EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian (8 page)

I was ushered into his presence where he sat at a small desk with his scribe, Phlegon, beside him. At that time, I didn’t realize Phlegon was an author in his own right, undertaking to write a history of the Olympic games. Later, I heard him read from his
Book of Marvels
while we were at court in Athens.

Both men greeted me, and Hadrian invited me to sit on the couch. He chatted with me in a desultory manner for several minutes while they finished some correspondence. I watched him use his signet ring to imbed his mark in the sealing wax of several scrolls, just as he once sealed his invitation to me.

Hadrian wore a simple, expensive robe, beneath which the muscles of his chest gleamed in the lamplight whenever he turned to speak to me. I felt shy, and cannot remember now either that of which he spoke or my own responses, which were no doubt inane. I didn’t know what to do with my own hands. As soon as he finished dictating his last missive, Phlegon departed, leaving the stylus and other apparatus of his trade behind on the desk.

Hadrian rose from his chair and came over to me—I stood again, when he did—and put his palms against both sides of my face. For a moment he stood motionless, staring into my eyes.

“So beautiful,” he said, and my own image swam before me in his pupils, dark as night.

His face just then amazed me. Not his gaze, not a smile or any expression crossing his features. Rather, the apparition of his face at that moment, a sun breaking from behind a pillow of cloud, radiance lighting upon him, upon us both.

Then he did an odd thing. He placed his hands upon both of my shoulders, a mute insistence.

I understood that I must kneel, go down on one knee before him. My head inclined in a bow, a loyal subject paying tribute to his ruler. The ancient words of Aeschylus describing the Greeks, which we had just read in school a few days earlier, hummed like bees of reproach in my ears: “They bow to no man, and are no man’s slaves.”

When I tried to rise again, his hands resisted. His robe, unbound, fell open in front of me.

After a moment, I realized what he wanted. I felt shame and anger, which I struggled to douse. This act I knew of, and certainly had heard about at school. I had seen the paintings at the baths. It was what one sometimes engaged in with a prostitute, or perhaps a servant or younger classmate. I was no slave, no girl, and this act I expected, anticipated, being done only to me, for me. By the Roman code, I knew, such submission was not asked of a partner, for it demeaned him.

But perhaps he meant to follow ancient Greek custom, intended to take a youth as his lover, to train him in the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, and then release him upon the arrival of his own manhood. Such submission to an older lover was still allowed with no dishonor until one came of age. I gave him my compliance.

Afterward I spit him out into my hand cloth with all the discretion I could muster. It smelled just like my own. I had always thought of sex as a red fish darting, an image gleaned from some erotic Egyptian poem, no doubt. Naïve boy, I expected silver or gold splashes, somehow, but he possessed the same flesh, the same seed, as any man.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, as if in a trance, I helped the hunt master and the other grooms ready the dogs and horses to ride out, and looked around at the great forest that engulfed us, dwarfing the lodge. These trees were the robust pines and firs of my childhood, not those parasols which consort with cypress all over Italy. That familiar wood, dappled with sunlight, comforted me, dazed as I was by my abrupt transition from boy to consort.

The next night I learned what else he wanted from me. It hurt.

Stoic, I said nothing, and did not cry out, so that Priapus, sating his lust, indulged in a private orgy to rival Messalina’s. On the hillsides of my childhood I had watched bulls and heifers, rams and ewes, randy goats going at one another, heard the older boys snicker about sheep and shepherds. But I never imagined myself as the mounted one.

The morning sun saw my blood on the bedclothes, despite Hadrian’s lavish use of warm, scented oil. When he went outside to relieve himself, I stripped away the stained sheet, replacing it with a fresh one. If he noticed, he said nothing.

T
HAT NEXT AFTERNOON
, Hadrian once again proved to all his prowess when he tracked down an enormous black boar and dispatched it with one thrust of his spear, driving it into the heart of the pig until he buried it up to the shaft. His mount still quivered and gasped for air after the pursuit, sides heaving in and out like bellows. Everyone kept up the shouting and rejoicing (I perhaps the loudest) while he claimed his trophy with deliberation and then pulled the hem of his hunting cloak over his head to silence us before he offered up the first meats of his quarry as a lustration for the success of the hunt.

Riding Pelas all day left my hindquarters in agony, a burning pain I took care to keep to myself. I suppose the thought never occurred to Hadrian that horseback might be a torment for me after the previous night’s activities. That evening I sat in a cool bath for as long as I dared before anyone began looking for me.

The scent of evergreens enveloping those Arcadian mornings acted as tonic for Hadrian. His brow smoothed itself, released from the usual furrows of worry, and a sweeter side began to emerge from behind his brusque manner.

Responding to the fresh air and beauty of our surroundings, my own maturing, recovered body also reacted as one might expect. I woke every morning with an erection, and to my surprise he often expected me to make use of this.

During those early bouts of lovemaking, my fear and shyness abating, I studied his naked body, which held the story of his life in its contours, ridges and protuberances. Old scars, calluses, and healed breaks at collarbone and rib bore witness to his youthful military career and hunting expeditions. An ugly gash seamed through his thigh, carved by the tusk of a boar, one of few creatures which ever managed to wound him. Tanned, muscular, his body betrayed his age only with a bit of slackening at the belly; a certain softness beneath his upper arms.

It seemed a privilege to be one of those few, besides his bath attendants, who ever saw the emperor in such a state of nature. But the first time that he, in turn, knelt before me, horror threaded the sensation—as if I were watching a noble fir bent to the ground by the passing of Dionysos, succumbing to a tumult of uncontrollable force. I closed my eyes and clenched my hands at my sides, not daring to tangle them in the hair of the emperor. Nor did I allow my hips to push forward against the source of that pleasure, though they ached to do so.

Afterward, I waited until I knew he had risen, put on his robe and turned away from me before I opened my eyes. It seemed the only way to conduct myself with the proper show of respect. He had spit my seed onto the floor. I mopped it up with one of my hand cloths.

In the mornings I prepared his simple breakfast—melons ripe and glistening, bread fresh-baked and fragrant, with such white, utter loveliness hidden within its brown crust. The pleasure of the knife, slicing, astonished me.

On one such morning, waking before my companion, I rose on one elbow and studied Hadrian’s face in repose. Asleep, he looked different, his features robbed of their normal expression. Then his eyes opened.

“Don’t,” he said.

“What?”

“Don’t look at me when I’m sleeping.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am not myself then.”

“All right,” I said, “then you must promise never to look upon me, either, when I sleep.”

He laughed and sat up on his elbow to look into my face.

“You’re wise,” he said. “Sleep is a most indifferent lover, like his brother Death, and cares not who reposes in his arms, a seducer with no regard for individuals, and no favorites.”

He took me in his own arms then, the conversation ended.

H
ADRIAN SOON ACKNOWLEDGED
our new intimacy in public by causing several new projects to be undertaken in Arcadia, including a new temple for Neptune, and the restoration of the tomb of Epaminondas and his companion. He also offered a she-bear skin to Eros at the spring of Narcissus. The pelt, removed from the animal that bore it, having undergone all manner of treatment meant to cure it, nonetheless remained impregnated with a stench of carrion—a fine metaphor for love, I now see.

After our return to Rome, at the banquet to welcome Hadrian back to court, Amyrra came up and kissed me on the cheek and said, “I knew it. You’ve become lovers. I can tell—Hadrian looks giddy and moon-fed.”

Her pleasure found an echo, somewhat less smug, on certain faces around us during the meal. Others there seemed either oblivious or else displeased by Hadrian’s signaling of a new relationship with me. Commodus behaved with indifference toward me and even toward Hadrian that evening, behavior intended to cut as much as possible without showing contempt to the emperor.

I began to accompany Hadrian at all times as the acknowledged new favorite, trotting at his side like a dog or a wife—just like the one who would be chosen and fobbed onto me someday at the appropriate moment; that time when the clouds obscure the sun, as the saying goes; when I, like Commodus, grow too old to remain the beloved.

I wanted to give Hadrian a gift in return after all his displays of affection, but nothing seemed appropriate. At last I decided to give him a set of cloths like my own, which I always found useful. At the market, I found a soft Egyptian cotton, pure white. When the seamstress stitched them up for me, I asked her also to embroider his signet in one corner of each with gold thread. I found the effect charming, and when I presented the set to Hadrian, he seemed pleased.

Yet for several weeks, well after our return to the city, nightmares disrupted my sleep, Cyclops, giants, various monsters always pursuing me until I woke.

In the mornings, I rose with the dawn in order to slip from his bedchamber before his barber and other attendants arrived, and made my way back to my own quarters while the aromas from bakery ovens filled the streets and birds rose like prayers from nests beneath the eaves of apartment buildings. This remained my routine until the next trip into the country with Hadrian. When we returned to Rome afterward, I was presented with my own bedchamber adjacent to his, and found all my belongings from school already in residence there.

Back in my classes again, it pleased me, vain little peacock, to note how several of the other boys, including Marcus, had taken to carrying small hand cloths, in imitation of Hadrian, and of me. Korias had chosen a subtle grey, while Marcus favored scarlet. Even at court, some men began to carry them after Hadrian made a point of flourishing one during a banquet. That acknowledgement delighted me. He didn’t intend to start a fashion—yet one began.

Commodus did not take up the trend. Instead, he played a trick on me, toward the end of one night’s banquet, to show just where I, a wine bearer, stood with him. He called my name in a soft voice and held out a linen dinner napkin, emblazoned with the imperial crest, folded like a sack around some hidden contents. As I took it, he gave me a dazzling smile and walked out of the banquet room.

The napkin was full of bones, remnants of the quail he had eaten at supper. I was glad he didn’t bother to stop and watch me open his nasty surprise. In his absence, he could not see me blush with anger; nor could I speak words in haste that I might regret later. Instead, I chose to ignore this insult, just as he always ignored me. Whenever I saw him afterward, I made sure to behave with neither more nor less courtesy than before.

About this time, Hadrian began to present me with frequent tokens of affection—books, incense, a silver mirror—which, I believe, were meant to signify a certain ascendance of my position at court. His enjoyment of my companionship seemed genuine. He appreciated my habit of maintaining silence in his presence, which allowed him to think, or work, or rest as he chose.

Sometimes when we sat alone together, he recited poems he had composed, or sang, or played a melancholy air upon the flute. That was an instrument I always avoided for fear that playing it made my face appear ugly and ridiculous. (I deferred to the wisdom of Athena, who, disgusted by her reflection in a river while playing, once tossed her own flute away.) But I did often accompany him upon the lyre, which I might play with proper decorum. I also recited the verses of Sappho, though I never recited for him my own cento based on her work. I admired the tenth muse, but also recognized that I myself was not one.

Hadrian once confessed to me his youthful nickname, the Greekling, with its veiled insults implying effeminacy and treachery, after I told him how the Roman boys teased me, referring to me as young Ulysses. Romans consider our Greek Odysseus too sly in his reliance on wit, rather than strength and courage. Yet it was he who thought up the horse which broke the Trojans.

P
LOTINA, THE WIDOWED
empress of Trajan and Hadrian’s adoptive mother, now took an interest in me. This woman, Hadrian’s greatest political ally and mentor, had arranged for his marriage to Trajan’s great-niece, Sabina, in order to cement his alliance with her husband. The union proved a political success, if not a fruitful one, and assured Hadrian’s succession to the throne upon her husband’s demise. Plotina’s ambitions for Hadrian were exceeded only perhaps by his own; she believed him capable of greatness.