Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece Part 57

For the first of the three hypotheses we have the authority of Hadrian himself, as quoted by Dion. The simple words [Greek: eis ton Neilon ekpeson] imply no more than accidental death; and yet, if the Emperor had believed the story of his favourite's self-devotion, it is reasonable to suppose that he would have recorded it in his 'Memoirs.' Accepting this view of the case, we must refer the deification of Antinous wholly to Hadrian's affection; and the tales of his _devotio_ may have been invented partly to flatter the Emperor's grief, partly to explain its violence to the Roman world.

This hypothesis seems, indeed, by far the most natural of the three; and if we could strip the history of Antinous of its mysterious and mythic elements, it is rational to believe that we should find his death a simple accident. Yet our authorities prove that writers of history among the ancients wavered between the two other theories of (i) Self-Devotion and (ii) Immolation, with a bias toward the latter. These, then, have now to be considered with some attention.

Both, it may parenthetically be observed, relieve Antinous from a moral stigma, since in either case a pure untainted victim was required.

If we accept the former of the two remaining hypotheses, we can understand how love and grat.i.tude, together with sorrow, led Hadrian to canonise Antinous. If we accept the latter, Hadrian's sorrow itself becomes inexplicable; and we must attribute the foundation of Antinoe and the deification of Antinous to remorse. It may be added, while balancing these two solutions of the problem, that cynical sophists, like Hadrian's Graeculi, were likely to have put the worst construction on the Emperor's pa.s.sion, and to have invented the worst stories concerning the favourite's death. To perpetuate these calumnious reports was the real interest of the Christian apologists, who not unnaturally thought it scandalous that a handsome page should be deified. Thus, at first sight, the balance of probability inclines toward the former of the two solutions, while the second may be rejected as based upon court-gossip and religious animosity. Attention may also again be called to the fact that Hadrian ventured to publish an account of Antinous quite inconsistent with what Dion chose to call the truth, and that virtuous Emperors like the Antonines did not interfere with a cult, which, had it been paid to the mere victim of Hadrian's pa.s.sion and his superst.i.tion, would have been an infamy even in Rome. Moreover, that cult was not, like the creations of the impious emperors, forgotten or destroyed by public acclamation. It took root and flourished apparently, as we shall see, because it satisfied some craving of the popular religious sense, and because the people believed that this man had died for his friend. It will not, however, do to dismiss the two hypotheses so lightly.

The alternative of self-devotion presents itself under a double aspect. Antinous may either have committed suicide by drowning with the intention of prolonging the Emperor's life, or he may have offered himself as a voluntary victim to the magicians, who required a sacrifice for a similar purpose. Spartian's brief phrase, _aliis eum devotum pro Hadriano_, may seem to point to the first form of self-devotion; the testimony of Aurelius Victor clearly supports the second: yet it does not much matter which of the two explanations we adopt. The point is whether Antinous gave his life willingly to save the Emperor's, or whether he was murdered for the satisfaction of some superst.i.tious curiosity. It was absolutely necessary that the vicarious victim should make a free and voluntary oblation of himself. That the notion of vicarious suffering was familiar to the ancients is sufficiently attested by the phrases [Greek: antipsychoi], [Greek: antandroi], and _hostia succidanea_. We find traces of it in the legend of Alcestis, who died for Admetus, and of Cheiron, who took the place of Prometheus in Hades. Suetonius records that in the first days of Caligula's popularity, when he was labouring under dangerous illness, many Romans of both s.e.xes vowed their lives for his recovery in temples of the G.o.ds. That this superst.i.tion retained a strong hold on the popular imagination in the time of Hadrian is proved by the curious affirmation of Aristides, a contemporary of that Emperor. He says that once, when he was ill, a certain Philumene offered her soul for his soul, her body for his body, and that, upon his own recovery, she died. On the same testimony it appears that her brother Hermeas had also died for Aristides. This faith in the efficacy of subst.i.tution is persistent in the human race. Not long ago a Christian lady was supposed to have vowed her own life for the prolongation of that of Pope Pius IX., and good Catholics inclined to the belief that the sacrifice had been accepted. We shall see that in the first centuries of Christendom the popular conviction that Antinous had died for Hadrian brought him into inconvenient rivalry with Christ, whose vicarious suffering was the cardinal point of the new creed.

The alternative of immolation has next to be considered. The question before us here is, Did Hadrian sacrifice Antinous for the satisfaction of a superst.i.tious curiosity, and in the performance of magic rites? Dion Ca.s.sius uses the word [Greek: hierourgetheis], and explains it by saying that Hadrian needed a voluntary human victim for the accomplishment of an act of divination in which he was engaged. Both Spartian and Dion speak emphatically of the Emperor's proclivities to the black art; and all antiquity agreed about this trait in his character. Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus spoke of him as '_futurorum sciscitationi nimiae deditum_.' Tertullian described him as '_curiositatum omnium exploratorem_.' To multiply such phrases would, however, be superfluous, for they are probably mere repet.i.tions from the text of Dion. That human victims were used by the Romans of the Empire seems certain. Lampridius, in the 'Life of Heliogabalus,' records his habit of slaying handsome and n.o.ble youths, in order that he might inspect their entrails. Eusebius, in his 'Life of Maxentius,' a.s.serts the same of that Emperor. _Quum inspiceret exta puerilia_, [Greek: neognon splagchna brephon diereunomenou], are the words used by Lampridius and Eusebius.

Justin Martyr speaks of [Greek: epopteuseis paidon adiaphthoron].

Caracalla and Julian are credited with similar b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifices.

Indeed, it may be affirmed in general that tyrants have ever been eager to foresee the future and to extort her secrets from Fate, stopping short at no crime in the attempt to quiet a corroding anxiety for their own safety. What we read about Italian despots--Ezzelino da Romano, Sigismondo Malatesta, Filippo Maria Visconti, and Pier Luigi Farnese--throws light upon the practice of their Imperial predecessors; while the mysterious murder of the beautiful Astorre Manfredi by the Borgias in Hadrian's Mausoleum has been referred by modern critics of authority to the same unholy curiosity. That Hadrian laboured under this moral disease, and that he deliberately used the body of Antinous for _extispicium_, is, I think, Dion's opinion. But are we justified in reckoning Hadrian among these tyrants? That must depend upon our view of his character.

Hadrian was a man in whom the most conflicting qualities were blent.

In his youth and through his whole life he was pa.s.sionately fond of hunting; hardy, simple in his habits, marching bareheaded with his legions through German frost and Nubian heat, sharing the food of his soldiers, and exercising the most rigid military discipline. At the same time he has aptly been described as 'the most sumptuous character of antiquity.' He filled the cities of the empire with showy buildings, and pa.s.sed his last years in a kind of cla.s.sic Munich, where he had constructed imitations of every celebrated monument in Europe. He was so far fond of nature that, antic.i.p.ating the most recently developed of modern tastes, he ascended Mount aetna and the Mons Casius, in order to enjoy the spectacle of sunrise. In his villa at Tivoli he indulged a trivial fancy by christening one garden Tempe and another the Elysian Fields; and he had his name carved on the statue of the vocal Memnon with no less gusto than a modern tourist: _audivi voces divinas_. His memory was prodigious, his eloquence in the Latin language studied and yet forcible, his knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy far from contemptible.

He enjoyed the society of Sophists and distinguished rhetoricians, and so far affected authors.h.i.+p as to win the unenviable t.i.tle of _Graeculus_ in his own lifetime: yet he never neglected state affairs. Owing to his untiring energy and vast capacity for business, he not only succeeded in reorganising every department of the empire, social, political, fiscal, military, and munic.i.p.al; but he also held in his own hands the threads of all its complicated machinery. He was strict in matters of routine, and appears to have been almost a martinet among his legions: yet in social intercourse he lived on terms of familiarity with inferiors, combining the graces of elegant conversation with the _bonhomie_ of boon companions.h.i.+p, displaying a warm heart to his friends, and using magnificent generosity. He restored the domestic as well as the military discipline of the Roman world; and his code of laws lasted till Justinian. Among many of his useful measures of reform he issued decrees restricting the power of masters over their slaves, and depriving them of their old capital jurisdiction. His biographers find little to accuse him of beyond a singular avidity for fame, addiction to magic arts and luxurious vices: yet they adduce no proof of his having, at any rate before the date of his final retirement to his Tiburtine villa, shared the crimes of a Nero or a Commodus. On the whole, we must recognise in Hadrian a nature of extraordinary energy, capacity for administrative government, and mental versatility. A certain superficiality, vulgarity, and commonplaceness seems to have been forced upon him by the circ.u.mstances of his age, no less than by his special temperament.

This quality of the immitigable commonplace is clearly written on his many portraits. Their chief interest consists in a fixed expression of fatigue--as though the man were weary with much seeking and with little finding. In all things, he was somewhat of a dilettante; and the Nemesis of that sensibility to impressions which distinguishes the dilettante, came upon him ere he died. He ended his days in an appalling and persistent paroxysm of _ennui_, desiring the death which would not come to his relief.

The whole creative and expansive force of Hadrian's century lay concealed in the despised Christian sect. Art was expiring in a sunset blaze of gorgeous imitation, tasteless grandeur, technical elaboration. Philosophy had become sophistical or mystic; its real life survived only in the phrase 'entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren' of the Stoics. Literature was repet.i.tive and scholastic.

Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, and Juvenal indeed were living; but their works formed the last great literary triumph of the age.

Religion had degenerated under the twofold influences of scepticism and intrusive foreign cults. It was, in truth, an age in which, for a sound heart and manly intellect, there lay no proper choice except between the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and the Christianity of the Catacombs. All else had pa.s.sed into shams, unrealities, and visions.

Now Hadrian was neither stoical nor Christian, though he so far coquetted with Christianity as to build temples dedicated to no Pagan deity, which pa.s.sed in after times for unfinished churches. He was a _Graeculus_. In that contemptuous epithet, stripping it of its opprobrious significance, we find the real key to his character. In a failing age he lived a restless-minded, many-sided soldier-prince, whose inner hopes and highest aspirations were for h.e.l.las. h.e.l.las, her art, her history, her myths, her literature, her lovers, her young heroes filled him with enthusiasm. To rebuild her ruined cities, to restore her deities, to revive her golden life of blended poetry and science, to reconstruct her spiritual empire as he had re-organised the Roman world, was Hadrian's dream. It was indeed a dream; one which a far more creative genius than Hadrian's could not have realised.

But now, returning to the two alternatives regarding his friend's death: was this philo-h.e.l.lenic Emperor the man to have immolated Antinous for _extispicium_ and then deified him? Probably not. The discord between this b.l.o.o.d.y act and subsequent hypocrisy upon the one hand, and Hadrian's Greek sympathies upon the other, must be reckoned too strong for even such a dipsychic character as his.

There is nothing in either Spartian or Dion to justify the opinion that he was naturally cruel or fantastically deceitful. On the other hand, Hadrian's philo-h.e.l.lenic, splendour-loving, somewhat tawdry, fame-desiring nature was precisely of the sort to jump eagerly at the deification of a favourite who had either died a natural death or killed himself to save his master. Hadrian had loved Antinous with a Greek pa.s.sion in his lifetime. The Roman Emperor was half a G.o.d. He remembered how Zeus had loved Ganymede, and raised him to Olympus; how Achilles had loved Patroclus, and performed his funeral rites at Troy; how the demi-G.o.d Alexander had loved Hephaestion, and lifted him into a hero's seat on high. He, Hadrian, would do the like, now that death had robbed him of his comrade. The Roman, who surrounded himself at Tivoli with copies of Greek temples, and who called his garden Tempe, played thus at being Zeus, Achilles, Alexander; and the civilised world humoured his whim. Though the Sophists scoffed at his real grief and honourable tears, they consecrated his lost favourite, found out a star for him, carved him in breathing bra.s.s, and told tales about his sacred flower.

Pancrates was entertained in Alexandria at the public cost for his fable of the lotos; and the lyrist Mesomedes received so liberal a pension for his hymn to Antinous that Antoninus Pius found it needful to curtail it.

After weighing the authorities, considering the circ.u.mstances of the age, and estimating Hadrian's character, I am thus led to reject the alternative of immolation. Spartian's own words, _quem muliebriter flevit_, as well as the subsequent acts of the Emperor and the acquiescence of the whole world in the new deity, prove to my mind that in the suggestion of _extispicium_ we have one of those covert calumnies which it is impossible to set aside at this distance of time, and which render the history of Roman Emperors and Popes almost impracticable.

The case, then, stands before us thus. Antinous was drowned in the Nile, near Besa, either by accident or by voluntary suicide to save his master's life. Hadrian's love for him had been unmeasured, so was his grief. Both of them were genuine; but in the nature of the man there was something artificial. He could not be content to love and grieve alone; he must needs enact the part of Alexander, and realise, if only by a sort of makebelieve, a portion of his Greek ideal. Antinous, the beautiful servant, was to take the place of Ganymede, of Patroclus, of Hephaestion; never mind if Hadrian was a Roman and his friend a Bithynian, and if the love between them, as between an emperor of fifty and a boy of nineteen, had been less than heroic. The opportunity was too fair to be missed; the _role_ too fascinating to be rejected. The world, in spite of covert sneers, lent itself to the sham, and Antinous became a G.o.d.

The uniformly contemptuous tone of antique authorities almost obliges us to rank this deification of Antinous, together with the Tiburtine villa and the dream of a h.e.l.lenic Renaissance, among the part-shams, part-enthusiasms of Hadrian's 'sumptuous' character.

Spartian's account of the consecration, and his hint that Hadrian composed the oracles delivered at his favourite's tomb; Arrian's letter to the Emperor describing the island Leuke and flattering him by an adroit comparison with Achilles; the poem by Pancrates mentioned in the 'Deipnosophistae,' which furnished the myth of a new lotos dedicated to Antinous; the invention of the star, and Hadrian's conversations with his courtiers on this subject--all converge to form the belief that something of consciously unreal mingled with this act of apotheosis by Imperial decree. Hadrian sought to a.s.suage his grief by paying his favourite ill.u.s.trious honours after death; he also desired to give the memory of his own love the most congenial and poetical environment, to feed upon it in the daintiest places, and to deck it with the prettiest flowers of fancy. He therefore canonised Antinous, and took measures for disseminating his cult throughout the world, careless of the element of imposture which might seem to mingle with the consecration of his true affection. Hadrian's superficial taste was not offended by the gimcrack quality of the new G.o.d; and Antinous was saved from being a merely pinchbeck saint by his own charming personality.

This will not, however, wholly satisfy the conditions of the problem; and we are obliged to ask ourselves whether there was not something in the character of Antinous himself, something divinely inspired and irradiate with spiritual beauty, apparent to his fellows and remembered after his mysterious death, which justified his canonisation, and removed it from the region of Imperial makebelieve. If this was not the case, if Antinous died like a flower cropped from the seraglio garden of the court-pages, how should the Emperor in the first place have bewailed him with 'unhusbanded pa.s.sion,' and the people afterwards have received him as a G.o.d? May it not have been that he was a youth of more than ordinary promise, gifted with intellectual enthusiasms proportioned to his beauty and endowed with something of Phoebean inspiration, who, had he survived, might have even inaugurated a new age for the world, or have emulated the heroism of Hypatia in a hopeless cause?

Was the link between him and Hadrian formed less by the boy's beauty than by his marvellous capacity for apprehending and his fitness for realising the Emperor's Greek dreams? Did the spirit of neo-Platonism find in him congenial incarnation? At any rate, was there not enough in the then current beliefs about the future of the soul, as abundantly set forth in Plutarch's writings, to justify a conviction that after death he had already pa.s.sed into the lunar sphere, awaiting the final apotheosis of purged spirits in the sun?

These questions may be asked--indeed, they must be asked--for, without suggesting them, we leave the wors.h.i.+p of Antinous an almost inexplicable scandal, an almost unintelligible blot on human nature.

Unless we ask them, we must be content to echo the coa.r.s.e and violent diatribes of Clemens Alexandrinus against the vigils of the deified _exoletus_. But they cannot be answered, for antiquity is altogether silent about him; only here and there, in the indignant utterance of a Christian Father, stung to the quick by Pagan parallels between Antinous and Christ, do we catch a perverted echo of the popular emotion upon which his cult reposed, which recognised his G.o.dhood or his vicarious self-sacrifice, and which paid enduring tribute to the sublimity of his young life untimely quenched.

The _senatus consultum_ required for the apotheosis of an Emperor was not, so far as we know, obtained in the case of Antinous.

Hadrian's determination to exalt his favourite sufficed; and this is perhaps one of the earliest instances of those informal deifications which became common in the later Roman period. Antinous was canonised according to Greek ritual and by Greek priests: _Graeci quidam volente Hadriano eum consecraverunt_. How this was accomplished we know not; but forms of canonisation must have been in common usage, seeing that emperors and members of the Imperial family received the honour in due course. The star which was supposed to have appeared soon after his death, and which represented his soul admitted to Olympus, was somewhere near the constellation Aquila, according to Ptolemy, but not part of it. I believe the letters [Greek: e.th.i.k.l.] of Aquila now bear the name of Antinous; but this appropriation dates only from the time of Tycho Brahe. It was also a.s.serted that as a new star had appeared in the skies, so a new flower had blossomed on the earth, at the moment of his death. This was the lotos, of a peculiar red colour, which the people of Lower Egypt used to wear in wreaths upon his festival.

It received the name Antinoeian; and the Alexandrian sophist, Pancrates, seeking to pay a double compliment to Hadrian and his favourite, wrote a poem in which he pretended that this lily was stained with the blood of a Libyan lion slain by the Emperor. As Arrian compared his master to Achilles, so Pancrates flattered him with allusions to Herakles. The lotos, it is well known, was a sacred flower in Egypt. Both as a symbol of the all-nouris.h.i.+ng moisture of the earth and of the mystic marriage of Isis and Osiris, and also as an emblem of immortality, it appeared on all the sacred places of the Egyptians, especially on tombs and funeral utensils.

To dignify Antinous with the lotos emblem was to consecrate him; to find a new species of the revered blossom and to wear it in his honour, calling it by his name, was to exalt him to the company of G.o.ds. Nothing, as it seems, had been omitted that could secure for him the patent of divinity.

He met his death near the city Besa, an ancient Egyptian town upon the eastern bank of the Nile, almost opposite to Hermopolis. Besa was the name of a local G.o.d, who gave oracles and predicted future events. But of this Besa we know next to nothing. Hadrian determined to rebuild the city, change its name, and let his favourite take the place of the old deity. Accordingly, he raised a splendid new town in the Greek style; furnished it with temples, agora, hippodrome, gymnasium, and baths; filled it with Greek citizens; gave it a Greek const.i.tution, and named it Antinoe. This new town, whether called Antinoe, Antinoopolis, Antinous, Antinoeia, or even Besantinous (for its t.i.tles varied), continued long to flourish, and was mentioned by Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus, together with Copton and Hermopolis, as one of the three most distinguished cities of the Thebad. In the age of Julian these three cities were perhaps the only still thriving towns of Upper Egypt. It has even been maintained on Ptolemy's authority that Antinoe was the metropolis of a nome, called Antinoeitis; but this is doubtful, since inscriptions discovered among the ruins of the town record no name of nomarch or strategus, while they prove the government to have consisted of a Boule and a Prytaneus, who was also the Eponymous Magistrate. Strabo reckons it, together with Ptolemais and Alexandria, as governed after the Greek munic.i.p.al system.

In this city Antinous was wors.h.i.+pped as a G.o.d. Though a Greek G.o.d, and the eponym of a Greek city, he inherited the place and functions of an Egyptian deity, and was here represented in the hieratic style of Ptolemaic sculpture. A fine specimen of this statuary is preserved in the Vatican, showing how the neo-h.e.l.lenic sculptors had succeeded in maintaining the likeness of Antinous without sacrificing the traditional manner of Egyptian piety. The sacred emblems of Egyptian deities were added: we read, for instance, in one pa.s.sage, that his shrine contained a boat. This boat, like the mystic egg of Eros or the cista of Dionysos, symbolised the embryo of cosmic life. It was specially appropriated to Osiris, and suggested collateral allusions doubtless to immortality and the soul's journey in another world. Antinous had a college of priests appointed to his service; and oracles were delivered from the cenotaph inside his temple. The people believed him to be a genius of warning, gracious to his suppliants, but terrible to evil-doers, combining the qualities of the avenging and protective deities.

Annual games were celebrated in Antinoe on his festival, with chariot races and gymnastic contests; and the fas.h.i.+on of keeping his day seems, from Athenaeus's testimony, to have spread through Egypt.

An inscription in Greek characters discovered at Rome upon the Campus Martius ent.i.tles Antinous a colleague of the G.o.ds in Egypt--

[Greek: ANTINOoI SYNTHRONoI ToN EN AIGUeToI THEoN].

The wors.h.i.+p of Antinous spread rapidly through the Greek and Asian provinces, especially among the cities which owed debts of grat.i.tude to Hadrian or expected from him future favours. At Athens, for example, the Emperor, attended perhaps by Antinous, had presided as Archon during his last royal progress, had built a suburb called after his name, and raised a splendid temple to Olympian Jove. The Athenians, therefore, founded games and a priesthood in honour of the new divinity. Even now, in the Dionysiac theatre, among the chairs above the orchestra a.s.signed to priests of elder deities and more august tradition, may be found one bearing the name of Antinous--[Greek: IEREoS ANTINOOU]. A marble tablet has also been discovered inscribed with the names of agonothetai for the games celebrated in honour of Antinous; and a stele exists engraved with the crown of these contests together with the crowns of Severus, Commodus, and Antoninus. It appears that the games in honour of Antinous took place both at Eleusis and at Athens; and that the agonothetai, as also the priest of the new G.o.d, were chosen from the Ephebi. The Corinthians, the Argives, the Achaians, and the Epirots, as we know from coins issued by the priests of Antinous, adopted his cult;[1] but the region of Greece proper where it flourished most was Arcadia, the mother state of his Bithynian birthplace.

Pausanias, who lived contemporaneously with Antinous, and might have seen him, though he tells us that he had not chanced to meet the youth alive, mentions the temple of Antinous at Mantinea as the newest in that city. 'The Mantineans,' he says, 'reckon Antinous among their G.o.ds.' He then describes the yearly festival and mysteries connected with his cult, the quinquennial games established in his honour, and his statues. The gymnasium had a cell dedicated to Antinous, adorned with pictures and fair stone-work.

The new G.o.d was in the habit of Dionysus.

[1] For example: [Greek: OSTILIOS MARKELLOSOIEREUSTOU ANTINOOU ANETHeKE TOIS ACHAIOIS] and a similar inscription for Corinth.

As was natural, his birthplace paid him special observance. Coins dedicated by the province of Bithynia, as well as by the town Bithynium, are common, with the epigraphs, [Greek: ANTINOOU e PATRIS] and [Greek: ANTINOON THEON e PATRIS]. Among the cities of Asia Minor and the vicinity the new cult seems to have been widely spread. Adramyttene in Mysia, Alabanda, Ancyra in Galatia, Chalcedon, c.u.ma in aeolis, Cyzic.u.m in Mysia, the Ciani, the Hadrianotheritae of Bithynia, Hierapolis in Phrygia, Nicomedia, Philadelphia, Sardis, Smyrna, Tarsus, the Tianians of Paphlagonia, and a town Rhesaena in Mesopotamia, all furnish their quota of medals. On the majority of these medals he is ent.i.tled Heros, but on others he has the higher t.i.tle of G.o.d; and he seems to have been a.s.sociated in each place with some deity of local fame.

Being essentially a Greek hero, or divinised man received into the company of immortals and wors.h.i.+pped with the attributes of G.o.d, his cult took firmer root among the neo-h.e.l.lenic provinces of the empire than in Italy. Yet there are signs that even in Italy he found his votaries. Among these may first be mentioned the comparative frequency of his name in Roman inscriptions, which have no immediate reference to him, but prove that parents gave it to their children.

The discovery of his statues in various cities of the Roman Campagna shows that his cult was not confined to one or two localities.

Naples in particular, which remained in all essential points a Greek city, seems to have received him with acclamation. A quarter of the town was called after his name, and a phratria of priests was founded in connection with his wors.h.i.+p. The Neapolitans owed much to the patronage of Hadrian, and they repaid him after this fas.h.i.+on. At the beginning of the last century Raffaello Fabretti discovered an inscription near the Porta S. Sebastiano at Rome, which throws some light on the matter. It records the name of a Roman knight, Sufenas, who had held the office of Lupercus and had been a fellow of the Neapolitan phratria of Antinous--_fretriaco Neapoli Antinoiton et Eunostidon_. Eunostos was a hero wors.h.i.+pped at Tanagra in Boeotia, where he had a sacred grove no female foot might enter; and the wording of the inscription leaves it doubtful whether the Eunostidae and Antinoitae of Naples were two separate colleges; or whether the heroes were a.s.sociated as the common patrons of one brotherhood.

A valuable inscription discovered in 1816 near the Baths at Lanuvium or Lavigna shows that Antinous was here a.s.sociated with Diana as the saint of a benefit club. The rules of the confraternity prescribe the payments and other contributions of its members, provide for their a.s.sembling on the feast days of their patrons, fix certain fines, and regulate the ceremonies and expenses of their funerals.

This club seems to have resembled modern burial societies, as known to us in England; or still more closely to have been formed upon the same model as Italian confraternite of the Middle Ages. The Lex, or table of regulations, was drawn up in the year 133 A.D. It fixes the birthday of Antinous as v.k. Decembr., and alludes to the temple of Antinous--_Tetrastylo Antinoi_. Probably we cannot build much on the birthday as a genuine date, for the same table gives the birthday of Diana; and what was wanted was not accuracy in such matters, but a settled anniversary for banquets and pious celebrations. When we come to consider the divinity of Antinous, it will be of service to remember that at Lanuvium, together with Diana of the nether world, he was reckoned among the saints of sepulture. Could this thought have penetrated the imagination of his wors.h.i.+ppers: that since Antinous had given his life for his friend, since he had faced death and triumphed over it, winning immortality and G.o.dhood for himself by sacrifice, the souls of his votaries might be committed to his charge and guidance on their journey through the darkness of the tomb? Could we venture to infer thus much from his selection by a confraternity existing for the purpose of securing decent burial or pious funeral rites, the date of its formation, so soon after his death, would confirm the hypothesis that he was known to have devoted his life for Hadrian.

While speaking of Antinous as a divinised man, adscript to the G.o.ds of Egypt, accepted as hero and as G.o.d in h.e.l.las, Italy, and Asia Minor, we have not yet considered the nature of his deity. The question is not so simple as it seems at first sight: and the next step to take, with a view to its solution, is to consider the various forms under which he was adored--the phases of his divinity.

The coins already mentioned, and the numerous works of glyptic art surviving in the galleries of Europe, will help us to place ourselves at the same point of view as the least enlightened of his antique votaries. Reasoning upon these data by the light of cla.s.sic texts, may afterwards enable us to a.s.sign him his true place in the Pantheon of decadent and uninventive Paganism.

In Egypt, as we have already seen, Antinous was wors.h.i.+pped by the neo-h.e.l.lenes of Antinoopolis as their Eponymous Hero; but he took the place of an elder native G.o.d, and was represented in art according to the traditions of Egyptian sculpture. The marble statue of the Vatican is devoid of hieratic emblems. Antinous is attired with the Egyptian head-dress and waistband: he holds a short truncheon firmly clasped in each hand; and by his side is a palm-stump, such as one often finds in statues of the Greek Hermes.

Two colossal statues of red granite discovered in the ruins of Hadrian's villa, at Tivoli, represent him in like manner with the usual Egyptian head-dress. They seem to have been designed for pillars supporting the architrave of some huge portal; and the wands grasped firmly in both hands are supposed to be symbolical of the genii called Dii Averrunci. Von Levezow, in his monograph upon Antinous in art, catalogues five statues of a similar description to the three already mentioned. From the indistinct character of all of them, it would appear that Antinous was nowhere identified with any one of the great Egyptian deities, but was treated as a Daemon powerful to punish and protect. This designation corresponds to the contemptuous rebuke addressed by Origen to Celsus, where he argues that the new saint was only a malignant and vengeful spirit. His Egyptian medals are few and of questionable genuineness: the majority of them seem to be purely h.e.l.lenic; but on one he bears a crown like that of Isis, and on another a lotos wreath. The dim records of his cult in Egypt, and the remnants of Graeco-Egyptian art, thus mark him out as one of the Averruncan deities, a.s.sociated perhaps with Kneph or the Agathodaemon of h.e.l.lenic mythology, or approximated to Anubis, the Egyptian Hermes. Neither statues nor coins throw much light upon his precise place among those G.o.ds of Nile whose throne he is said to have ascended. Egyptian piety may not have been so accommodating as that of h.e.l.las.

With the Graeco-Roman world the case is different. We obtain a clearer conception of the Antinous divinity, and recognise him always under the mask of youthful G.o.ds already honoured with fixed ritual. To wors.h.i.+p even living men under the names and attributes of well-known deities was no new thing in h.e.l.las. We may remember the Ithyphallic hymn with which the Athenians welcomed Demetrius Poliorketes, the marriage of Anthony as Dionysus to Athene, and the deification of Mithridates as Bacchus. The Roman Emperors had already been represented in art with the characteristics of G.o.ds--Nero, for example, as Phoebus, and Hadrian as Mars. Such compliments were freely paid to Antinous. On the Achaian coins we find his portrait on the obverse, with different types of Hermes on the reverse, varied in one case by the figure of a ram, in another by the representation of a temple, in a third by a nude hero grasping a spear. One Mysian medal, bearing the epigraph 'Antinous Iacchus,' represents him crowned with ivy, and exhibits Demeter on the reverse. A single specimen from Ancyra, with the legend 'Antinous Heros,' depicts the G.o.d Lunus carrying a crescent moon upon his shoulder. The Bithynian coins generally give youthful portraits of Antinous upon the obverse, with the t.i.tle of 'Heros' or 'Theos;' while the reverse is stamped with a pastoral figure, sometimes bearing the talaria, sometimes accompanied by a feeding ox or a boar or a star. This youth is supposed to be Philesius, the son of Hermes. In one specimen of the Bithynian series the reverse yields a head of Proserpine crowned with thorns. A coin of Chalcedon ornaments the reverse with a griffin seated near a naked figure.

Another, from Corinth, bears the sun-G.o.d in a chariot; another, from c.u.ma, presents an armed Pallas. Bulls, with the crescent moon, occur in the Hadrianotheritan medals: a crescent moon in that of Hierapolis: a ram and star, a female head crowned with towers, a standing bull, and Harpocrates placing one finger on his lips, in those of Nicomedia; a horned moon and star in that of Epirot Nicopolis. One Philadelphian coin is distinguished by Antinous in a temple with four columns; another by an Aphrodite in her cella. The Sardian coins give Zeus with the thunderbolt, or Phoebus with the lyre; those of Smyrna are stamped with a standing ox, a ram, and the caduceus, a female panther and the thyrsus, or a hero reclining beneath a plane-tree; those of Tarsus with the Dionysian cista, the Phoebean tripod, the river Cydnus, and the epigraphs 'Neos Puthios,' 'Neos Iacchos;' those of the Tianians with Antinous as Bacchus on a panther, or, in one case, as Poseidon.

It would be unsafe to suppose that the emblems of the reverse in each case had a necessary relation to Antinous, whose portrait is almost invariably represented on the obverse. They may refer, as in the case of the Tarsian river-G.o.d, to the locality in which the medal was struck. Yet the frequent occurrence of the well-known type with the attributes and sacred animals of various deities, and the epigraphs 'Neos Puthios' or 'Neos Iacchos,' justify us in a.s.suming that he was a.s.sociated with divinities in vogue among the people who accepted his cult--especially Apollo, Dionysus, and Hermes. On more than one coin he is described as Antinous-Pan, showing that his Arcadian compatriots of Peloponnese and Bithynia paid him the compliment of placing him beside their great local deity. In a Latin inscription discovered at Tibur, he is connected with the sun-G.o.d of Noricia, Pannonia and Illyria, who was wors.h.i.+pped under the t.i.tle of Belenus:--

Antinoo et Beleno par aetas famaque par est; Cur non Antinous sit quoque qui Belenus?

This couplet sufficiently explains the ground of his adscription to the society of G.o.ds distinguished for their beauty. Both Belenus and Antinous are young and beautiful: why, therefore, should not Antinous be honoured equally with Belenus? The same reasoning would apply to all his impersonations. The pious imagination or the aesthetic taste tricked out this favourite of fortune in masquerade costumes, just as a wealthy lover may amuse himself by dressing his mistress after the similitude of famous beauties. The a.n.a.logy of statues confirms this a.s.sumption. A considerable majority represent him as Dionysus Kisseus: in some of the best he is conceived as Hermes of the Palaestra or a simple hero: in one he is probably Dionysus Antheus; in another Vertumnus or Aristaeus; yet again he is the Agathos Daimon: while a fine specimen preserved in England shows him as Ganymede raising a goblet of wine: a little statue in the Louvre gives him the attributes of youthful Herakles; a basrelief of somewhat doubtful genuineness in the Villa Albani exhibits him with Romanised features in the character perhaps of Castor. Again, I am not sure whether the Endymion in the celebrated basrelief of the Capitol does not yield a portrait of Antinous.

This rapid enumeration will suffice to show that Antinous was universally conceived as a young deity in bloom, and that preference was given to Phoebus and Iacchus, the G.o.ds of divination and enthusiasm, for his a.s.sociates. In some cases he appears to have been represented as a simple hero without the attributes of any deity. Many of his busts, and the fine nude statues of the Capitol and the Neapolitan Museum, belong to this cla.s.s, unless we recognise the two last as Antinous under the form of a young Hercules, or of the gymnastic Hermes. But when he comes before us with the t.i.tle of Puthios, or with the attributes of Dionysus, distinct reference is probably intended in the one case to his oracular quality, in the other to the enthusiasm which led to his death. Allusions to Harpocrates, Lunus, Aristaeus, Philesius, Vertumnus, Castor, Herakles, Ganymedes, show how the divinising fancy played around the beauty of his youth, and sought to connect him with myths already honoured in the pious conscience. Lastly, though it would be hazardous to strain this point, we find in his chief impersonations a Chthonian character, a touch of the mystery that is shrouded in the world beyond the grave. The double nature of his Athenian cult may perhaps confirm this view. But, over and above all these symbolic ill.u.s.trations, one artistic motive of immortal loveliness pervades and animates the series.

It becomes at this point of some moment to determine what was the relation of Antinous to the G.o.ds with whom he blended, and whose attributes he shared. It seems tolerably certain that he had no special legend which could be idealised in art. The mythopoeic fancy invented no fable for him. His cult was parasitic upon elder cults. He was the colleague of greater well-established deities, from whom he borrowed a pale and evanescent l.u.s.tre. Speaking accurately, he was a hero or divinised mortal, on the same grade as Helen immortalised for her beauty, as Achilles for his prowess, or as Herakles for his great deeds. But having no poet like Homer to sing his achievements, no myth fertile in emblems, he dwelt beneath the shadow of superior powers, and crept into a place with them.

What was this place worth? What was the meaning attached by his votaries to the t.i.tle [Greek: synthronos] or [Greek: paredros theos]? According to the simple meaning of both epithets, he occupied a seat together with or by the side of the genuine Olympians. In this sense Pindar called Dionysus the [Greek: paredros] of Demeter, because the younger G.o.d had been admitted to her wors.h.i.+p on equal terms at Eleusis. In this sense Sophocles spoke of Himeros as [Greek: paredros] of the eternal laws, and of Justice as [Greek: synoikos] with the Chthonian deities. In this sense Euripides makes Helen [Greek: xynthakos] with her brethren, the Dioscuri. In this sense the three chief Archons at Athens were said to have two [Greek: paredroi] apiece. In this sense, again, Hephaestion was named a [Greek: theos paredros], and Alexander in his lifetime was voted a thirteenth in the company of the twelve Olympians. The divinised emperors were [Greek: paredroi] or [Greek: synthronoi]; nor did Virgil hesitate to flatter Augustus by questioning into which college of the immortals he would be adscript after death--

Tuque adeo, quem mox quae sint habitura deorum Concilia, incertum est.

Conscript deities of this heroic order were supposed to avert evils from their votaries, to pursue offenders with calamity, to inspire prophetic dreams, and to appear, as the phantom of Achilles appeared to Apollonius of Tyana, and answer questions put to them. They corresponded very closely and exactly to the saints of mediaevalism, acting as patrons of cities, confraternities, and persons, and interposing between the supreme powers of heaven and their especial devotees. As a [Greek: paredros] of this exalted quality, Antinous was the a.s.sociate of Phoebus, Bacchus, and Hermes among the Olympians, and a colleague with the G.o.ds of Nile. The princ.i.p.al difficulty of grasping his true rank consists in the variety of his emblems and divine disguises.

It must here be mentioned that the epithet [Greek: paredros] had a secondary and inferior signification. It was applied by later authors to the demons or familiar spirits who attended upon enchanters like Simon Magus or Apollonius; and such satellites were believed to be supplied by the souls of innocent young persons violently slain. Whether this secondary meaning of the t.i.tle indicates a degeneration of the other, and forms the first step of the process whereby cla.s.sic heroes were degraded into the foul fiends of mediaeval fancy, or whether we find in it a wholly new application of the word, is questionable. I am inclined to believe that, while [Greek: paredros theos] in the one case means an a.s.sociate of the Olympian G.o.ds, [Greek: paredros daimon] in the other means a fellow-agent and a.s.sessor of the wizard. In other words, however they may afterwards have been confounded, the two uses of the same epithet were originally distinct: so that not every [Greek: paredros theos], Achilles, or Hephaestion or Antinous, was supposed to haunt and serve a sorcerer, but only some inferior spirit over whom his black art gave him authority. The [Greek: paredros theos] was so called because he sat with the great G.o.ds.

The [Greek: paredros daimon] was so called because he sat beside the magician. At the same time there seems sufficient evidence that the two meanings came to be confounded; and as the divinities of h.e.l.las, with all their l.u.s.trous train, paled before the growing splendour of Christ, they gradually fell beneath the necromantic ferule of the witch.

Returning from this excursion, and determining that Antinous was a hero or divinised mortal, adscript to the college of the greater G.o.ds, and invested with many of their attributes, we may next ask the question, why this artificial cult, due in the first place to imperial pa.s.sion and caprice, and nourished by the adulation of fawning provinces, was preserved from the rapid dissolution to which the flimsy products of court-flattery are subject. The mythopoetic faculty was extinct, or in its last phase of decadent vitality.

There was nothing in the life of Antinous to create a legend or to stimulate the sense of awe; and yet this wors.h.i.+p persisted long after the fear of Hadrian had pa.s.sed away, long after the benefits to be derived by humouring a royal fancy had been exhausted, long after anything could be gained by playing out the farce. It is clear, from a pa.s.sage in Clemens Alexandrinus, that the sacred nights of Antinous were observed, at least a century after the date of his deification, with an enthusiasm that roused the anger of the Christian Father. Again, it is worthy of notice that, while many of the n.o.blest works of antiquity have perished, the statues of Antinous have descended to us in fair preservation and in very large numbers. From the contemptuous destruction which erased the monuments of base men in the Roman Empire they were safe; and the state in which we have them shows how little they had suffered from neglect. The most rational conclusion seems to be that Antinous became in truth a popular saint, and satisfied some new need in Paganism, for which none of the elder and more respectable deities sufficed. The novelty of his cult had, no doubt, something to do with the fascination it exercised; and something may be attributed to the impulse art received from the introduction of so rare and original a type of beauty into the exhausted cycle of mythical subjects. The blending of Greek and Egyptian elements was also attractive to an age remarkable for its eclecticism. But after allowing for the many advent.i.tious circ.u.mstances which concurred to make Antinous the fas.h.i.+on, it is hardly unreasonable to a.s.sume that the spirit of poetry in the youth's story, the rumour of his self-devoted death, kept him alive in the memory of the people. It is just that element of romance in the tale of his last hours, that preservative a.s.sociation with the pathos of self-sacrifice, which forms the interest we still feel for him.

The deified Antinous was therefore for the Roman world a charming but dimly felt and undeveloped personality, made perfect by withdrawal into an unseen world of mystery. The belief in the value of vicarious suffering attached itself to his beautiful and melancholy form. His sorrow borrowed something of the universal world-pain, more pathetic than the hero-pangs of Herakles, the anguish of Prometheus, or the pa.s.sion of Iacchus-Zagreus, because more personal and less suggestive of a cosmic mystery. The ancient cries of Ah Linus, Ah Adonis, found in him an echo. For votaries ready to accept a new G.o.d as simply as we accept a new poet, he was the final manifestation of an old-world mystery, the rejuvenescence of a well-known incarnation, the semi-Oriental realisation of a recurring Avatar. And if we may venture on so bold a surmise, this last flower of antique mythology had taken up into itself a portion of the blood outpoured on Calvary. Planted in the conservatory of semi-philosophical yearnings, faintly tinctured with the colours of misapprehended Christianity, without inherent stamina, without the powerful nutrition which the earlier heroic fables had derived from the spiritual vigour of a truly mythopoeic age, the cult of Antinous subsisted as an echo, a reflection, the last serious effort of deifying but no longer potent Paganism, the last reverberation of its oracles, an aesthetic rather than a religious product, viewed even in its origin with sarcasm by the educated, and yet sufficiently attractive to enthral the minds of simple votaries, and to survive the circ.u.mstances of its first creation. It may be remembered that the century which witnessed the canonisation of Antinous, produced the myth of Cupid and Psyche--or, if this be too sweeping an a.s.sertion, gave it final form, and handed it, in its suggestive beauty, to the modern world. Thus at one and the same moment the dying spirit of h.e.l.las seized upon those doctrines of self-devotion and immortality which, through the triumph of Christian teaching, were gaining novel and incalculable value for the world. According to its own laws of inspiration, it stamped both legends of Love victorious over Death, with beautiful form in myth and poem and statuary.