EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A
RRIVING IN
J
ERUSALEM
, 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.

O
UR 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.

W
E 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.

N
EXT 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.

B
Y 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.