One of the Stoics explained to me that his suicide was a rational act, and thus Euphrates behaved in a rational manner during his final hours. It was not an act of emotional turmoil, despite its origin in physical pain. A Stoic might endure all things—yet also might choose not to, after consideration.
Hadrian seemed somber when he discussed this event with me, but he believed Euphrates had exercised his right as a citizen. He didn’t realize what an impact the Stoic’s choice made on me. Euphrates’ ending of his life by his own hand, the making of such a decision and the act of will behind it, preoccupied my mind for some time, even after we packed up again to travel to Sicily, and then on to Phrygia.
During a visit to the tomb of Alcibiades, Hadrian ordered a new marble statue to honor the beloved hero and his fallen companion, and we stayed on to participate in the local feasting, horse racing, and dancing that accompanied the announcement of the memorial’s refurbishment. Late in the night, while the fire waned, all the company sang and played instruments. I ventured to offer up a song of my own. The look of pleased surprise on Hadrian’s face touched me, and made me realize just how far down in my own thoughts I had been wandering, alone, like Persephone maundering through Hades. I vowed to quit dwelling in contemplation of death, and to attack my personal studies with renewed vigor whenever we arrived again in Rome.
AS IT HAPPENED, we returned in time for Plotina’s funeral.
Though he did not mention it, I suspect Hadrian may have felt some guilt for not having been at her side during her final illness. Despite the Senate patricians’ disdain for the staid old custom, Hadrian wore a black toga for the full nine days of mourning in tribute to his adoptive mother and mentor. He scrupled over Plotina’s apotheosis and burial ceremonies and insisted on every formality in his bestowal of posthumous honors upon her. He commissioned a temple in her memory in Nemausus in Gaul, just as he had commissioned a temple for the Deified Trajan, the only one of his public works Hadrian ever chose to have his name carved upon—proof of his rightful succession set in stone.
Plotina’s ashes were interred with her husband’s beneath his column at the foot of Quirinal Hill. Grief etched new lines in Hadrian’s face.
Next, he focused on completion of the new temple of Venus and Rome, and consulted with Apollodorus, the prominent architect, about his plans for a great temple he intended to consecrate to Pan and all other gods, known and unknown, as well.
Hadrian decided to revise the plans for the Pantheon himself, so that the building assumed a spherical shape, with a dome open at its center to provide light to the interior. He commissioned a variety of marble and granite from quarries all over Italy, Greece, Egypt and Africa to grace the new home of the gods. The effect was beautiful.
I loved to stand in the center of its polished expanse of floor and look up at that oculus which let in the sky like the eye of heaven, a porthole for Zeus. The white marble exterior and bronze dome dazzled viewers’ eyes in the sunshine. At night, beneath the moonlight, the marble seemed to glow. When it stormed, showers of droplets patterned the marble floor below the open space and the sweet smell of rain rose like incense beneath the heavens rumbling with thunder.
Even Hadrian’s wife Sabina, newly appointed with the title of empress relinquished by Plotina in death, attended the ceremonies for the opening of the temples.
Though he dislikes her, Hadrian would never consider embarrassing Sabina publicly by divorcing her. He once even banished a writer and historian, Seutonius, from court because of the man’s inexcusable rudeness to her, out of respect for her position. But he always preferred the company of Plotina, and even that of his mother-in-law, Matidia, to that of his wife. I suspect the feeling was mutual.
To me, Sabina seems almost put away in lavender now, surrounded by her attendants and chosen companions. For several years she has sequestered herself at her own villa, making only those official appearances required by protocol. She strikes me as a lonely woman, though perhaps she likes the perquisites of her role well enough. She has always remained civil, even gracious, to me. Perhaps she doesn’t understand the nature of my relationship with her husband. Or, perhaps, doesn’t care. I sometimes wondered whether she wanted children, or regrets not having them. What else is there for a woman, even if she is a queen?
Hadrian himself seems unconcerned that he has no natural-born heirs. After all, he was adopted by his imperial predecessor, just as Trajan was adopted by Nerva before him. When the time comes, he intends to follow suit.
AFTER PLOTINA’S DEATH, mindful of his own mortality, Hadrian decided to begin work on his own tomb, on the far bank of the Tiber. He and Apollodorus have often sparred over that particular architectural project. Apollodorus feels invalidated by the amateur, and Hadrian feels envious of the professional. Apollodorus might do well to recall that, while he is the professional, Hadrian is the emperor. At the least, he might refrain from comparing Hadrian’s drawings of dome elevations to pumpkins.
Perhaps to spite the architect, Hadrian ordered that Trajan’s bridge over the river Ister, designed by Apollodorus, be dismantled during a period of border realignment and fortification.
Hadrian also criticized Trajan’s victory column as unseemly, whereas I found its original friezes possess, despite clumsy execution, a certain energy or vitality not always found in Roman copies of Greek style—although I did not, of course, venture to offer this dissent aloud.
Thinking to improve my understanding of engineering and architecture, I asked Hadrian’s permission to study higher mathematics while we were back in residency in the court at Rome. I found I could follow the threads of the mathematician’s logic for a while, and began to see a pattern emerging from its weaving. There are patterns within patterns, patterns to be discerned everywhere if one but looks for them, and the thought of all these smaller patterns incorporated into one enormous pattern occurred to me—but then the thread snarled, the numbers blurred, and that final design I could not bring myself to grasp fell away into tangles. A little frightened by the experience, I gave up, and thanked the tutor for his graciousness in trying to teach me.
Meanwhile, Hadrian, having been taunted as a young man for his own provincial Latin accent, worried that I didn’t apply myself hard enough to learning more about Latin, didn’t exert myself to unlock all of its intricacies, grammatical and otherwise, and perfect my pronunciation.
But why should I? I have Greek. Latin: language of government, formality, classification, officialdom. Greek: language of the mind, the soul, poetry, philosophy, medicine—in short, the language of life. Any Roman writer worthy of that appellation has looked to the Greeks before him, dipped in and borrowed well, whether Virgil looking back to Homer’s poems for his Aeneid, or Julius Caesar emulating Xenophon in the history of his campaigns. That foundation is the one on which I stand.
DURING MY SPAN of time as the emperor’s favorite, I found myself exposed to many an intrigue, vendetta, and scandal at the imperial court. Yet my own betrayal came, oddly enough, from within the nest of my family back home in Claudiopolis.
When word arrived of my grandfather’s death, Hadrian gave me the news. Upon his inquiries into my family’s situation, he gleaned additional bad news: it seemed my inheritance had evaporated.
“Your Uncle Thersites,” Hadrian said, “has managed the family investments and properties in such a way that there will be nothing remaining of the estate to be passed along to you.”
“Not even the house?”
“Not even the house. It will be sold when your grandmother dies.”
At least my grandmother might continue to live there, facing down her own death. Hadrian fumed on my behalf, which I found both dismaying and gratifying. Now, of course, I realize his anger arose from his superior understanding of the situation—that when we parted, upon my coming of age, I could no longer count on any resources of my own to fall back upon.
When we traveled to Bithynia, my name now linked with Hadrian’s on every man’s lips
all over Claudiopolis, I witnessed my uncle’s extreme discomfort upon his introduction to Hadrian. When the two men clasped hands, Hadrian sized him up with a hard gaze and a soft “Ah, yes,” and then dismissed him, right there in his own house.
I derived a certain pleasure, I confess, from seeing my uncle’s face cloud and fall when the understanding settled upon him that the emperor knew of the estate situation. Any aspirations he harbored toward a higher post in the government were hopeless.
Nonetheless, I felt ashamed that my family had thus been tarnished in Hadrian’s eyes, and even felt a little sorry for my uncle, a likeable fellow who could not have foreseen how his own plans and ambitions might someday be thwarted due to the chance meeting of his nephew and the emperor of Rome. I could never bring myself to believe he had siphoned away all those funds and assets on purpose, despite Hadrian’s own thoughts on the matter.
With my grandmother, Hadrian waxed gracious. Sitting there in the atrium of my old home, he asked her about my childhood, encouraged her to hold forth on local myths and superstitions, and even told stories of his own about the tribulations of being emperor, while I kept silent, savoring her pleasure.
“Once I found myself petitioned for a second time by the same man,” he said, “only the fellow had dyed his hair black since our first exchange. When his turn in line came, I told him I could see a strong family resemblance, for I felt sure I already spoke to his grandfather.”
My grandmother laughed, covering her mouth with her palm. A remnant of girlish beauty radiated from her face in that moment, the sun peering from behind a cloud and then retreating once more.
“Another time,” Hadrian said, “I visited the public bath of a city while on a tour. There I found a man scratching his back against the lintel post outside the entrance, too poor even to go in for a bath. Feeling sympathy for his plight, I decided to give him a slave to scratch his back, and money enough to feed and bathe the both of them.”
My grandmother nodded, waiting for him to continue.
“The next day, when once again I went to the baths, wouldn’t you know—a whole flock of old men were waiting around the entrance, rubbing against the posts for all they were worth. They looked astonished, not to mention disappointed, when I merely suggested they might have a try at scratching one another.”
She and Hadrian both laughed.
During that trip home, I also gave the old cook her first taste of a truffle, that culinary oddity from beneath the Tuscan woods I had saved for her. When I stepped into her kitchen, she exclaimed over me, how tall, how handsome. When I held out my hand, she took the spongy black lump without hesitation.
“What’s this now?” She turned it around between her thumb and forefinger.
I held out a knife and said, “Taste it.”
She pared off a sliver, sniffed it, closed her eyes and popped the bit into her mouth. When she opened her eyes again, they looked liquid. She closed her fist around the rest of it, as if she were burying treasure.
“Ah, Antinous,” she said. “Thank you.”
UPON OUR RETURN to Rome, I learned that Korias, no longer ensconced in the court, had converted to Christianity and left his government post in order to follow his new faith off into the wild, perhaps somewhere in Africa. Although we settled on friendship in school, I still sometimes wished I had slept with him just once, all night, my hand on his cock, my head on his heart.
Of course I heard the rumors, everyone has, of the atrocities committed by that cult, how they drown children in baptismal rites, drink blood and eat human flesh in order to make themselves immortal, and hold frenzied orgies in secret chambers underground. Having known Korias, however, I never believed them. The followers of Jesus of Nazareth claim their own leader offered himself as a sacrifice for anyone, not just those of Jewish origin, who wishes for his intercession with Yahweh, who is, they claim, also his father. One day he will open up the underworld, they say, so that all the dead may fly out. I sometimes wonder whether Korias himself did not have rather a taste for self-sacrifice. It seems so, now, to me.
AMYRRA HAD NOTICED a couple of dark hairs that now shadowed my upper lip upon our return to Rome. She made a gift to me in secret: a pair of tweezers.
“Just—like that,” she said, and demonstrated by tugging a stray hair from her own brow. “Pluck, pluck for luck, Antinous. Remember, you are suffering for beauty.”
She handed the implement over to me and held up a mirror so I could look into it. I caught up a filament of hair in the tweezers’ tapered jaws and pulled. That first sting surprised me, but I began to tweeze above my lip and along my chin almost daily to preserve the nudity of youth—a vain attempt to forestall the inevitable.
To immortalize my youthful beauty, Hadrian had engaged a couple of artists and sculptors to capture my likeness for a few works of art he planned to install at his Tibur villa. I soon grew accustomed to their constant scrutiny. Even when I wasn’t sitting for a portrait, as often as not some man sat off to one side of me during a banquet or some other gathering, sketching my features, his own brow beetled with concentration.
For as long as I had known Hadrian he had been designing and overseeing the restoration and expansion of his country villa at Tibur, east of the great city, situated so that the sun always appeared to set on Rome. The original house, acquired as part of his wife’s inheritance, dated back to the Republic. That venerable structure was first refurbished, and then encompassed in its entirety within the newer, grander main structure. He also built a villa in miniature upon an island within the grounds, for use as his private retreat.
I always enjoyed walking the grounds there, trying to envision the planned Academy in its completion, wreathed with art, or the dome of the tower intended to house an observatory for his perusal of the stars. Plotina always had enjoyed strolling there, as had Matidia, Hadrian’s mother-in-law. Sabina herself seldom visited.
Once I suggested to him that he might commemorate his travels by construction of temples or other monuments evocative of the great cities under his command.
“You might place a miniature Parthenon on that hill,” I said, nodding toward the swell of ground that rose beneath a grove of oaks, “to recall the Acropolis. And perhaps a long reflecting pool near the spring to represent the Nile.” I knew how he looked forward to traveling in Egypt, and in particular to a visit to Alexandria.
“A child’s notion,” he said, but smiled. “Some statuary might be appropriate, at that—cats, crocodiles, the eye of Horus.”
When next he met with the architects, builders and stonemasons, I noticed he had followed some of my suggestions, but I said nothing. I understood him better by then, and I needed no recognition from them.
The last time we visited the villa, I discovered a favorite mosaic among all the new works, a Centaur hurling a stone at a striped, snarling tiger.
Upon its completion, Hadrian’s villa compound will rival any imperial palace for splendor, for it will boast almost a thousand rooms, and even an underground passageway for servants and service wagons. There the emperor and company might enjoy the countryside undisturbed, far from the demands of Rome and the baleful eyes of the Senate. The senators’ refusal to acknowledge Hadrian’s superiority as ruler galls him, although he never has spoken of it to me. The villa will provide a respite from his lack of popularity with certain patricians in the city and at court.
THOSE AT COURT who gave me credit for good behavior in those days did not perceive a shameful truth I understood about myself. My apparent detachment masked a fierce attachment to my own concerns (which included anything that might concern my emperor and lover). It also masqueraded adequately enough as compassion and affection, and made it easier to avoid those power games which preoccupy so many minds at court, causing it at times to resemble a nest of adders.
I felt no curiosity or interest in gossip about events which seemed to intrigue others. I simply could not care less who slept with whom, or who despised this or that one. What I
did find fascinating: the intrigue process itself.
Once an accusation got into the air, say, that a certain man neglected his aged parents, or slept with another’s wife, the accused was judged in the court of gossip and hearsay, and most often found guilty, convicted by everyone around him without a shred of empirical proof having been offered. Watching this process unfold over and over again throughout various scandals at court made me realize why our laws have come about—not only to prosecute the guilty, once they are determined based on factual evidence, but also, to protect the innocent from foes and false friends happy to seize any excuse to bring about their ruin.
I found it fascinating as well to see how those who think of themselves as good citizens, having decided that another has transgressed and violated some social boundary, feel free therefore to transgress against him, to violate with impunity that individual’s own boundaries in ways heretofore undreamed of—making nasty comments, observations, and jokes at his expense, and often in a manner calculated to further insult him by intimating he can’t possibly understand he is the butt of their humor. His right to privacy and decency are somehow revoked, though no evidence to prove his guilt has been found, and very well never may be. Yet he shall remain guilty in public memory.
At such times, I kept apart from the crowd as much as possible; held my tongue; remained polite especially toward those who scorned and stung me, and willingly played the fool to please any who wished to outsmart me. No man is offended by the impression that you think him the wiser of the two of you, since, in secret, he inevitably believes this to be true.
Many assumed that because I was young and naïve, I must be so to the point of stupidity. I never exerted myself to correct this false impression, for seldom is one hurt more by such underestimation than by an accurate or exaggerated assessment—as long as one is careful not to return this favor to one’s detractors.
EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian Page 8