According to the Historia Augusta (Sec. 25.9), Roman Emperor Hadrian (AD 76-138) lay on his deathbed writing a short poem to his departing soul. Unlike many Roman emperors who were assassinated, Hadrian died of heart failure after twenty successful years of ruling the Empire. Reflecting on the good life he shared with his “little companion”, Hadrian asks it where it would go as it flees from him.

This little lyric has been translated countless times by poets, scholars and translators famous and obscure.

T.S. Eliot alluded to this short lyric in the title of his 1928 poem “Animula”, one of his Ariel Poems, which charts the helpless progress of the soul from birth, through its withering, into death.