Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951)

Across the empire stood temples to a drowned boy. Statues filled the forums, a city rose on the Nile bank where he had sunk, a star was named for him; and the man who ordered all of it had governed the known world from the wall in Britain that bears his name to the eastern deserts, and rebuilt the Pantheon that stands in Rome still. None of that power could call Antinous back out of the water. Marguerite Yourcenar spent nearly thirty years reconstructing Hadrian's world before she dared to lend him a voice, and the novel that resulted is his own unhurried letter to the boy who will one day inherit Rome, the young Marcus Aurelius, written at the pace of a man whose heart is failing and whose thinking is nearly spent. Here is what it knows so exactly it aches: the one who could administer everything could not administer love back into being. He governs to the end by setting it all down in words, schooling himself, at last, to enter into death with open eyes.