EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian

by McDonald, Melanie

  There atop the peak at first light, just as the priests prepared to offer up the sacrifice, lightning struck, blinding us all for a moment. At once, both an acolyte and the intended sacrifice fell dead before us. Those of us who survived the bolt stood stunned into silence, the air still rent by the scorch of sulphur and flesh burning.

  The surviving priests, whose voices shook with awe, proclaimed that both priest and kid had been taken up for the emperor’s genius, and the span of their lives added to his, in an acknowledgement by Zeus himself.

  Hadrian said nothing, but his arm beneath mine trembled. His health had begun troubling him of late, and the ascent must have fatigued him, but it was not only fatigue that caused his shakiness. I knew he wondered whether he had in truth received a sign of favor, or a portent heralding disaster.

  Afterward, he wanted to visit a local seer to determine what such an omen meant, but I declined the opportunity to delve into the future myself. Had I accompanied him, perhaps I might have avoided the disaster that later befell me. Perhaps not.

  ARRIVING IN JERUSALEM, Hadrian learned that his plan to build a temple to Adonis there had outraged the Jewish people, who demanded that he respect the site of their ruined ancient tabernacle. I fear a crisis will arise from among these people, whose belief in their one god excludes any and all others. Theirs is a zeal only beginning to foment. Their Jehovah is an angry, jealous god; they fear only him, and no other.

  Not even a century has passed since nine hundred of their number faced a legion at Masada, beside the Dead Sea, holding off five thousand soldiers for four years. Rather than submit to Rome, they fell upon their own swords by firelight at siege’s end. Yet Hadrian seems not to recognize the intransigence of such faith, or else deems it traitorous to the realm of which he is sovereign lord.

  We left Judea and followed the coastline down toward Pelusium to begin the long journey to Egypt and Africa. I thought of Calliria. Her words now seemed yet another veiled omen. At Pompey’s tomb, Hadrian himself composed an epigram, remarking, “How poor a tomb for one so rich in shrines.” He gave orders that it be reclaimed from the sand and restored.

  OUR INITIAL ENTRY into the land of Egypt went unheralded, a deliberate choice on Hadrian’s part. Empress Sabina and Lucius Commodus, though both in ill health, planned to travel to Alexandria with their own parties, including Hadrian’s young nephew and possible heir, Pedanius Fuscus. Hadrian chose to delay official festivities until their arrival.

  The city of Alexandria received one year’s advance notice of our pending visit. Such forewarning is a necessity since the royal entourage requires an enormous amount of provisions, even for a few weeks: a thousand bushels of barley, or about a hundred thousand loaves of bread; three thousand bundles of hay; three hundred suckling pigs; and two hundred sheep.

  Sabina’s friend Julia Balbilla of Athens, a highly educated poetess, agreed to accompany her on this Egyptian junket. Observing their friendship, I wonder whether the empress is not less lonely than I earlier believed, and I am glad for her in this consolation. Over time, Hadrian’s lack of compassion for his wife has begun to grate on me. Odd though it might sound, I would prefer that my consort treat his wife with greater respect and deference than is his habit, for she always has done what was expected of a woman of her station, and cannot help her own awkward nature.

  The great city of Alexandria, as cosmopolitan in its way as Rome herself, boasts a veneer of international citizenry over its Greek heritage, set atop the bedrock of the ancients. The Egyptians themselves no longer can decipher the inscriptions with which their ancestors covered their monuments; mysteries lie intact before all eyes, buried within a picture-language which looks at once both familiar and utterly strange.

  Hadrian looked forward to examining the tomb of Alexander and visiting the city’s museum and library, while I most looked forward to the sights to be found along the Street of the Blessed, and relished the opportunity to study Egyptian religion, with regard to their lion and cat gods and goddesses, Bastet, Sekhmet, Pakhet, Qadesh, Shu, Aker, Mehet, Nefertem, Tefnut, and Edjo, in particular.

  During my studies, I also became fascinated by Ammit, “the gobbler,” with the head of a crocodile, the front legs of a lion, and the back legs of a hippopotamus (which Herodotus called a river horse). This mythical creature waits beside the balance where the hearts of the deceased are weighed against the Feather of Truth, once they have recited certain spells from the holy Book of the Dead. He eats the hearts of those who wronged others in life.

  I felt struck in particular by one incantation from that book, the Negative Confession. It lists many disavowed offenses against one’s community, and was written long before, but is quite similar to, the commandments said to have been revealed in stone to Moses and kept by the Jewish tribes: “I have not stolen; I have not coveted; I have not caused another to stumble; I have not given false witness; I have not fornicated; I have not committed murder, I am pure, pure, pure.”

  And who would designate a scarab, that insect known as the dung-beetle or cockchafer, as a sacred symbol of creation and the sun? The Egyptians.

  Even Hadrian was rather taken with their dwarf god Bes, the guardian of home and childbirth. He commissioned a local sculptor to fashion a likeness of the little lion-headed demon-deity for his villa at Tibur.

  WE TREKKED OFF into Africa, where for a second time we were to join a lion hunt. Hadrian deemed me old enough to participate at last. One lion in particular, a man-killer, had been causing chaos throughout the region, so Hadrian sought to save his subjects from its ravages. He saved my life on this hunt, as well.

  Riding along in the savannah, mountains in the distance shimmering with heat, we talked in a desultory fashion, pointing out sights to one another, such as a colony of termites, an egret startled into flight, unusual rock formations, and some strange red flowers in bloom—the exact shade, I observed to Hadrian, of the crimson wax he employs for leaving his royal mark.

  Everything happened so fast.

  All at once the man-killer, a tawny mass of muscle and hunger, materialized out of the brush, shaking his enormous dusty head and roaring as if to warn us, turn us back.

  Hadrian might have claimed the prize right then, put an end to that day’s sport at once with his bronze spear. Instead, he chose only to wound the beast with a blow, leaving its killing to me.

  “Take him, Antinous,” he shouted at me.

  And I—I misjudged the distance between my horse and the thrashing, wounded cat, threw my spear too fast. With both javelins I tried again, but the space had narrowed so that, too close, I could not maneuver for a good throw.

  Balius, hunt-trained, battle-hardened, selected with care by my old stable master, stood his ground, not panicking, though his rider sat unarmed and the lion rushed at him. Recalling it now, that horse’s valor shames me.

  The lion crouched low alongside our flank, meaning to spring against my horse’s neck, tear me off and drag me to the ground, but Hadrian, lunging in on Xanthus between the lion and my own mount, struck fast. A terrible roar, and then silence.

  All danger past, Hadrian dismounted and motioned for me to come to him, where he stood staring down at the fallen lion. He looked almost as shaken as I felt.

  “Antinous, what happened? I cannot—”

  He didn’t finish the thought. He clasped me to himself in a rough gesture, and I felt his heart charge against the cage of his ribs.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for saving me. My life is yours.”

  That night, at a feast which became a frenzy of rejoicing once news of the lion’s demise spread, I thanked Hadrian, praising him as we have always praised those heroes of old who offered themselves up for one another.

  Neither of us died that day. By his own actions, by his choice, he had put my life at risk. Once again, testing me—I am utterly, fatally convinced of it. Yet he also saved me, and more than ever my life belonged to him, not to me. Already, I knew myself to be lost, trapped, with no hope
of escape, while the crows flocked nearer, whispering.

  By the time we retired, our guides already had stripped the hide from the beast and cleaned and hoisted that trophy aloft, a grisly memento not unlike the sheet unfurled outside the bridal bower after the wedding night, according to the custom of barbarians (such a sheet might well wind up a shroud if no blood issues forth from the deflowered one). The skin’s stench reminded me of the bear pelt Hadrian once sacrificed to Eros, and of another sheet, stained once with my blood.

  During the night, he asked if I remembered a lion at the Flavian amphitheatre that had been caged with a canine companion, and how it pined after the dog was taken away, leaving the great beast on its own. I did not remind him how I once employed a lion to chastise him, but perhaps he remembered anyway. He took my face in his hands, searching it in the candlelight.

  “Ah, love,” he said. “Never die.”

  A brief fumbling, and then ecstasy. Afterward, I wondered how it could be so simple—rather, why it couldn’t always be so.

  That night, I began to understand what must be done, but did not yet comprehend how, nor see how such a choice might also serve him, become a gift apart.

  NEXT MORNING, RIDING out, we saw where the carcass lay cast aside after being skinned, its red and white marbled remains, attended by a host of flies, appearing before us like the foetus of some strange god, a final humiliation for the beast whose scythes had failed to dispatch me.

  Hadrian tossed his own mane, the lion conqueror mounted in triumph upon his fine horse, ill health and fear of disaster forgotten. I thought of proud, ruined beauty, Marsyus flayed in porphyry, a grey-eyed bitch cringing before the whip, and my lover, triumphant, playing his flute in the hot breath of the night. I wanted to vomit.

  Later, we heard how the locals, claiming to have found a red bloom growing on the spot where the lion fell, renamed the flower after me. Better to have named it after the lion.

  BY THE TIME we returned once more to Alexandria, greeted by the gleam of the lighthouse of Pharos, an edifice acclaimed as one of the world’s seven wonders, Sabina and Commodus had arrived with their friends and attendants.

  Sad news had come from my uncle in Bithynia, by way of the court in Athens, of my grandmother’s death. No personal message accompanied the announcement and formal condolences. I knew there would be no more welcome in the house which now belonged to him, after the way he had been humiliated in public by Hadrian’s cold reception.

  Hadrian, now mindful of his appearance as pharaoh, avoided returning downriver toward Alexandria with the Nile in Akhet, the flood season. The Egyptians believe that to travel on the rising Nile of the flood insults the gods, low though the water remains during this second year of drought. Pharaoh Alexander, in defiance of this sacred edict, once sailed downriver at full flood. Soon afterward, devastated by the loss of his companion Hephaestion, he must have wondered whether the gods of this strange land had indeed punished him for his trespass against the mother river that undulates through this desert country like a green umbilical cord and tethers her people along banks swathed in fecundity.

  In the midst of all the pomp and banqueting and official visits undertaken to inspect various sights, Hadrian grew distracted both by his duties and by more agitations fomented by the local Jewish faction over the temple dispute back in Jerusalem. This made my own preoccupation with dishonor after the hunt, and the dilemma of what must be done, easier to conceal from him.

  At one point, after fruitless negotiations with an elder from the local synagogue, Hadrian fainted in his quarters, a sign of fatigue or worse. Only a servant and I saw this, and he swore us to secrecy, declining to tell even his physician about the incident.

  The next evening, we were taken by boat to visit a magician at Canopus. Once ashore, we were conducted to a dank little grotto of a shop which seemed older than the pyramids themselves and stank of unsavory things. A mummified crocodile’s head leered through the gloom as we crossed the threshold into the sorcerer’s lair.

  There he cast predictions for Hadrian, employing his attendant witch to demonstrate a spell he claimed can attract someone in one hour, send dreams, cause illness in two hours, even destroy a man in seven hours—a spell which he also copied out and sold to Hadrian, who paid him double for it.

  The spell calls for a mouse deified in spring water, along with two moon beetles deified in river water. These are to be pounded on a mortar together with a river crab, the fat of a virgin, dappled goat, dung of a dog-faced baboon, two ibis eggs, two drams of storax, two drams of myrrh, two drams of crocus, four drams of Italian galingale, four drams of frankincense, and an onion. This mixture is to be kept in a lead box and used whenever a spell to beseech the goddess is performed, by sprinkling it over a charcoal fire on a rooftop at moonrise. (One must wear a papyrus roll with a protective charm while making the sacrifice as well, according to the sorcerer, lest the goddess make the seeker airborne and then hurl him to the ground.)

  Then certain incantations must be spoken over the sacrifice, which vary depending upon one’s intentions. For example:

  “I offer you this spice, O child of Zeus,

  Dart-shooter, Artemis, Persephone,

  Shooter of deer, night-shining, triple-sounding,

  Triple-voiced, triple-headed Selene,

  Triple-pointed, triple-faced, triple-necked,

  And goddess of the triple ways, who hold

  Untiring flaming fire in triple baskets,

  And you who oft frequent the triple way

  And rule the triple decades with three forms

  And flames and dogs. From toneless throats you send

  A dread, sharp cry when you, O goddess, have

  Raised up an awful sound with triple mouths.

  Hearing your cry, all worldly things are shaken:

  The nether gates and Lethe’s holy water

  And primal Chaos and the shining chasm

  Of Tartaros. At it every immortal

  And every mortal man, the starry mountains,

  Valleys and every tree and roaring rivers,

  And even the restless sea, the lonely echo,

  And daemons through the world, shudder at you,

  O blessed one, when they hear your dread voice.

  Come here to me, goddess of night, beast-slayer,

  Come and be at my love spell of attraction

  Quiet and fruitful, and having your meal

  Amid the graves. And heed my prayers, Selene,

  Who suffer much, who rise and set at night,

  O triple-headed, triple-named Mene

  Marzoune, fearful, gracious-minded, and

  Persuasion. Come to me, horned-face, light-bringer,

  Bull-shaped, horse-faced goddess, who howl doglike;

  Come here, she-wolf, and come here now, Mistress

  Of night and chthonic realms, holy, black-clad,

  ‘Round whom the star-traversing nature of

  The world revolves whenever you wax too great.

  You have established every worldly thing,

  For you engendered everything on earth

  And from the sea and every race in turn

  Of winged birds who seek their nests again.

  Mother of all, who bore Love, Aphrodite,

  Lamp-bearer, shining and aglow, Selene,

  Star-coursing, heavenly, torch-bearer, fire-breather,

  Woman four-faced, four-named, four-roads’ mistress.

  Hail, goddess, and attend your epithets,

  O heavenly one, harbor goddess, who roam

  The mountains, are goddess of the crossroads;

  O nether one, goddess of depths, eternal,

  Goddess of dark, come to my sacrifices.

  Fulfill for me this task, and as I pray

  Give heed to me, Lady, I ask of you.”

  This, to attract love. (To ask the goddess to punish a slanderer, or any other who has given offense, the incantations become much graver.)

  This same sorcere
r also offered to make a certain special sacrifice for the emperor’s genius. Hadrian made it clear no human sacrifice was acceptable in honoring him. Still, I absorbed every particular as the magician described the requirements for this ceremony, which seems to me in keeping with the Roman generals’ own time-honored practice of devotio suicide. It reminded me as well of the voluntary sacrifice of the Nazarene of the Christians’ sect, who was crucified, then deified, one hundred years ago. Such rites call for a subject willing to give up one life for another.

  Egyptian custom calls for this particular sacrifice to be drowned in the Nile’s waters, in order to be assimilated unto Osiris, god of the dying and resurrected. The sorcerer told us the pharaoh’s genius may afterward assume the form of such a sacrifice, to appear to him and serve him in the future. The Egyptians’ official mourning festival to honor the death of Osiris having just begun, any such sacrifices now offered are considered particularly effective.

  When I asked the sorcerer if any animal sacrifice might make an acceptable substitute, he allowed that the voluntary sacrifice of a pet might suffice. I then volunteered to offer up the falcon of Osroene, a gift from the mountain king to Hadrian, who later in turn gave it to me, amused by my fascination with the creature, its glowering amber eyes and downy breast. The least I could do, to offer it back to him.

  Once the courier returned from fetching it, a sorceress performed the rites in preparation for the sacrifice. She removed the small leather head covering which kept the bird soothed, but by some means of enchantment soon lulled it back into sleep. The sorcerer observed that it is crucial for the victim of this rite to appear to have volunteered for the sacrifice, not to have struggled with death.

  She anointed the falcon, then with one swift thrust immersed its motionless body in a vat of holy water drawn from the Nile, cradling it in her hands, tender as any mother, until the river stilled the heart and unsheathed the spirit, allowing it to fly to Osiris and become one with Hadrian’s genius.

  Hadrian paid the chief sorcerer in gold, and then our party returned to the boat to be ferried back to the city.

  MARCELLUS ONCE TOLD me the Egyptians must deify anyone, prince or commoner, who happens to drown in the Nile, as one chosen by Osiris and Isis. They believe the taboo against suicide is lifted, too, from all of those claimed by the Great Mother. He said the local legends do not agree with Plutarch’s claim that a fish swallowed Osiris’ penis (oh innocent red fish); the Egyptians believe his phallus still resides in Memphis.