Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (50 page)

Even if there was something to these fears, that one member of the pair was losing interest or that the other was feeling shame, the evidence of Hadrian’s behavior after the drowning points to the passionate sincerity of his love, and so surely mitigates them. That is to say, Antinous could count on the emperor’s continuing affection even if for one reason or another the love affair itself were to end. He had no grounds for anticipating that he would either be discarded or abused.

We are left with the opinion of the literary sources, although from a modern perspective they propose by far the most implausible of the options. However, the idea of compensatory self-sacrifice was familiar to the ancient world. Euripides’ famous tragedy
Alcestis
told the story of a wife volunteering to hand herself over to death in place of her husband, Admetus, whose time was due. Admetus would be permitted to survive

This account neatly parallels Hadrian’s alleged search for a volunteer, according to Aurelius Victor.

At some point after 130 or 131, Hadrian’s friend the historian and public official Arrian wrote a guide to part of the Black Sea coastline in the form of a long letter to the emperor. It includes a description of an island called Leuke, deserted except for a few goats. Here, legend had it, the Greek hero Achilles once lived as a boy. Visitors left votive offerings to him and his older
erastes
, Patroclus, for whose death Achilles had wreaked a terrible vengeance during the siege of Troy before himself being killed. Arrian concluded:

Although Hadrian and Antinous are hardly a perfect match for the Greek couple, Arrian was surely linking two doomed
eromenoi
who, in different ways, put their lives on the line for their lovers. It was a delicate allusion, well judged to touch and comfort his desolate correspondent.

In sum, then, Hadrian was suffering from a serious illness of some kind; he and Antinous believed that the emperor would recover his health if he, Antinous, gave up his life in his stead. So the verdict of suicide stands, but for religious or magical reasons rather than from private unhappiness.

Another unappetizing option is that, with or without Antinous’ consent, Hadrian arranged for his sacrificial execution, as he had sacrificed the piglet during his Eleusinian initiation. This would have been very odd behavior. The Romans had outlawed human sacrifice long ago during the Republic, and the Egyptians are not known to have practiced it in remembered times. But magic may be a different matter: the Pachrates papyrus at least purports to deal in spells that cause death. The lethal power of witches was widely believed: Horace summed up the fearful fantasies of popular opinion in his little horror poem about a boy who was buried alive up to his neck and starved to death so that his marrow and liver could be used in a love potion. Whether such crimes were
commonplace may be doubted, but it is conceivable that Pachrates or some other magico-religious authority was consulted about a ritual sacrifice to restore the emperor’s health, and that Antinous was, willy-nilly, cast into the river. At least that would justify Hadrian’s denial of suicide.

Any conclusion on these matters has to be guesswork. Such evidence as there is points to the offering of one life for another. Two marble busts, one of them from Tibur, and dating from about this time or later seem to offer confirmation. They show the emperor as a young man again. A new coin type shows an equally youthful Hadrian. Thanks to wishful thinking, it was supposed that the death in the Nile had worked its magic. The emperor had been aging and ill, but now, look, here was the proof—he had been rejuvenated, this time literally, not symbolically,
renatus
.

Within a week of the drowning the emperor decided to found a new city opposite Hermopolis where Antinous had been taken from the water. He had already had in mind the creation of a Hadrianopolis to be located at some as yet undetermined place in the center of Egypt, but now this general project was transformed into a massive memorial to the dead boy.

Plans were quickly drawn up for a splendid new city, to be called Antinoopolis after its founding divinity. Settlers, a mix of people of Greek descent and army veterans, were attracted by generous tax concessions from other Hellenized Egyptian cities. Although almost nothing remains today (thanks to the depredations of local people), three centuries ago many buildings were intact. An eighteenth-century visitor remarked: “This town was a perpetual peristyle.” Antinoopolis was arranged in a grid and two main streets with double colonnades crossed in the city center, where a large shrine was erected, dedicated (we may reasonably suppose) to the new divinity.

This layout echoes that of Alexandria where the Sema, a building that housed the body of Alexander the Great, stood at the intersection of two grand avenues; here the mummified conqueror lay in a crystal coffin. It is possible that Hadrian’s first thought was to inter Antinous at the new foundation, within hailing distance of where he died. If so, he
soon changed his mind and commissioned a shrine to house his remains at his villa at Tibur. Construction began almost at once in a very prominent location just by the villa’s grand entrance and proceeded with great speed.

The Antinoeion was a walled enclosure with two small temples inside it. Facing the entrance was a semicircular colonnade, or
exedra
, at the back of which a porch led into a sanctum, the tomb itself. In the center of the enclosure a specially commissioned obelisk was installed (now called the Barberini obelisk, it stands on the Pincian Hill in Rome). It bears four inscriptions; the first expresses good wishes to the emperor and empress, and the other three concern Antinous and his cult as the new god Antinous-Osiris. One passage reads: “Antinous rests in this tomb situated inside the garden [that is, Hadrian’s villa and its park], property of the emperor of Rome.”

Antinous had a marvelous life after death. His cult spread with great speed and his popularity grew with the years. As a god who dies and is resurrected, he even became a rival to Christianity for a while; it was claimed that “the honor paid to him falls little short of that which we render to Jesus.”

One of the characteristics of religion in the Mediterranean was that an equivalence was assumed among the gods of different religions. Antinous was associated immediately on deification with Osiris, something he may dimly have guessed at while still alive. It is likely that he died on October 24, the day of the festival of Osiris; if so, this was a date he or Hadrian very possibly chose for its spiritual resonance. Osiris was the merciful judge of the dead and, by the same token, the underworld power that gave life. He inspired the annual flooding of the Nile and the vegetable renewals of spring.

Antinous did not only overlap with Osiris, he was also linked to Hermes (the Egyptian Thoth and the Roman Mercury), patron of boundaries and the travelers who cross them. This is why Pancrates called him “son of the Argus slayer” in his poem about the hunt, which was written in the weeks following the drowning. Argus was a many-eyed monster whom Hermes killed. As well as being the messenger of the gods, he
was a psychopomp, a conductor of souls to the underworld. In Athens Antinous merged with Dionysus, and the priest of his cult was allocated a best seat for the theatrical performances of the Dionysia, which the new god had originally attended, we may assume, as an ordinary member of the audience.

A coin has been found that shows Antinous as Iakchos, the minor deity who played a part in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Having first encountered the visions and secrets of Demeter as a humble initiate, he returned as a divine being.

Apart from founding Antinoopolis and establishing a cult at Mantinea, Hadrian did not insist on the worship of his lost lover. But local elites seeking his favor quickly realized that commissioning temples and statues was one sure way to obtain it. When the contemporaneous travel writer Pausanias visited Mantinea, he noticed a new temple dedicated to Antinous. “I never saw him in the flesh,” he commented, “but I have seen statues and images of him.”

This was no exaggeration. Soon Antinous was everywhere. Dio writes that Hadrian “set up statues, or rather sacred images of him, practically all over the world.” The emperor must have commissioned an artist of great ability to produce a sculptural paradigm, which was then widely copied. It is an unforgettable type of masculine beauty—melancholy, heavy-locked, large-chested, eyes modestly downcast.

Around the Mediterranean, temples, altars, priesthoods, oracles, inscriptions, and games were established in his name, all of which required images. It has been estimated that as many as 2,000 were carved, of which more than 115 still exist, and more are emerging from the ground as the years go by. A colossal seated statue recently excavated in the Peloponnese shows Antinous tying a fillet around his head as if he were a victorious athlete. The villa at Tibur was filled with Antinous; at least ten statues have been found there. At Delphi his effigy was ritually oiled for so many generations that it acquired, and even now possesses, the translucency of alabaster. Remarkably, the distant Iberi, realm of the difficult-to-please King Pharasmenes, yielded to the spell. In the grave of one of his noblemen, a very fine silver dish embossed with Antinous’ head has been unearthed. It was probably an official gift, much prized by the recipient.

The worship of Antinous long outlasted the reign of his imperial lover. Free of Hadrian he drew his own mass following, and his image can be found not only in high-status artworks but in the artifacts of daily life—lamps, plates, and bowls. Whatever the original intention behind his deification, the ageless Bithynian became a talisman by which the Greek inhabitants of the empire could simultaneously celebrate their own identity and their loyalty to Rome. He personified the reconciliation between the two dominant cultures of the Mediterranean world. He was the ideal of the Panhellenion made flesh.

Even today his is the most instantly recognizable and memorable face from the classical world. Antinous is one of the very few ancient Greeks and Romans to have his own active websites.

The death of Antinous did not halt the imperial tour. The journey up the Nile and the sightseeing continued. The party visited the so-called singing statue of Memnon at Thebes; this was one of two seated figures of a pharaoh. It lost its top half in an earthquake; thereafter at dawn, when the sun’s rays warmed the stone, a singing sound could be heard—“very like the twanging of a broken lyre string or harp string.” This curious phenomenon was irregular, and on the first visit it failed to sing. The next day Sabina and her friend Balbilla returned and the statue performed, as it did soon afterward for Hadrian. Balbilla carved some poems on the stone, in one of which she wrote

Hadrian spent some months in Alexandria, coming to terms with his loss and planning the construction of Antinoopolis. Pancrates produced his poem on the lion hunt, in which he suggested that the rosy lotus should be renamed antinoeus on the fictive grounds that it sprang from the blood of the lion Hadrian killed. Pleased with the conceit, the emperor enrolled the poet as a member of the Mouseion.

He left Egypt in the spring of 131 and toured the provinces of Syria and Asia. Then, for his third visit as emperor, he returned to Athens, where he spent the winter. No doubt he attended the Eleusinian Mysteries again, this time alone. His benefactions continued; in an inscription
he asserts: “Know that I take every opportunity to benefit both the city publicly and individual Athenians.”

In the spring the delegates of the Panhellenion met for the first time, probably on the occasion of the dedication of the Olympieion. The first games, the Panhellenia, did not take place until 137, but with new Panathenaic games, new Olympic games, and the Hadriania, in honor of the emperor (perhaps instituted only after his death), every year in a quadrennial cycle was to see Athens host a great international celebration, with large influxes of visitors from all over the eastern Mediterranean. Athens was to become a festival city and the acknowledged center of the Greek-speaking world.

A catastrophe now befell Hadrian for which he had only himself to blame. The Jews were infuriated by the ban on circumcision and deeply offended by the rebuilding of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, a Jewless and Hellenic city. It looked to them very much as if the Romans intended to ethnically cleanse Judaea. Also, the diversion by Titus of the half-shekel tax levied on all Jews for the upkeep of the Temple on the Mount to the upkeep of the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitol in Rome still rankled half a century on.