EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian

by McDonald, Melanie

  At many of those banquets in my earliest days at court, I succumbed to gluttony, sampling all the exotica offered up for empire by wealth and power at those official feasts of greed. At times, it shames me now to say, I overindulged to the point of having to go and vomit. Such an endless profusion of delicacies seemed like nectar and ambrosia for a boy not from that city.

  I ate hummingbird, thrush tongues, caviar, crayfish, artichokes, eels, peaches, oysters, snails, dormice, wild game, exotic fruits, and vegetables seasoned with expensive spices from India and China. The food was accompanied by the finest wines, Falernian, Nomentan, Setian, Amineum, and various other golden vintages from Campagna, Hispanica and Greece, sometimes served chilled by snow, transported to Rome at great cost to some banquet sponsor just for that purpose. In those dishes I devoured, I discovered even more of the world that still lay beyond my own experience, all offered up for the pleasure of the imperial court.

  Yet after a while I noticed Emperor Hadrian himself did not always partake in these extravagances, despite being urged by those around him. He often preferred simpler dishes: grilled fish, or a bit of lamb, bread and olives, water and wine. Perhaps he had been offered so many delicacies that his palate, numbed by surfeit, craved the plain fare of his army years. Or perhaps one must become great before one’s preferences are allowed to become so simple.

  Hadrian, in his unique and unassailable position, felt no need for such exhibitions, I realize now, but tolerated them as a necessity for those beneath him, ceaseless in their efforts to impress and please him. And, too, perhaps we youths and beauties of the court, sleek partridges dressed in fine garments, were encouraged to desire the exotic, the rare, the savory, so that the great expense accrued and paid for such consumption, meant to promote various benefactors while they sought to curry favor with the emperor, might be justified. Power and wealth, I have learned, often exhibit themselves by such means.

  AS FOR MY schooling, I enjoyed the opportunity to read for myself those philosophers of whom I had so often heard from my father and grandfather, and the chance to discuss their works and ask questions of teachers whose intellects and ethics I respected. Rhetoric, Latin grammar and mathematics I did not enjoy, but persisted in those disciplines nonetheless.

  When I had been at the court school for perhaps six months, Emperor Hadrian came to sit in and listen to our classes one afternoon, during the Ides of March, I believe. No doubt Hadrian felt it an appropriate day for Caesar to spend among schoolboys.

  Because of the mild sunny weather, we sat outdoors that afternoon. Our teacher welcomed our royal visitor with a courteous speech and asked him to be seated. We were reading about Odysseus in a new Latin translation (which of course renamed him Ulysses), and had just been discussing his return to Ithaka in the guise of a beggar, and the beggar’s odd request to participate in the archery contest for Penelope’s hand, a contest which would soon reveal his deadly glory to the ill-fated suitors.

  “Why a bow?” our teacher asked. “Why did the poet choose the bow—and Ulysses’ own great bow, at that—as the weapon to be used in the contest for Penelope?”

  “Because only he could string it,” Marcus said, eager to show off, wanting to prove he had read the text and knew the answer.

  “Yes, of course,” said the teacher, with a bit of impatience, “we are told that in the text. But why a bow, rather than, let’s say, a spear, or a sword?”

  I understood what he was asking—what that weapon might represent symbolically, beyond a means to kill those rivals—but hesitated to volunteer an answer. The teacher saw the hesitation in my face, and called upon me anyway.

  “Antinous, you looked as if you might have an idea.”

  “Sir,” I said, “he might have chosen the bow and arrow since, traditionally, they are the weapons of the god of love, and Ulysses is competing to win his wife back from false lovers. The arrow flying into the rings is fairly obvious in its implications—”

  A snicker, at once suppressed, interrupted my thought. Then the teacher said, “Yes, go on.”

  “And also—also.” I took a breath. “Might it be because of the tension?”

  “What do you mean, Antinous?”

  “That tension which accompanies the stringing of the bow, which must be bent to receive it, and the drawing back of the arrow, the holding and then, release, the letting go.

  “Because this scene is also full of tension. Those who know what soon will happen there in the banquet hall are taut with nerves. Penelope cries in the storeroom when she goes to retrieve his bow. Telemachus laughs, because he can’t conceal his excitement over seeing his father in battle at last. Only Odysseus—Ulysses, I mean—holds his nerves in check. He remains in control even as he strings the bow, easy as a lyre, and plays it for and against the suitors.”

  I noted the lift of Hadrian’s left eyebrow as he considered my answer.

  “Well done, my boy,” the teacher said. “I take it this is your favorite moment of his homecoming, for clearly you have given it some thought.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “this, and the moment when his old dog knows him and thumps his tail in greeting.”

  “But isn’t that a bit mawkish, sir?” Marcus, embarrassed earlier, now sought to regain face by making me wrong.

  Then Hadrian spoke.

  “It is a bit sentimental, I’m afraid.” He glanced at Marcus, and at the teacher, and then at me. “And one of my favorite moments in the homecoming, as well.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, then wondered if I should have spoken again at all. I felt the color rise and splash like blood across my own throat.

  After class, walking through the courtyard, I looked up to see Korias above me in one of the oak trees. It seemed he had dawdled about in order to wait for me. He dropped down to the earth with a cat’s grace when I drew near, and spoke to me.

  “I liked what you said about the tension of the bow, how it correlated to the tension of the scene,” he said. With a little jump, he sprang up and caught the tree limb above our heads, dangling from it by his hands for a moment before letting go again.

  “I thought you might,” I said. “You’re an excellent archer yourself.”

  “Were you afraid to answer in front of the Emperor?” His eyes on me were guileless. Extraordinary eyes, amber irises ringed and flecked with green.

  “Yes,” I said. “But when the teacher called on me, I was more afraid not to.”

  Korias laughed and tossed an arm around my shoulders, a gesture that thrilled me with its calculated casualness, and began to steer me on across the courtyard.

  Whatever else we may have talked about then, I now can no longer recollect. The usual silly schoolboy offerings, and back-and-forth banter of flirtation. While his beautiful lean body, hanging from that tree, had made my heart spring like a lamb in the meadow. I wanted, more than anything, to feel it pressed against me.

  ONE DAY SOON afterward, a package arrived for me at school.

  Emperor Hadrian had sent me a bracelet of hammered copper from one of his family’s Spanish mines.

  “The Emperor congratulates you for making excellent progress in your courses,” said the palace slave who presented the gift box to me where I sat reading in one corner of the library.

  I slipped the bracelet onto my wrist. It fit as if made for me. Perhaps it was. Then I asked the messenger who delivered it to wait for a moment, so that I might write a thank-you to convey my gratitude to the emperor as soon as possible.

  I wasn’t sure quite what to think of this gesture—perhaps every student received a similar token once it became clear he might be a suitable addition to the emperor’s retinue.

  After the servant departed with my note in hand, I turned the bracelet this way and that, studying it. I decided to stash it in my linen chest for safekeeping until I had a better idea of just what the gift and the wearing of it represented. Already I had seen how envy and competitiveness could turn some of the boys vicious, and I wanted to avoid tro
uble if possible. I planned to wait until our next audience with the emperor to wear it in public.

  Several days later, despite my caution, a calamity struck. Marcus played a trick on me that took my breath with its mean-spiritedness. After class one morning, while some of us played at knucklebones and the others sat watching, or else stood around kicking a ball back and forth, Marcus walked up and said, “By the way, has anyone see my bracelet, the twisted silver one? I seem to have mislaid it—can’t find it anywhere.” He stooped and grabbed up the ball as it rolled past him, cradling it to his chest to maintain everyone’s attention.

  I knew the bracelet of which he spoke. In fact, I had complimented it earlier, and wondered whether it had been a gift to him from the emperor although, of course, I hadn’t asked.

  Everyone said no, they hadn’t seen it, almost in unison.

  “No matter,” he said, “I just wondered.”

  He dropped the ball and with a gesture of nonchalance kicked it to the next boy. He began to stroll away. Without looking back he said, “I’m sure it will turn up eventually.”

  Then, in the evening, just before we left our private quarters to go to supper, Marcus, who had been pacing around, called out, “Wait, everyone,” so that we all turned in the hallway where we were lining up.

  He paused beside my quarters and, when everyone’s eyes found him, stepped in and pounced on an item amid the tumble of foolscap, twine, candle ends and other articles heaped atop the small table beside my bed. He held it aloft—the missing bracelet.

  “Antinous, please explain,” he said, looking me straight in the eye.

  Staring at him across the empty space between us, I felt the blood rush into my face and then fall away to my feet, leaving me leaden. He had planted his own bracelet there on my night table to make it look as if I had stolen it. I knew any protest I made now would only make me look guiltier, and so remained silent.

  “Really, if you wanted to borrow it, all you had to do was ask.”

  He smirked at me, his eyes narrowed.

  Korias and the others, embarrassed by this scene, slipped away one by one until only Marcus and I remained. I still did not know what to say, what to do. Then an idea came to me.

  “I’m sorry, Marcus,” I said, in my most ingratiating voice. “Please allow me to make it up to you.”

  “How do you propose to do that?” He was enjoying himself, now that I was at his mercy.

  I crossed the room to where he stood beside my bed. I bent down, opened my linen chest, and felt beneath my folded laundry. The copper bracelet still nestled where I had hidden it. I turned to my accuser and held it out to him.

  “Here,” I said. “Please accept this as a token of apology.”

  “And from whom did you steal this one?” He laughed at his own cleverness.

  “It was a gift.” I omitted mention of the giver’s name.

  He slipped it onto his wrist, next to the other bracelet.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I will enjoy this.”

  Supper was a constrained affair. All that night and during the next day the other boys cast troubled looks in his direction and mine. Marcus had made a few enemies already with his bullying, but his father was an aristocrat in good standing, and he, the family scion. I, on the other hand, was nobody. The fact that he was a known bully did not preclude my being a thief. I knew this thought must linger in some boys’ minds as well. No doubt they all checked over their own possessions to be sure none of theirs went missing.

  The following evening, we attended an official banquet at the palace, since Emperor Hadrian had returned to Rome.

  Excited as always to see the emperor, I also felt heartsick that he might hear, if indeed he had not already, the story of the missing bracelet, and I hoped he proved as astute as I believed him to be in judging our two characters and ascertaining the truth of the situation.

  Marcus already had arrived at the banquet hall, adorned with both bracelets and his expensive purple-striped toga, and settled on his couch for the evening by the time I got there. He spotted me standing just inside the doorway, trying to discover my own place assignment, since I wasn’t serving that evening.

  “Look, you’re sitting by me, Antinous,” he called out in a mock gesture of friendship. I had no choice but to go over to the couch where he already reclined and lie down alongside him.

  Emperor Hadrian, after being officially seated at the head table next to the guest of honor, began to greet everyone at the nearby tables. When I saw how he noticed my bare arms I feared, and hoped. Then he spotted my copper bracelet glinting alongside the silver on Marcus’ wrist. I saw his eyes narrow before turning my gaze to my plate.

  “Marcus,” Hadrian said, “where did you find that copper bracelet? It looks very much like one I just gave Antinous—and which, it seems, he has chosen not to wear this evening.”

  Hadrian looked at me then, one eyebrow lifted in query, and I gave him a pleading look in return while everyone else quieted down, waiting for Marcus to answer. Even the servants stood back and hushed, sensing a confrontation.

  It gave me pleasure, I do admit, to watch how Marcus trembled, and stuttered his response, even as I dreaded the emperor’s annoyance over our ridiculous schoolboy antics.

  “Sir—it—it was a gift, Antinous gave me—”

  “Sir,” I said, interrupting my erstwhile accuser, “I apologize. It is the same bracelet. I gave it to Marcus to make up for the loss of his silver one.”

  “But Marcus is wearing a silver bracelet,” he said, pointing out the obvious in a wry voice. I felt certain then that the silver bracelet must not have been his gift to Marcus after all.

  Relief infused me. I answered with more confidence.

  “Yes, sir, but his had gone missing. Then, it turned up in my things somehow—”

  Now Marcus interrupted me.

  “It was a misunderstanding, sir, on my part,” he said, slipping the copper bracelet from his wrist and handing it back to me. “I didn’t realize—”

  “I am quite sure, Marcus,” the emperor said, in a dry tone, “that you did not.”

  Hadrian made a point of looking away just then, breaking eye contact with Marcus, to motion for more wine.

  Korias, serving that night, passed by the couch where Marcus and I reclined, glanced at me and winked.

  Marcus, glowing with humiliation, picked up his cup and drank without looking at anyone. I didn’t dare look over at him.

  Later I looked up to find Emperor Hadrian’s amused eyes upon me. When I caught him, he smiled and gave me a little salute. That night was when I first noticed his hands, their particular beauty. (He is a man quite vain of his hands, which are shapely and almost hairless.)

  I dropped my own eyes, allowed myself only a brief smile in return. It was wrong to gloat, and I sought to spare the wounded pride and mortified feelings of Marcus. I still needed to get along with him as best I could in school the next day, and the next.

  At the end of that term, Marcus’s father took his son off to their villa in the country for the greater part of the summer. When Marcus returned the next fall, he had grown taller and slimmer. In his behavior toward me, it seemed he had forgotten our quarrel. Still, I remained wary. Often, I caught him looking at me. Whenever I looked at him, he smiled.

  SOON AFTER THE incident of the bracelets, I began to receive attention of another sort from a woman at court named Amyrra, the courtesan Hadrian favored at the time. She seemed to take a liking to me, and saw fit from time to time to whisper words of encouragement and instruction in my ear, as if I were a protégé of hers. I had to wonder why she took an interest in championing me—whether she was scheming to win a bet, or back a friend’s, or best some rival of hers. She always made a point of talking to me at banquets and other gatherings. While she spoke, her hand brushed across my chest and then down, her touch light, a leaf falling alongside an oak trunk, a trick she employed to contrast her daintiness with the brawn of whatever male she addressed.
/>
  Pale as alabaster despite her claim of descent from ancient Nubian royalty, Amyrra outlined her eyes with kohl in the Egyptian style, which made them appear enormous. She always wore some subtle perfume, essence of jasmine mingled with another darker fragrance, intoxicating as wine. Expensive. As were her embroidered silken robes, her leather sandals, her many other adornments. Bracelets shimmered up and down both wrists while she gestured with graceful hands, hennaed palms turned out.

  Rumor had it more than one patrician over the years vied for her company before she caught the emperor’s eye, and she had managed all those attentions so as to retire a wealthy woman one day.

  Once, after a performance of the tragedy Hyacinthus, Amyrra drew near while we were all drinking wine, and murmured her thoughts.

  “Those men are considered great actors. Pah. We servants of love are the greatest actors of all.” She tapped her fan on my forearm.

  “Oh, now, Antinous, don’t look shocked. Surely you don’t think you’ve been brought all the way to Rome just to serve wine and join the civil service someday. Believe me, acting is our true calling—along with a bit of thievery. With our sighs, our glances, the subtleties of lips and limbs, we must steal the affections of our targets. We must be as nimble as the pickpockets in the forum who thrive on purloined gleanings.”

  I laughed at that, although her assumptions about my position at court offended me. Assumptions that, of course, were later proved right.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Think about it, darling. How I envy those fellow thieves of ours. After all, they get to practice first on their straw dummies tied with bells. We must succeed at once, or fail. Men are fickle—though they can be made to shake like a sistrum. We must never forget to give thanks to Mercury, god of messengers, physicians, and thieves.”