EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian

by McDonald, Melanie

  And yet, she was right to feel anger. She had no choice. I see that now. Just as I now see that I never considered the act I committed with any regard to my relationship with Hadrian. At the time, those two had no connection at all in my mind, even though she was a gift from the court—and so, from him.

  A FEW MONTHS ago, I spoke to her about this latest journey, to give her time to prepare my clothes for the long foray with Hadrian into Athens, Egypt and Africa. Her words to me that evening shattered something inside me, like a glass cup dropped upon tiles.

  “Perhaps,” she said, folding a tunic while she stared at me with those northern eyes, “I will not serve you again.”

  Hers are a people who believe in prophecy, and indeed some claim to see the future before it happens. Those words expressed no regret; rather a wish, or premonition.

  I had intended, before departing, to present her with a sketch I created of her, with wings like those of a butterfly emerging from her shoulder blades, a rather good likeness. Instead, I tore this handiwork to shreds and burned it that very night. Bits of papyrus reddened and fluttered, then crumpled and shrank into ash.

  I FOUND NO opportunity to speak to my old friend Amyrra at the farewell banquet heralding this trip, for she chose to retire to her villa in Tuscany last year, when the first signs of wavering attention at court signaled that her charms might be fading through familiarity. Her decision to remove herself before she might be dismissed seems a wise one, an example to heed. I feel no worries for her welfare. Rumor already has a new beau in the form of a retired senator stepping up to show her about the province.

  At the banquet, Marcus took the opportunity to stun me, delivering the news of his illness from the couch next to mine while the rest of the guests watched a gang of tumblers perform. Leaning close to my ear to ensure that Hadrian, reclining next to me, didn’t hear, he said, “You know, Antinous, I am dying.”

  Turning my head to look at him, I said, “Surely not.”

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “Of course, there’s hope—one can always hope—that a cure may be effected. But I’ve coughed blood for a few months now, and that symptom, my doctor assures me, almost always means the disease is beyond treatment. He and my father are the only ones who know. And now, you.”

  I felt numb, and after a moment realized I must speak.

  “I’m so sorry, Marcus. I assure you, I won’t speak of this to anyone—unless you wish for me to do so.”

  I assumed that, for whatever reasons of his own, he wanted me to give this sad news to Hadrian. What he said next, I never anticipated.

  “Thank you, Antinous,” he said. “and I know I must tell Hadrian, but I wanted to tell you first, because you’ve been a friend. One of my best friends, in truth. What a way we’ve traveled from our school days.”

  Fumbling for a response, I hesitated and then said, “Thank you, Marcus. I had no idea you thought so well of me.”

  He coughed, covering his mouth with a dinner napkin, and I tried not to look, despite temptation to see if spatters of blood marred the golden square.

  “I’ve always been fond of you, Antinous. Rather fond. And thought you might be fond of me as well—but it seemed impolitic to admit it,” he said, “given the circumstances.”

  He gave a discreet nod toward Hadrian, whose eyes were still on the performers. “You understand.”

  “Of course,” I said, feeling even more uncomfortable.

  In truth, I’d always found Marcus about as alluring as a turnip. But I felt loathe to disabuse him of his false notions now, if such a belief comforted.

  Marcus himself changed the subject.

  “So perhaps you’ll be allowed to go on the lion hunt this time out. Maybe he’ll even let you have a spear.”

  This failed to rouse a response from me, recovering as I was from the twin blows of his illness and romantic revelation. Then he said, “Don’t worry, lions much prefer Christians anyway, or so I’m told. Speaking of which—any news of Korias?”

  This question at least I felt safe in answering. I noticed gooseflesh on my arms.

  “No, nothing. And you?”

  “Not a word,” said Marcus, perhaps crestfallen at having failed to elicit any confessions, romantic or otherwise, from me. “Maybe the lions already got him.”

  A guest on the other side of his couch poked him in the shoulder, and began to repeat a joke he’d just heard. Marcus laughed as if nothing were amiss. I busied myself with the remains of the dinner growing cold on my plate, relieved that Hadrian didn’t seem to suspect anything wrong.

  Strange to say, but I have begun to see how Marcus as a boy just might have resembled a young Hadrian; how, despite all of his gifts and his status, insecurity might undermine him, reduce him to the rank of bully, and degrade him as well as his victims.

  I wonder whether the gravity of his situation had caused Marcus to engage in self-examination, and allowed his better nature to unfurl, even as his days began to wind down. And I am sorry not be there, at the last, if I might have been any help to him.

  MOMIUS, MY OLD stable master, seemed reluctant to let me take my leave when I stopped by to see which horses we would ride to hunt on this last trip.

  He grasped my hand in his calloused one and paused for a moment. One of the stable cats minced past, intent upon some invisible prey.

  “That’s a good horse there, Antinous,” he said of the one he’d chosen for me, pulling his hand free to wave it in the direction of Balius’ stall. The horse’s alert brown eyes watched us over the top of the gate, as if he intended to size me up as well. I had never ridden him before. He was the hunt master’s usual mount, just as Xanthus was Hadrian’s. I wondered why I was being offered the penultimate horse, and which horse the hunt master now would ride, instead.

  “A good horse. So take care of him now. Don’t risk him unnecessarily.”

  “I will, sir. I promise. I’ll do my best.”

  “That I know, boy. That I know,” he said.

  Balius in his stall gave a whinny, as if he understood our conversation and approved of what he heard.

  I knew this show of concern for my horse was Momius’ way of expressing fondness for me. But now I also wonder whether he intended to give me warning with his oblique urgings—whether he guessed the test of courage and skill Hadrian intended for me during the upcoming hunt, and felt caught between loyalty to the emperor and concern for a former hand, toward whom he still felt a paternal affection.

  WHEN WE TOURED in Athens again before traveling further east and south, my official designation as imperial favorite provided me with the privilege of conducting the sacrifice to the sacred Python of the oracle, to honor the emperor’s genius. The wrens bred for this ceremony had been mutilated, their wings clipped to prevent flight. The drubbing of those ruined wings when I placed the creatures atop the great serpent’s altar recalled to me the fluttering heart of a hare I once captured and tamed, before the hounds fell upon him and tore it out.

  Once again I found myself asking why gods are so cruel as to elicit praise from fountains of gore, delight in the deaths of male and female, or find, in the shattering of skulls delicate as eggshell, a source of glee.

  AT THE ATHENIAN court, Arrian was persuaded to read aloud the piece I had “commissioned” regarding his favorite bitch, now expanded into an essay called “On Hunting with Hounds,” which Hadrian and I both found graceful and moving. I asked for a copy of this text as a keepsake so I might re-read certain passages at my leisure, and Arrian seemed pleased to oblige, delivering the manuscript to me the next morning.

  “One should sacrifice to Artemis the Huntress,” he wrote, “in thanks for such a possession; and one should sacrifice also after a successful hunt, and dedicate the first-fruits of the catch to the goddess, and purify the hounds and the huntsmen, according to local tradition and custom.

  “Some Celts have the custom also of making an annual sacrifice to Artemis: they display an offertory box for the goddess, and when a hare
is caught they put two obols in the box, for a fox, a drachma. . .when the festival of Artemis’ birth comes round, the box is opened, and from the collected sum they buy a sacrificial animal, some a sheep, some a goat, some a calf, if there is enough. After the sacrifice, and having given the first offering of the animal to the Huntress, as is the custom in various places, they and their hounds have a feast. They also put garlands on their hounds on that day, to make it clear that they are holding a festival in their honor. . .”

  My favorite passage offered a description of one hunter’s beloved hound:

  “For I myself reared a hound with the greyest of grey eyes, and she was fast and a hard worker and spirited and agile, so that when she was young she once dealt with four hares in one day. And apart from that she is the most gentle (I still had her when I was writing this) and most fond of humans, and never previously did any other dog long to be with me and my fellow-huntsman Megillus as she does.

  “If she sees one of us even after a short period of time, she jumps into the air gently, as if welcoming him, and she gives a bark with the welcome, showing her affection. When she is with one of us at dinner she touches him with her paws alternately, reminding him that she too should be given some of the food. And indeed she makes many different noises, more than any other dog that I think I have seen; and she shows audibly what she wants.

  “And because when she was being trained as a puppy she was punished with a whip, if anyone to this day should mention a whip, she goes up to the one who has said it and crouches down like one beseeching, and fits her mouth to his mouth as if she is kissing, and jumps up and hangs from his neck, and does not let him go until the angry one gives up the threat. And so I think that I should not hesitate to write down the name of this dog, for it to survive her even into the future, viz. that Xenophon the Athenian had a dog called Horme, very fast and very clever and quite out of this world.”

  Arrian also presented me with a belated birthday gift, a silver cup commissioned from a renowned silversmith, a stunning piece of craftsmanship. The outside of the bowl had been worked in two scenes which complemented each other. One side depicted a bearded man and a youth making love with gestures at once ardent and tender, while the other showed a young man similarly engaged with a boy. I supposed the former image might have reminded Arrian of Hadrian and me, and that he assumed we might find it pleasing, but I wondered about the two figures on the other side. The boy there looked resigned, his features slack, eyes staring off into the distance.

  ON A JAUNT into Smyrna, to address some civic concerns called to his attention by Polemo, Hadrian coerced me into spending an evening with him and a new courtesan named Hostia, one I found little better than a street prostitute. I thought her coarse in manner and appearance both, almost a different species from Amyrra, despite their common gender. Hers was a face in which all sweetness had curdled, and beneath the smoke of incense, her house smelt of rancid cheese.

  Well aware of my disdain, this Hostia missed no opportunity to hiss in my ear, while pretending to whisper enticements during the wine drinking.

  “You think you are superior? You are no better than I—just another plaything to be discarded once his desire is slaked. Don’t put on airs with me, fancy boy.”

  When she led Hadrian off into her gaudy, mirror-encrusted bedroom, he turned and gestured, wanting me to follow. No doubt he intended for the three of us to engage one another, but I pretended not to understand and sank down onto a cushioned stool just inside the doorway.

  I gazed around the glittering candlelit room, trying my best to ignore the two of them coupling on the low, wide bed. This proved impossible, the movement of their twining limbs drawing my gaze against my will to the naked bodies before me in reflection after reflection around the mirrored walls.

  Hadrian turned her over, to take her from behind. Her breasts and pale buttocks shuddered and recoiled from the force of his thrusting, the muscles of his thighs working as he gripped her waist with one arm, bracing himself with the other.

  My eyes were drawn upward to the mirror above the headboard, and there all at once I met her eyes, with their gaze of detached amusement. She had been watching me while I watched their intercourse in a state of aroused revulsion. His eyes were closed, turned inward upon himself, as always, during the act.

  She flashed me a grin obscene in its complicity, insulting in its implication: “Here I am, where you usually are, and your turn is still to come.”

  Disgusted, I looked away. I further avenged myself by declining her after he had finished.

  “Not to my taste,” I said when he pressed me. Thus we disengaged Hostia and took leave of her house. Hadrian paid her a bonus as if to make up for my refusal.

  His accusations later that night, whispered against my turned back, were true. I was indeed sulking. He had besmirched our sacred lust with his own base ones.

  It never occurred to me that I did likewise with Calliria—perhaps even more so, for I felt some genuine emotion, angry, vengeful, regretful, toward her, rather than simple lust. My impulsive act of congress with Calliria had betrayed to me my own submerged desire for power over another, such power as Hadrian himself wields over everyone. That power becomes more of a burden and less of a privilege the longer it is possessed.

  ON OUR LAST boar hunt together, during a light rain on a hillside outside Athens one afternoon, the boar I killed turned out to be the prize of the weekend. As expected, as I anticipated, my lover feigned pleasure over my fortune with the kill, but when I pulled up the hem of my cloak and offered the choice meats to the goddess, a green light glinted in his eyes, betraying his anger at being bested.

  DURING YET ANOTHER procession out in the Greek provinces, parading past yet another dazzled small town crowd, I spotted a youth fresh in from the countryside, mud and shit still clinging to his boots, a farm boy gawking mouth-open like a fish at all the imperial pageantry. I caught his stare, his frank look of appraisal too innocent to be much abashed by my glance, his demeanor reminding me of Periander, the fish I once let slip back out to sea. That farm boy’s thought upon seeing me was captured on his bare face as plain as if he had spoken it aloud:

  “You’re the one who takes it up the ass every night.”

  I thought of the blind fox, and smiled.

  HADRIAN AND I once again participated in the Eleusinian mysteries. The other initiates, bedecked in myrtle wreaths and golden ribbons, kept a discreet distance while we purified ourselves in the sea, made our sacrifices, and joined the torchlit processional along the ruts of the Sacred Way from Eleusis back to Athens.

  Hadrian chose to undergo several other cults’ initiations as well, in keeping with the ideals of the new Pantheon back in Rome and his own assumption of a title of deity, Zeus Olympos, to please the Greek citizens under his rule. He had only just accepted the title of Father of the Fatherland from the Roman Senate. He refused the title early in his reign, and said he must earn it (perhaps in emulation of Augustus, who accepted that title only after ruling for twenty-five years).

  Some of those cults’ rites seemed exotic, to say the least, and others struck us as barbaric, even horrific, such as the ritual castration required as proof of dedication from the priests of Cybele. Hadrian also finds circumcision rites, practiced by some peoples of the Empire, offensive. He said he cannot fathom why such mutilation of the human body is judged seemly, much less holy. Even my initiation into Mithraism sent Hadrian into a spasm of disgust, despite having undergone the ritual himself some years ago.

  I shall never forget how steam rose in a wreath from the bull’s cut throat before its blood rushed over me in a scalding stream, blinding me momentarily to everything except my own ecstatic vision, the spiritual union of slayer and slain.

  Or how, when I emerged from that baptismal pit gory as an infant fresh-sprung from the womb and blinking at the ferocity of the light, I caught a glimpse of Hadrian’s face distorted by revulsion, before he reined in that reaction and regained his composure,
the impassive mask of Empire slipping into place once more.

  I went with him to pay homage at Hector’s tomb and at the marble one Hadrian had built to hold the bones of Ajax, where he also sacrificed a golden peacock. I myself made a sacrifice in tribute to Patroclus, friend of Achilles, whose story of devotion I learned in childhood.

  While the blood ran and the meat charred, I reflected on all those old stories I drank like mother’s milk as a boy. I began to wonder how I missed the real point of those tales of men whose heroism entailed sacrifice for each other: Love requires death to become immortal.

  Soon afterward, in an official visit to the barbarian kingdom of Parthia, Hadrian averted further battle and cemented Roman relations with their king, Osroes, by ensuring that a daughter of his, kidnapped by Trajan’s forces during an earlier skirmish, was returned. He then allowed the barbarian emperor to take us up into the mountains to hunt deer and hare with leopards and falcons.

  AFTER PLOTINA’S DEATH, Hadrian developed an even keener interest in what becomes of the soul at death. This topic engendered several rounds of pillow-talk, for I, too, had given much thought to this matter, recalling the blue butterfly of a ghost which haunted my childhood, the deaths of my father and grandfather, and the Stoic philosopher’s rational suicide.

  I promised Hadrian that if I died first, I would try to illuminate death for him. He laughed, believing I spoke in jest, but my offer was sincere. Indulging myself in a morbid fancy, I decided I must come back to visit him in the form of a butterfly, blue like my mother, or perhaps as one of the big yellow specimens that hover each summer over a certain weed with straggly white flowers, blooms my grandmother called love-in-ashes.

  Not long after that particular conversation, we ventured to the summit of Mount Casius, where Hadrian meant to offer a sacrifice to Zeus after completing the climb.