Title: Hard to Follow Hadrian.
Product review: The author is scholarly, and her work shows a great deal of thought--but little joy. This is a difficult read! Instead of being a purely scholarly presentation, it was 50% conjecture, mixed with the idea that you would know some of the scholarly research. There were multiple times where the author assumed the reader knew things no one but a student of Hadrian would. And fully more than half of the book dealt with Antinous, not Hadrian. (The author theorizes that Antinous was a homosexual lover of Hadrian, whose death an a trip to Egypt drove Hadrian insane.) What reading this book did for me was teach me that Hadrian was a fascinating individual--and I'd like now to read something about him. Previous to this, my only knowledge of him was that he commissioned a Wall in Northern England. Now I know that he commissioned thousands of projects all over the Roman empire. It is a pity the author didn't more than mention a few. Hadrian was fascinating; this book about him isn't.
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