Hadrian & Antinous: A Roman Love Affair

It was the book Hadrian’s Memoirs, by Marguerite Yourcenar that would eventually, many years later, bring me to Rome.

Yourcenar, after an exhaustive 30-year research, wrote a fictional memoir in the first person of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117—138) giving a full recounting of his life and including his brief love for Antinous and the tragedy that ended it. Yourcenar researched every classical historical account on Hadrian and Antinous, including Hadrian’s own writings. Yourcenar was an accomplished author of 20 books and, in 1980, was the first woman elected to the Academie Francaise, an extraordinary achievement in the history of French letters.

Hadrian consolidated an empire which stretched from Britain, throughout much of Europe and North Africa and all the way east to Saudi Arabia. For much of his reign, he was away from the capital, traveling the empire and finding time to visit Greece whose Hellenic culture he favored. It was in Bythinia, on the northwest corner of Asia Minor, were he met the lad Antinous. Hadrian, through Yourcenar, ponders the object of his affection:

"If I have said nothing yet of a beauty so apparent it is not merely because of the reticence of a man too completely conquered… I see a head bending under its dark mass of hair, eyes which seemed slanting, so long were the lids, a young face broadly formed as if for repose. A week of indolence sufficed to soften him completely; a single afternoon at the hunt made the young athlete firm again…an hour’s sun would turn him from jasmine to the color of honey…the full chest of the young runner took on the smooth, gleaming curves of a Bacchante’s breast; the brooding lips bespoke a bitter ardor, a sad satiety. In truth, this visage changed as if I had molded it night and day."

These were the sort of passages that mesmerized me years back, promising myself to go to Rome and find images of Antinous and those too of Hadrian, as evidence of Yourcenar’s haunting passages.

I walked out of the front entrance of Rome’s Stazioni Termini on a summer day, hailed a cab and, like a detective, scrutinized each passing obelisk and monument. I was in the center of an empire whose population, in Hadrian’s second century, was 50—70 million of the most racially diverse people on the globe.

I dropped my bags in my hotel room and rushed outside to catch the last long rays of sunset wandering in the direction of Campo Fiori, a piazza which my guidebook insisted as the first visit to Rome.

A look in my map while seated in an outdoor café later made me realize that the Pantheon was not too far away. I was off to see Hadrian’s most impressive architectural contribution to the world.

Hadrian was an inveterate traveler, visiting much of the empire and staying for short periods of time in Rome. Around 125 A.D. returning from a long trip to the east, he began the construction of the Pantheon, a temple for all the Roman deities.

I was tempted to link the beauty of the Pantheon, built around A.D. 125, to an inspired Hadrian who had returned to Rome accompanied by his beloved Antinous, now part of the imperial paedagogium, to be trained as a palace page.

Bisexuality among Roman and Greek men was the norm then, with older men taking on youths as their lovers and, at the same time, maintaining a marriage with women. Romantic love expressed in poems and writings between men and youths were encouraged while marriages with women were seen as practical, procreative unions.

When the youth approaches manhood, the relationship alters. The younger, once passive partner adopts his expected aggressive stature befitting a man, marries a woman and searches for his own inamorato. The older man is expected to find another lad he would educate, be patron to and become the new romantic companion. What happens when the older man and youth wish to continue their relationship after the youth becomes a man? That was the conundrum that befell Hadrian and Antinous and may have led to their love’s tragic demise.

Contemporary observers will define this relationship as pederasty and it is such. But cultural and sexual mores evolved through history and what is regarded now as morally wrong and, even illegal, was not so in those days. In modern society, children are afforded individual rights and there are laws to protect them from sexual and parental abuse. In Imperial Rome, the affectionate relationship between men and youths was pervasive despite the emotional and social inequality in the relationship.

Once hounded and persecuted by early Roman emperors, the Catholic Church and its teachings prevailed by the sixth century and the practice of pederasty considered a sin.

I returned to the Pantheon the next morning, and with a flock of tourists, entered its dome. Conversation ceased, a hush pervaded as we all craned to look up to a magnificent ceiling with an oculus at the very top. Sunlight streamed like a flashlight beam into the dome. A feeling of sublimity enveloped us gaping mortals. Hadrian’s plan to connect the interior, containing Deities, to the heavens above through this hole was logical and prescient. Yourcenar’s Hadrian clearly explained the rotunda-shaped building: "This temple, both open and mysteriously enclosed, was conceived as a solar quadrant. The hours would make their round on that caissoned ceiling…the disk of daylight would rest suspended there like a shield of gold; rain would form its clear pool on the pavement below; prayers would rise like smoke toward that void where we place the gods."

In the sixth century, the Pantheon was transformed from a sacred site for Roman gods to that of a Catholic Church.

Antinous, while on a trip in A.D. 130 with the Emperor fell from a boat and drowned in the Nile River. There were many theories over this tragedy. The most intriguing was that Antinous was becoming a man and custom deemed that he had to move on and marry and the Emperor would seek another young lad. Realizing this, and possibly not accepting his new fate, Antinous decided to take his life at the height of his love affair with the Emperor.

Hadrian was inconsolable when Antinous died, weeping openly, to the dismay of his courtiers who found his behavior unbecoming of a soldier-emperor. In the next eight years until his death Hadrian transformed his young lover into a god, to be adored like other Roman gods. Thousands of his images from coins, busts and full-length statues would be commissioned and placed in religious altars throughout the empire. In Egypt, Antinous the deity would be garbed as an Egyptian and near his death site, a new city, Antinopolis, was founded.

But in the Pantheon, there was no sign of the god Antinous. The next day, I visited Hadrian’s tomb, renamed Castel Sant’Angelo, an immense round structure by the Tevere River. Designed by Hadrian to be his resting place, the prominent Roman landmark has, through the centuries, become a fort for Popes fleeing the Vatican during a siege. The view of all of Rome from the top is breathtaking, giving one a hint of the majesty that Hadrian envisioned for his remains and the physical legacy he wished to leave behind. I searched the various images throughout the tomb and found one bust of Hadrian, stern and forlorn looking. There was no sign of his lover nor a mention in the Castel Sant’Angelo guidebook.

As I walked the streets of Rome, passing churches and shrines, hopelessly seeking books about Hadrian and Antinous in bookstores, I realized that the writing of history belongs to the victors. With the ascendancy of Catholicism, significant parts of Roman past were expunged. Only until recently, with the advent of gay historical research, did we find out that except for one emperor, all the rest of the emperors had engaged in loving young men. But in the year 2002, I would find hardly anything on the subject. And in the few instances that Antinous’ name would appear, his sanitized designation would be "companion" to Hadrian.

I saved my visit to the Vatican Museum for the last day. My detective work vainly locating images of Antinous and Hadrian was for naught. The Vatican Museum would be an end to my ruminations to surrender to the storehouse of religious arts.

After the obligatory Sistine Chapel, the vast museum was one wandering journey. Down the long hallway past walls of cartography, I came across a series of large salas and entered a round domed room. It was the Galleria Dei Busti and across from the entrance, sculpted larger than life was a statue of a handsome naked Hercules holding a club in one hand. Flanking his statue on both sides were male busts. I approached the statue awed by its physique but I stopped in my tracks dumbfounded by the caption on the youthful bust beside Hercules. It was Antinous, curly haired, sensual lips, gazing serenely.

Instinctively, I looked across the other side of Hercules and approached the bust of an older bearded man. It was Hadrian’s. Stepping back in wonderment, Hadrian’s bust angled towards Antinous but looking at a distance, perhaps at his empire. While Antinous is positioned directly at Hadrian. His eyes gaze downward, in deference to his master. I would find, to my amazement, the bust of the two male lovers right in the Vatican Museum, under the watchful eyes of a sinewy Hercules.

But that wasn’t all. Nearby, in the Egyptian room, containing mummies and sarcophagi, was an assemblage of Egyptian statues taken in the 17th century from Hadrian’s villa in outlying Tivoli. In a position of prominence were the full length statues of Antinous as an Egyptian God. I chuckled to myself at the thought of sympathetic, possibly gay museum curators working in the heart of the Vatican.

At the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport, while waiting for my flight, I was pleased with myself that I set out to visit Rome and pay homage to Hadrian and Antinous inspired by a book. It seemed the appropriate time to reread Yourcenar again. I pulled out my dog-eared copy and read Hadrian’s thoughts on why he had made countless statues of his beloved and placed them throughout the empire:

"…I sought also an exact resemblance, the familiar presence and each irregularity of a face dearer than beauty itself. How many discussions it cost to keep intact the heavy line of an eyebrow, that slightly swollen curve of the lip. I was counting desperately on the eternity of stone and the fidelity of bronze to perpetuate a body which was perishable, or already destroyed, but I also insisted that the marble, rubbed daily with a mixture of acid and oil, should take on the shimmer, and almost the softness of youthful flesh."

I was leaving the Eternal City having seen some of the very same statues Hadrian had sorrowfully made and wished to life. Two thousand years later, their love affair, thanks to Marguerite Yourcenar and the Vatican Museum, continues unabated.