Empire of Silence

“That noble banner, sigil of my fathers unto the very deeps of time, sullied now by my hand. Perhaps you’ve seen it? Blacker than the black of space, its red devil capering, trident in its hands above our words: The sword, our orator.”

The narrator-Hadrian describes the crest and motto of the Marlowe family, highlighting the associations he makes between his family and the cruelty and despotism of the palatine class in general. The family motto recurs several times in the novel, particularly when Hadrian duels Gilliam, and these repetitions suggest that despite his philosophical bid for freedom, Hadrian remains trapped by his lineage, which he equates with fate.

“There was a clear pattern of events emerging, but I was little more than a child, and could not see it. […] Why I did not see it when I had been trained for such things almost since I could speak, I will never know. Perhaps it was arrogance […]. Perhaps it was greed. Or perhaps it was because we are blind until the knife first takes us, because we believe ourselves immortal until we die.”

An important aspect of the young Hadrian’s character is his occasional inability to understand what is happening around him, despite his intelligence and education. His older self attributes this lack of awareness to arrogance or to ego, and the novel’s events that this flaw becomes his downfall on several occasions. His ruminations also draw attention to his innate hubris and belief in his own infallibility.

“We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom—these are as much parts of our universe as light and gravity.”

By employing the first-person plural, the narrator-Hadrian includes the readers in his view of the world, portraying stories as powerful forces that tap into the deepest mysteries of the universe. Here, his portrayal of stories as inevitabilities speak to his view that many of his own actions were “written” and preordained by fate in some unknowable way.