vain license, and do not know how to fashion for themselves the lightest yoke. For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom." Part of the story deals with his relationship with a Greek youth called Antinous. Yourcenar worked on the novel for fifteen years and published it immediately after settling in the United States.
Coup de Grâce (1957) was a story of a Prussian officer, who murders the woman who loves him because he loves her brother. The Abyss (1976) was a fictitious life of Zeno, a Renaissance man, created from Yourcenar's fascination with the occult. She worked on the story intermittently from 1921 to 1965. Zeno's personality and life is a combination of Da Vinci, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno. He travels around Europe and the Mediterranean searching for truth. In the rivalry between Catholic and Protestant states, Zeno refuses to take sides, and like Hadrian, Yourcenar depicts him as essentially homosexual. "The strange magma which preachers define by the not ill-chose name of lust (since it would seem to be a matter of the luxuriance of the flesh expending its force) defies examination because of the variety of substance which compose it, and which in their turn break down into other components, themselves complex. Love is one part of the mixture, though less often, perhaps than is admitted, but the concept of love is itself far from simple."
The central figures in Yourcenar's fiction are torn between society's demands and their own passions. Noteworthy, the majority of the characters she presents are male. Yourcenar's only novel with a contemporary setting was Le Denier du rêve (1934), about an assassination attempt on Mussolini. The book was written while she lived in Italy, and revised in 1958-59. Through her characters - a doctor, a flower-seller, a whore, and a Resistance fighter - Yourcenar examines life under a cruel regime and offerers different views into the female psyche. A woman loves unhappiness, another is "stingy like all who have just enough money for a single expense and enough fore for a single passion."
In Alexis, which came out in 1929 and again in 1965 with Yourcenar's foreword, a young aristocratic man writers a long letter to his wife, Monique. Alexis confesses that he did not love his wife, and at school he already found women disgusting. He has decided to leave her and his son, and devote himself to his music and sensual pleasures, that are not against his own true self. The author is purposefully ambiguous about their nature and Alexis's sexual orientation. In her foreword Yourcenar denies that Gide's Traité du Vain Désir had influenced her book. Yourcenar's Mishima: A Vision of the Void (1980) tried to separate the persona or shadow of great Japanese writer, and homosexual, and the human being of flesh and blood. "... let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work."
The first version of Anna, soror... (1981) Yourcenar composed already at the age of 22. The central characters are Miguel, a young aristocrat, and his sister Anna. They live and love earch other in seclusion from the surrounding world after the death of their mother. Yourcenar's family memoirs, Souvenirs pieux (1974) and Archives du Nord (1977), prove the author's skill to depict contemporary life. Yourcenar's other works include prose poems FEUX (1935), and Fleuve profound, sombre rivière(1974), essays ('Without Liability to Debts,' 1962; 'Mishima or the Vision of Emptiness,' 1981), and several plays. Yourcenar also translated Negro spirituals and various English and American novels into her native French.

إن الإنسان الذي يفكر، المنشغل في مشكلة فلسفية أو في إعداد نظرية ما، ليس هو برجل أو امرأة أو حتى إنسان. إنه شيء آخر». يعكس هذا الرأي للروائية الفرنسية مارغريت يورسنار، شخصيتها الفذة والاستثنائية التي استطاعت أن تقدم للأدب العالمي روايات تاريخية بزت بإبداعها كبار الكتاب، ولا أدل على ذلك من ترشيحها وقبولها كأول امرأة تنضم إلى الأكاديمية الفرنسية عام 1981 بعد مضي أربعمئة عام على تأسيسها.
وتتناول يورسنار التي ولدت في بلجيكا عام 1903، في رواياتها الأسطورة والتاريخ الإغريقي والروماني وما بعدهما، وطبيعة الحب الإنساني والعلاقات العاطفية، والقيم والمثل والصراع القائم بينها وبين الدين والواقع والسياسة. وعلى الرغم من أنها روائية إلا أنها لم تعتمد في أعمالها على الحوار، فمحاورها تدور في فلك التأمل وفلسفة الحياة. ويتجلى ذلك من خلال روايتها القيمة بكل المعايير «مذكرات هادريان» التي حققت لها شهرة فور صدورها، إذ ترصد من خلال المذكرات التي كتبها إمبراطور روما هادريان المفكر والحكيم الذي استعاض عن الحروب باستراتيجيات بديلة حققت نفس الغاية، وشرّع الكثير من القوانين التي تحمي حقوق الإنسان وكرامته. وقد أصبح كتابها مرجعا تاريخيا أكاديميا للباحثين على الرغم من كونه رواية، إذ كتبت يورسنار مذكرات هادريان من وحي تاريخ الأحداث.
وقد نشرت روايتها تلك عام 1951 حينما كانت في أواخر الأربعينات، بعد توقف عن الكتابة دام عشر سنوات، وذلك بعد أن استقرت في الولايات المتحدة مع بداية الحرب العالمية الثانية حيث لم تستطع العودة من باريس إلى اليونان حيث كانت تعيش. وكان لدعوة صديقتها البروفيسورة الأميركية غريس فريك (ومترجمة رواياتها إلى الانجليزية لاحقا) لها لزيارتها في الولايات المتحدة في ذلك التوقيت، الحل الأمثل ليورسينور وهناك درّست في إحدى الجامعات.
أما عودتها إلى الكتابة فكانت مع وصول صندوق خاصتها كانت قد تركته في أحد الفنادق حينما غادرت أوروبا، وعندما وصلها بعد سنوات في عام 1949 لم يتبق فيه من أشيائها سوى مجموعة من الأوراق التي كتبتها في العشرينات من عمرها، ومن ضمنها مشروع رواية «مذكرات هادريان»، وعلى الفور شرعت في كتابتها. كما حققت روايتها التي تلتها «الهاوية» التي نشرتها عام 1968 نجاحا مماثلا مع اختلاف المضمون والأحداث واللغة التي اعتمدتها والمقاربة من عصر النهضة.
علما أن روايتها الأولى «أليكسيس» نشرت عام 1929، بعد وفاة والدها المقرب منها الذي شاركها حبها للأدب واللغات التي أتقنتها من اللاتينية إلى الإغريقية فالانجليزية ولاحقا اليابانية. نشرت بعد ذلك مجموعة من المقالات والدراسات والقصص القصيرة، لتعود إلى الرواية بكتابها «انقلاب غريس» عام 1939، والذي ساعدها العائد منها على التفرغ للكتابة.
وفي سنواتها الأخيرة تفرغت لكتابة مذكراتها وإن وافتها المنية عام 1987 قبل أن تنجز الجزء الأخير من سيرتها، وكان ذلك بعد إصابتها بأزمة قلبية قبل سفرها إلى أوروبا مجددا. و«الهاوية» رواية فكرية فلسفية تاريخية، تدور أحداثها في القرن السادس عشر في المرحلة الانتقالية ما بين عهد الظلمات ومرحلة النهضة والتنوير، حين كانت أوروبا كالبركان والموت سيد الموقف، فالأوبئة والحروب من جهة، وهيمنة وتسلط الكنيسة وثورات الفلاحين ومطاردة المفكرين والعلماء من جهة أخرى.
وتمثل شخصية زينو بطل الرواية، الفكر المتنور الذي يسعى من خلال المعرفة والعلم والتفكير إلى كشف حقائق الحياة خلال تلك المرحلة. وقد استهلمت يورسنار شخصيته من رواد تلك المرحلة كليوناردو دافنشي، وكوبرنيكوس وجيودانو برونو.
وزينو ابن غير شرعي لهيلزوند أخت المصرفي الثري هنري جوست ليغر الأقوى في بورغيس، وتربطه صداقة طفولة بابن خاله هنري ماكسميليان ليغر. وعلى الرغم من الحياة المستقرة التي عاشها ودراسته للاهوت ومستقبله الأمن، إلا أنه تخلى عن دراسة اللاهوت ومستقبله ليجول عبر البلدان بحثا عن الحقيقة، التي كان على قناعة أنه لن يجدها إلا من خلال اقتران المعرفة بالتجربة. وهكذا بدأ رحلته عبر أوروبا حينما كان في العشرين من عمره.
وعلى الرغم من رحيل هنري ماكسميليان وهو في السادسة عشر أيضا، متخليا مثله عن ثروة ومركز العائلة وهو في السادسة عشر، إلا أنهما كانا قطبان متنافران فيما يتعلق برؤيتهما للحياة، فهنري رحل حبا بالمغامرة والبطولة وانضم إلى الجيش ليحقق أحلامه في المجد وكان يبحث دائما عن جماليات الحياة.
في حين سعى زينو في المرحلة الأولى من أسفاره إلى دراسة العلوم والطب والكيمياء، وكرس نفسه لمعالجة المرضى وإجراء التجارب الكيميائية لتحويل المعدن إلى ذهب، ولم يتردد في نشر بحوثه ودراساته التي نمّت عن ذكائه المتقد وعبقريته، وقد حققت له انجازاته صيتا كبيرا، مما أثار مخاوف وحفيظة الكنيسة التي كانت ترى في التفكير، تكفير وهرطقة.
وبعد مضي سنين، يعود زينو الذي تعب من الارتحال الدائم، إلى بلدته متخفيا باسم مستعار ويعيش في دير ويعالج المرضى ويتكتم على أفكاره، وإن تمكن من خوض نقاشات طويلة وعديدة مع رئيس الدير المنفتح الذهن والمتمسك بصداقته.
وحينما يصاب الأخير بمرض مزمن يعجز زينو عن علاجه، وقبل وفاته يوصيه رئيس الدير بضرورة مغادرة المدينة حفاظا على حياته. يغادر زينو البلدة على مضض لكنه سرعان ما يعود لتعبه من الهرب. وخلال اجتماعه بمجموعة من الرهبان الشبان يتم القبض عليهم. وبعد مساومة السلطة معهم يشهدون ضد زينو الذي يودع في السجن بتهمة الإلحاد والهرطقة.
الكتاب: الهاوية
تأليف: مارغريت يورسنار
الناشر: غاليمار - باريس 1976
الصفحات: 511صفحة
القطع: المتوسط