EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian (9 page)

I came upon her as if by accident one afternoon in the palace gardens, where she sat on a marble bench beside a shrine graced with a statue of the goddess Aphrodite and her companion nymphs. A fountain burbled behind them. Topiary shrubs spiraled around the flagstones of the path, and from pear trees nearby came the chirruping of birds kept in one of the aviaries.

“Good afternoon,” she said, acting as if she were surprised to discover me there as well. “A lovely day, isn’t it?”

Plotina must have gleaned from some of the servants that I often walked there when I had a few moments of free time. I wondered how long it took her to pick her way to that bench through the droppings from the free-roaming flock of peacocks. She had taken care that their ubiquitous excrement should not soil her dainty sandals.

Like Lucretia reborn, Plotina always appeared to embody purity, as befits an aristocratic Roman matron. Despite knowing, from a comment Hadrian once made, that her elaborate hairstyle alone required an hour of dressing by her attendants each morning, I do not believe she was a vain woman at all. Her coiffure, like the heavy gold jewels and tasteful, expensive clothing she wore, merely announced her status, confirmed her position in society—wife to one emperor, foster to another. That elaborate styling became as much a component of a designated uniform as the crested helmet worn by a centurion.

I greeted her with deference, and she asked me to be seated. After we chatted for a few moments, she began, with her customary diplomacy, to sound me out about the depth and dimensions of my fledgling relationship with her foster son.

Soon satisfied, or so it appeared, by my answers, and deeming her task accomplished, she took her leave of me with a paean of praise for Hadrian and a proffering of advice to me.

“Be kind to him, Antinous,” she said, looking deep into my eyes. “Like Atlas, he bears the world upon those shoulders.”

Her stern gaze softened as she spoke.

“Be sweet and loving, and listen to him, without judging or competing. Let others try to impress him by showing off. In time, a successor will be found from among the aristocracy, someone like Lucius Commodus, or even Hadrian’s own nephew, Pedanius Fuscus. What he needs right now, above all, is someone who is appreciative, all-accepting—someone who will love him just as he is.”

I took those words to heart, gratified by her faith in my ability to love Hadrian as he needed to be loved. In those halcyon days, I still saw in him my Zeus, Apollo, Odysseus bearing his boar-tusk scar. I fancied myself his Ganymede, Hyacinthus, Penelope. I worshipped him like a Christian, flesh and blood upon my tongue. Plotina divined this, of course, as if it were inscribed upon my pink and guileless face.

“You see Jupiter in him, don’t you?” she asked. “And yourself, the cupbearer.” Her voice was light, almost girlish, but her eyes held mine in steady regard. I could not tell whether she mocked me.

Plotina remained concerned above all with Hadrian’s well-being—he whom she had supported, abetted, even, some whispered, lied and forged for, to assure his succession to the throne. Others whispered that they were lovers, but I never saw in the rectitude of their behavior any indication of such an adulterous relationship. In all of their dealings, her attitude seemed that of a proud, watchful mother; his, that of a respectful son seeking out her wisdom.

I realize now that all the various kindnesses shown to me by Plotina at court were truly meant for Hadrian. While she bore me no ill will, nor malice or jealousy, neither did she give a single fig regarding my own interests, needs, or well-being. I was a subject she deemed beyond reproach, a love interest of whom she approved.

O
VER TIME
, I also began to perceive the subtle ways in which my lover was attempting to break me, just as he might gentle a horse or dog, to gain obedience while maintaining trust. Hadrian tested me all the time, demanding my acquiescence through various acts of control and manipulation—acquiescence I would have given of my own accord if only I had been allowed.

Once, I recall, while I sat watching him work at the correspondence desk in his private quarters, he held up a ring sent by yet another supplicant, a blue stone mounted in a four-pronged setting of silver.

“Do you know what stone this is?” he asked me, turning it this way and that in the lamplight.

“Lapis,” I said, pleased to be able to respond at once, mistaken in my thought that he too would be pleased, proud of my knowledge.

He was not.

As I discovered when I stood and went over to him thinking to claim a kiss, a prize he denied by turning his head away to one side, sullen as a child. That gesture of pettiness both amused and cut me to my core. I had not realized the question as posed meant a win-lose game, nor that he expected me to forfeit if I knew the answer. At least Phlegon, gone off to fetch more ink, didn’t witness the ugliness of that little scene.

Sensing my hurt and disappointment in him, Hadrian relented and dropped a swift, begrudging kiss onto the side of my neck just below my jaw—more to save face, I think, than to reassure me. I never saw that particular ring again, nor did I ask what became of it.

At the first festival of Jupiter I attended as his acknowledged beloved, Hadrian humiliated Korias and embarrassed me during the horse race. We all sat on the imperial dais overlooking the Sacred Way, and when the horses came rushing along the street, Korias looked over at me and smiled. Hadrian must have thought he held my gaze a little too long, because he leaned in from the other side of me and said, “The horses just went that way, gentlemen.”

Korias, stricken, swiveled to look in the other direction, where the horses soon approached the finish line at the foot of the Capitoline. I, too, turned to watch them, feeling Hadrian’s gaze burn into my neck. His hand pressed against the folds of purple-striped toga at the small of my back, but I refused to lean against it in acknowledgement of that gesture of intimacy.

After the race ended, as soon as the winning mount had been offered up to Jupiter and its head removed for the priests while the smell of charred horseflesh wafted up into the hills, Korias gave a courteous nod to Hadrian and to me, not meeting our eyes, and hurried from the platform, his purple-striped toga swirling about him, to lose himself in the crowd and recover his equanimity. I ached for him. I knew he felt mortified.

“Why did you—” I started to ask, but stopped. One does not question the emperor.

Hadrian smiled at me, at his ease. He may have assumed I felt flattered, pleased by his possessiveness. Had it been some other boy—say, Marcus—who caught that lash, my vanity well might have plumped like a toadstool. But not when it landed on Korias. Not him.

“A nice boy,” Hadrian said. “A little sensitive, perhaps. I didn’t mean anything, of course—just a bit of good-natured teasing.”

“Of course.”

Knowing Korias as I did, I knew he was the last person Hadrian ever need warn away from my affections. Korias’ own sense of honor precluded any such necessity.

Hadrian’s behavior that afternoon also struck me as somewhat hypocritical, since even I had heard the gossip about Hadrian’s own earlier days at court, before he became emperor. While Trajan still reigned, the story alleged, he and Hadrian almost feuded over a couple of boys serving in the page corps. Only a warning from a mutual friend, no doubt instigated at Plotina’s discretion, intervened and kept Hadrian from an assignation with one of them—the one for which Trajan might never have forgiven him. Hadrian turned for solace to a couple of senators’ wives instead. So the gossip avowed, anyway.

H
ADRIAN MUST NOT
have been much loved as a child, I think, to so mistrust love as an adult that he prefers being in control to being in love. Even so, from time to time, I looked up to catch his face unguarded, and found it just then swamped with love, as my own also must have looked, at least early on—at times it seemed to me that we circled like combatants in the ring, always dancing around and away from that small, red-hot, unspeakable word. Reeking with all the old fear of the cave, death. Our gods, ancestors, surely still smell it on us.

When Socrates and Phaedrus discussed love beneath a plane tree, the former described how love can transform, the latter, how it can deform. Hadrian’s love has deformed me, because both his nature and his office demand he must always, always win. This in turn demands that I must always, always lose to him.

Not enough for Hadrian to have the upper hand—he must raze the field, break the spine, crack open the opponent and devour his entrails. Yet his arrogance masks depths of insecurity, and fear of emotion, whether his own or anyone else’s.

He has always surrounded himself, when in Rome and traveling as well, with the most brilliant minds of our day—Apollodorus, Juvenal, Tacitus, Seutonius, Plutarch, Arrian, Marcellus, Favorinus, and many others—yet always he feels compelled to best them in their own area of expertise, and woe to any man who refuses to yield to his opinion. Hadrian is far more open and kind in engagements with any common man of the street than in discourses with these men—no doubt because the former poses no threat to him, or rather his sense of superiority.

Such revelations of Hadrian’s character over time, while increasing my understanding, also acted as slow poison on my respect and affection for the man.

How pure his love for horses and hounds, though, his admiration of their grace and courage in the face of boar, bear, lion. He once built a monument for his favorite horse, Borysthenes, after its death, in the manner of Alexander, who honored his own racer, Bucephalus, in similar fashion, even naming a city after him.

Hadrian rides as if he and the horse were one; he once took down a boar with one blow; yet the killing is not, I think, what he revels in, but rather that state, almost of time suspended, one enters into with animals in nature—those which are hunted, and those which partake of the hunt.

An expert marksman, he claims to be impressed by my own ability to use either hand for a throw or thrust. I tried to eat with my left hand when I was small, but my father and grandfather discouraged this flaw, adamant in teaching me that one’s left must bear up the shield, leaving one’s right free to strike. Training the right arm to do the work to which the left seems inclined makes either arm sufficient, if necessity demands.

Hadrian also holds to a Platonic ideal for breeding his favorite creatures. By establishing standards for each breed, to which animals must conform before being allowed to mate, the most desirable characteristics and abilities can be preserved. Dogs bred in this way to herd livestock often can be seen, while yet in clumsy puppyhood, circling close to the sheep in the fields and dropping to a crouch, trying to corral the flock by instinct before their masters have even begun training them.

Hadrian never has shared my fascination with cats, those hunters sacred to the Egyptians, bred and revered for their regal beauty, symbols of the great goddess. Feline instincts betray too much cruelty, I suppose, to win his admiration. They enjoy tormenting prey, whereas Hadrian prefers to believe his own cruelties are not innate but practical, methodical, means to achieve his ends—and allay his fears.

I have always suspected that Hadrian’s travels to the far reaches of the empire not only give him a clear picture of the holdings over which he rules, but also provide an excuse not to attend the spectacles in the Flavian amphitheatre any more often than required in his official capacity as ruler. Such orgies of blood do not represent to him, a Spaniard by origin and temperament, the truth of the hunt, in which each kill is hallowed for the hunter by a spirit of engagement with the beast of prey.

While he enjoys the chariot races held in the Circus Maximus, favoring the Green teams over the Red, White and Blue, and always attends the race for the October Horse during the Jupiter festivities, I believe the killing of human beings in the ring for sport appalls him far more than he can prudently reveal. With regard to duties and privileges alike, the emperor must remain, or appear to remain, disinterested in order to best fulfill his office. In this way, the most powerful often becomes a servant to the desires of those over whom he rules.

These past few years, I have accompanied Hadrian on his travels and with him have seen much of this sprawl of empire, every corner of which he is determined to visit. A poet he considers a friend, Florus, once wrote a poem to tease him about his peripatetic habits:

“I don’t want to be a Caesar

Plodding around Britain

Freezing my nuts off

in a Scythian midden.”

Hadrian knew Florus’ poem was a tribute, disguised, yet as always he couldn’t resist trying to top it:

“I don’t want to be a Florus

Crawling around pubs,

Skulking in pie-shops

Bitten by bugs.”

On my first visit to Athens with Hadrian, I had my first glimpse of the Acropolis, with the Parthenon gleaming atop the city like a crown scoured pure by the Greek sun. I thought of Pythagoras, Plato, the dream of harmony in a perfect city, music of the spheres. It remains the only sight from my travels which overwhelmed me to the point of tears.

In Athens also I made the acquaintance of Favorinus of Arles, the notorious Gaul, hermaphrodite, nemesis of Polemo, and gadfly of a philosopher. He was one of the few men besides the philosopher Secundus and the architect Apollodorus brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to contradict Hadrian to his face. He likes to boast of himself, “I am a eunuch tried for adultery, a barbarian who speaks Greek, and one who has quarreled with the emperor, yet remains alive.”