Book Description

Excerpt from A Study of the Life of Hadrian Prior to His Accession The other part of the Vita is characterized by the vagueness and looseness of its style, and by its strange words and phrases, as well as by the trivial, personal and frequently scandalous quality of its notices. It deals much with anecdotes. No at tention is paid to chronology; the statements oat in air. This part of the Vita has been called the biographic part (bio graphischer It is violently hostile to Hadrian; by final analysis it represents the gossip and scandal about him which his many enemies of the senatorial class set in motion. Spar fianns had some history or biography of senatorial origin be fore him and combined its use with that of the work of the Anonymous. Now the latter was friendly to Hadrian, hence the Vita as it stands today bristles with contradictions. Spar tianus was a wretched compiler; he copied his sources word for word, and patched his excerpts roughly together without making any attempt to harmonize them in style or to recon cile the contradictions in content. He used the work of the Anonymous in a manner at once arbitrary and careless, he has left out much of importance, and was apparently inclined to sacrifice good historical notices to make room for bio graphic bits he considered interesting. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."