‘Antinous, I could offer you or your father a great deal of money or property, but yes, that would be prostitution. I’m fairly sure that such a transaction is probably outside the code of your caste, yes?
As you probably realize, Antinous, I can take my pick of the most excellent slaves of all types available at market, and then some. I can buy whatever fits my desires, or simply seize that which is un-buyable. I am Caesar, after all. Yet I am a law abiding Caesar.
Importuning a slave is beneath me, no matter how beautiful or desirable. It is an abuse inflicted by mediocrities. As Plutarch has recently written, a wise ruler does not solicit people who ultimately have no choice in the matter. My rule as Caesar has seen the codification of the legal rights of slaves for their safety and justice, so I must be consistent in these things.
My goal instead is to engage with a freeborn companion; a willing freeborn companion; a friend of good family, of a suitable class, of intelligence, of an appropriate education and potential, and of great natural beauty, yet who is not Roman. It is my duty as the protector of the law and an exponent of the law.
I have been searching for this person for more than two years, but I’ve found only one or two who are even barely equipped for the role.
For example, you have seen Glaucon of Syria? He was the sweet-voiced singer of ancient love songs at the symposium tonight. He is the son of a leading Syri aristocrat at Damascus who aspires to Roman citizenship and entering the Senate, so he is cultivating my favor expensively. It is clear the father has thrown his son at me as a down payment on his project.
Glaucon is quite appealing in a sensual, even feminine, sort of way and is most congenial in his sexual accomplishments, I assure you. I have reason to know.
But he is not a person to be at my side as my consort at Court, at a military parade, at a religious sacrifice, in the company of rugged soldiers, on a Legion bivouac, at audience in the presence of my wife Sabina, or before the baying plebs at Rome’s amphitheaters. He is not someone whose very presence adds gravitas to my official comportment beyond his feline beauty, of which one tires quickly. An emperor requires the companionship of someone who possesses visible substance, someone who displays self-evident quality, not merely delicate bones, a silver voice, a slim waist, wears silk well, or offers eager orifices to my amusement. He also does not inspire delight in my heart as you do.’
Hadrian paused to measure the impact of his words on his young confidante. They were strikingly, brutally candid, if ultimately flattering.
‘But tell me now, Antinous, what do you yourself seek in your life?’ he asked.
From my hiding place I wondered how my pal would respond.
‘Sir, I do not know how to reply,’ I heard Antinous utter in dismay. ‘As a second son I am obliged to make my own way in the world. I am ruled by honor and my search for my contribution to my community, my elders, and my peers. As typified by the condemned gladiators of the arena, I wish my death to be noble, heroic, fearless, an event worthy of my life’s living.
I am on a quest for my life’s meaning, sir. My Father tells me I must take the actions necessary to fulfill my quest, they will not arrive of their own volition. I seek opportunities for engagement which fulfill this quest.
Yet in honesty, Caesar, I do not know if I possess the gifts you seek. I am unsure of what you expect of me. I might disappoint you, particularly among your courtiers or in your bedroom. I do not know if I possess gravitas before my seniors, or can perform inventive sexual novelties. I am entirely inexperienced in these things and am protective of my arete.
Fear of shame and the pursuit of honor are my guardians. So it’s my hope and desire that until the day of my betrothal my Father will permit me to enter schooling at Athens. This will be prior to taking up your gesture of a scholarship to the Palatine College at Rome.
At Athens I aspire to learn something more of life, of philosophy or rhetoric, to read the classics, to study the new sciences, to hear the debates of today’s thinkers, to take initiation into the Mysteries, to attend the gymnasia and palaestrae to refine my body or improve my technique with weapons and sports. Perhaps, too, to experience love or lust with a worthy companion, whoever he or she may be.
But I do not feel I am equipped to provide you with the satisfactions of a proper eromenos, especially an eromenos worthy of Great Caesar.’
He fell silent with his eyes downcast in shame.
‘Antinous, lad, all this and more may happen. Do not be at a loss,’ Hadrian interceded. ‘You are young, so another year’s education in a major centre of culture like Athens will do you no harm. Your body has entered manhood so extra training in armor, or casting javelin and discus, or refining riding on proper-sized chargers, will help you achieve it swiftly. You are well on your way. But I must add, the guidance of an experienced cavalry officer and exponent of hunting who is also familiar with the ways of love can complete it. That, Antinous, would be my contribution.
I am sure your father will be pleased with your decision if you decide to become my companion. You only have to ask him.’
Both Antinous and I immediately intuited Hadrian might already know of Telemachus’s response. Hadrian may have made separate contact.
‘I am grateful for your patience, sir,’ Antinous responded hesitantly, beginning to find his tongue at last. ‘Yet I must confess I possess only limited experience of sex. My body makes demands of me I myself cannot fulfill, let alone provide readily to another.
Surely there are many other freeborn youths in Bithynia who already know the arts of love, who are experienced as an eromenos, and who are familiar with a courtesan’s skills or a slave’s duties? I’m sure they may satisfy your desires with greater accomplishment than I ever could? I fear I’m not equipped with the aptitudes you require, my lord.’
Antinous assumed that shy downcast-looking gesture which was quite familiar to me when he was insecure in a situation. Caesar now grew more assertive.
‘Let us test that aptitude, young man. Step closer, Antinous,’ Hadrian instructed.
Antinous hesitantly moved a half-step nearer the couch.
‘This will be the extent of my demand upon you at first,’ he added, ‘the rest may prove equally as engaging some later day.’
Hadrian leaned forward and tenderly brushed my friend’s lips with a kiss. Antinous was startled but did not withdraw. Caesar’s fingertip gently raised his chin to search into his eyes while the other hand reached down towards his groin. Patiently, calmly, deliberately, Hadrian, the ruler of the known world with thirty Legions at his beck-and-call plus twenty-thousand slaves, reached to the lower hem of my friend’s tunic lying tucked behind his furled cloak. Ant reacted with a reflex shift of body weight but didn’t overtly respond to the provocation. In fact his body was surprisingly impassive, I thought.
Hadrian lifted the tunic’s hem away from his groin with one hand, and then gently, purposefully, teasingly, searched with the other into the binding folds of the loin-clothed mound lying close against Ant’s crotch.
My recollections of my friend’s threshold of sexual arousal indicated an immediate response by his generative organ; after all each of us was at the age where self-relief was a thrice-daily necessity to satisfy the demands of hyperactive genitalia and their wantonly lurid fantasies. We used to joke about it. Our organs certainly had a mind of their own which simply ignored our better judgment.
Hadrian obviously understood these things. Silently fussing about for a moment he playfully withdrew Antinous’s already firmed member from behind the folds of the flannel. Antinous flexed bolt upright in astonishment while remaining available to Caesar’s touch. Even at my distance from the scene I recognized how Antinous was fully aroused in a manner familiar to me. He had firmed despite the chill air.
He breathing was accelerating. I sensed he was powerfully turned on by his extraordinary predicament. Antinous has a comfortably sized organ, though nothing to gloat over as some owners do when on display in the p
ublic baths. Yet his erection is nothing to be ashamed of either. Perhaps he was no roadside priapic Herm with its extravagant phallus to defend a house from intruders by its sheer enormity, yet he was adequately built for pleasing action.
He stood motionless before Caesar, immovable, stricken, mesmerized, thrilled, but goose-fleshed. His erection and his scrotum were exposed from beneath his tunic in heightened arousal. His mouth gaped open, galvanized in amazement.
Hadrian calmly spat into one hand a few times and then applied his saliva to Antinous’s package projecting from its foreskin. He worked the spittle into every nerve-end and sensory nodule of his member while his other hand methodically fondled the testicles. Both received intense, languid, voluptuous attention. Due to my friend’s pelvic thrust projecting from beneath his tunic, I guessed Hadrian might have been fingering his anus with his other hand.
Shifting closer to look intently into Antinous’s eyes, Caesar savored his intoxicated responses as he kneaded and stroked his parts. I thought I detected half a smile wash across Hadrian’s face; a smile which combined teasing whimsy with some form of victory. It was entirely without sleazy prurience; it was quite generous in its intent. It was affectionate, even loving. Yet it was knowing.
Antinous simply stared wide-eyed back at Hadrian. He was uprightly entranced with astonishment verging on sensory swoon.
A few protracted moments elapsed until, with a faint gasp, half-closed fluttering eyelids, and a writhed undulation at the hips, he quivered ecstatically as he flung back his head in cathartic release. His bright shaggy hair bounced in the moonlight as he emitted a strangulated cry, an animal yowl of agonized rapture. I guessed he had ejaculated charges of semen directly into his paramour’s fondling palm, just as I had seen him forcefully expel on those occasions of our jerk-off competitions under the stars by a wilderness fireside. Young men are fascinated by the extraordinary demands of their sex drive and its uncontrollable bodily manifestations.
Hadrian, bemused but determined, teasingly rolled the ejaculate around Antinous’s penis to intensify his sensitivities, causing him to squirm in feigned hurt in a burst of nervous laughter. He then calmly wiped his palm on the flannel of Ant’s loincloth while grinning into his companion’s shining eyes.
The episode complete, he took Antinous’s cranium in both hands to fondly buss him on the forehead, each eyelid, the tip of the nose, his lips, and bat a final brotherly tap to the butt.
‘Young men are so hasty,’ I heard Hadrian mutter in amusement, ‘they don’t wait around, do they?’
‘Can I do something pleasing for you too, my lord?’ I heard Antinous ask limply.
I suddenly realized how such reciprocation could lead in embarrassing directions; directions I might not wish to witness or even know about. The prospect of being obliged to avert my eyes from watching my best friend being butt-fucked by Rome’s great emperor in an artificial garden by pale moonlight rose to mind. But I was immediately rescued from this prospect. Hadrian responded.
‘You have already done enough,’ he replied. ‘But there’ll be time for those things some other day, Antinous. We are going to part now, so you can return to your friends. I have other matters to address. But I hope my message came through to you? If you speak to your father for his permission, and if it is given, I would welcome you with your friend Lysias and your servants too, at Athens in the spring. You could join me for the Festival of Dionysus celebrations. That is, if it is your father’s will. Farewell until then. I hope we meet again, Antinous. I look forward to it.’
Hadrian began to wind his cloak around himself in readiness to depart.
‘Hadrian,’ I heard Antinous murmur, halting the emperor in his move away from the couch with a presumptuous tug at his sleeve.
Caesar froze at this lapse of protocol as Antinous searched into his eyes. He had used the emperor’s name in a familiar manner, while the tug at the sleeve was not a subject’s approved kiss of a cloak hem. As we all know, a Caesar may engage in familiarity without permission, but a citizen should not do the same at risk of a lethal response from the Guard.
Hadrian scanned the garden to flick his head in a subtle negative shake. It immediately made me wonder if he expected hidden guards to be monitoring the occasion from somewhere nearby. If so, they were not evident to me, thankfully.
Antinous stumbled out his words. He was quaking with emotion.
‘When next we meet, and with my Father’s endorsement, I hope to be able to say to you ‘Yes Caesar, I am yours’, if this remains your desire,’ he said softly but clearly.
Hadrian smiled.
‘Prepare yourself well, Antinous of Bithynia. Your true life is about to begin. You will fulfill your destiny to your heart’s desire. Until Athens, farewell.’
Caesar rewound himself in his cloak and swept back into the Marquee’s dark interior. Once again Antinous was standing alone in the moonlight, disheveled, cold, while fumbling to adjust his loincloth and re-furl his cloak.
But then I perceived how, besides myself beneath the pale gray moon, another concealed observer had seen these events. Both of us had witnessed the inauguration of something which proved to be momentous for our generation.”
“An observer, you say?” Suetonius interjected.
“Yes. I began to back away from my place of concealment. I withdrew into the shadows to return to the lanes leading back to our sleeping quarters. I moved quickly to ensure I returned ahead of Antinous. I knew Antinous would feel his honor had been impugned if he realized I had observed the exchange with Caesar.
As I moved into the shadows I noticed another figure flit through the darkness ahead of me, someone who too had been concealed. Startled but evasive, I caught the image of this figure from the corner of my eye silently emerging through the moonlight and again disappearing into darkness. It happened momentarily. This figure must surely have seen me too concealed up ahead. He too had probably been a witness to the transaction between Hadrian and Ant. I perceived the shadowy figure’s height, breadth, and body type to have been similar to someone like Arrian.
It dawned on me how the absence of Horse Guards or Praetorian protectors at the site of the rendezvous was intentional to permit the night’s events to proceed unhindered. The emperor’s assignation with my friend was arranged to be entirely private and personal.
I then moved swiftly through the tent city’s lanes to be ahead of my school friend’s return.”
The four listeners heard out Lysias’s reminiscence with fascination. The graphic details of Caesar’s adventure with his Bithynian subject concentrated their minds wonderfully. Lysias returned to silence while sipping at his wine.
CHAPTER 11
“So? What happened next?” Suetonius asked.
Lysias sat upright to begin his testimony again.
“On returning to our sleeping quarters I was confronted with another surprise. Our staff was standing around staring in dismay at the places where Antinous and I were supposed to be asleep. Squatted atop Antinous’s bed of piled straw a pace from my own stack was a human figure reclining in a nonchalant manner.
She was a young woman of striking pertness, delicacy, and shining with a copper-colored complexion. Her dark hair was bound high on her head in the fashionable style of gentlewomen of quality at Rome, pinned with needles of ivory. She was dressed in the fine, sheer raiment and silken mantle of a member of the Imperial Court adorned with drop earrings and a necklet of filigree gold. Her eyes were outlined in thin black lines of kohl, a striking fashion affected at the eastern half of the Empire.
She had a travelling sack bulging with possessions lying beside her, and as I approached I realized she also had a sheathed gladius short-sword lying on the blanket before her. The weapon’s matching hip dagger and its finely-crafted belt-strap were immediately-recognizable. It was the knife which had brought down the boar earlier in the day. Hadrian’s knife. It was accompanied by an Imperial scroll tied in scarlet silk and sealed with a clay bulla.
‘Antinous of Bithynia?’ she asked brightly as I came near.
‘No, I am Lysias, his friend,’ I responded. ‘Who are you? What do you want with Antinous, young lady?’
‘Oh,’ she said firmly, ‘I am instructed to speak only with Antinous of Bithynia.’
At that moment Antinous entered the marquee, only to be surprised to find everyone awake and standing forlornly around his bedding place. It was occupied by the dark eyed interloper seated between her various possessions. He glanced around the motley group facing him.
‘What the …?’ he gasped.
The lithe young beauty arose from her seat with a supple dexterity and a delicate feminine grace I have rarely seen expressed so effectively in a single human bodily movement. I realized the delightful creature in the resplendent attire with her supple elegance was perhaps one of the dancers from the evening’s entertainments, or some other nubile attendant to the Imperial Household.
She met eye-to-eye with Antinous and immediately understood how this blond haired, tall-statured youth with the gilded suntan was her mission’s objective. Someone had told her Antinous would be the very good looking fellow of our group.
‘Antinous of Bithynia, victor of the Hunt, greetings!’ she proclaimed gaily. ‘I am instructed by my master to deliver these gifts to you and ensure their purpose is understood.’
With a nod of the head gesturing to the sword and dagger at her feet while proffering the official scroll, she continued trippingly.
‘These are awards from Great Caesar to be delivered directly into the hands of Antinous of Bithynia. I am also instructed to deliver myself into your household’s service as well,’ she said with a teasing flash of the eyes. She rose to her full height barely up to Antinous’s chest and offered the gladius, dagger, belt, and scroll, accompanied by a small kidskin pouch knobbled with bulges. It suggested many coins within.
‘Yes, I am Antinous of Bithynia, young lady,’ he confirmed with formality before the eyes of all. ‘So who are you?’
The Hadrian Enigma - A Forbidden History Page 17