THE LAST GOD OF ROME

a term paper for Art History 148

by Delia Morgan

30 May 2000

I. Introduction

On a clear summer night, a star-gazer looking up toward the celestial equator will find the constellation Aquila – the eagle. In classical myth, this eagle was the bird of Zeus; it was the form the god himself took as he swooped down from the sky to seize Ganymede and carry him off to Olympos. A group of stars close by once represented the beautiful young Trojan prince, who would be granted immortal life as the cup-bearer to the gods. Nearby is also an asterism which, in the Roman empire of 130 C.E., was heralded as a new star – the soul of a new god named Antinous. (150) [Fig. 1]

The story of Antinous is one of tragedy and triumph, love and sacrifice, imperial intrigue and divine mystery. Its beginnings were humble: a beautiful young Greek boy in Asia Minor was plucked, like Ganymede, from his native soil and whisked away to the heady atmosphere of imperial Rome to become the favorite companion to the emperor Hadrian, a man who fancied himself as Zeus incarnate. (110) Their love, celebrated in antiquity and later denigrated by puritanical Christians, ended abruptly during a trip to Egypt, when the young Antinous drowned in the floodwaters of the Nile. Rumor and speculation surrounded his death – was it murder, suicide, an accident? Or was it, as several ancient authors claimed, a deliberate act of religious sacrifice, voluntarily undertaken to restore and renew the emperor and the land?

Whatever the cause of death, the subsequent apotheosis of Antinous resulted in a tidal wave of religious sentiment that swept the breadth of the entire empire. (4) Temples were built and priesthoods established, and thousands of religious images of the new god were created in the remarkably short span of a few years. (3) Much of this cult activity was vigorously promulgated by Hadrian himself, who was so overcome by grief that he never fully recovered. However, there was also a spontaneous outpouring of popular faith in Antinous -- enough to sustain the cult for some two centuries after his death; enough for him to be declared the last pagan god of the Greco-Roman world. (2)

The influence of the life and death of Antinous on history is hard to calculate. He himself harbored no imperial ambitions or possibilities, and was not thought to use his position to influence Emperor Hadrian directly. However, his indirect influence on the emperor is likely to have been immense. After his death the grief-stricken emperor undertook the extraordinary task of deifying the youth and spreading his cult with an almost evangelical zeal. At the same time, Hadrian finally lost patience with the Jewish revolts against Rome, and he undertook a series of harsh and drastic measures which ultimately culminated in the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem – the Jewish diaspora which lasted two millennia, until the establishment of Israel in the 1940’s. (167) Antinous also had an effect on the shaping of early Christianity. The early church fathers, deeply disturbed by the resemblance of the dying savior god Antinous to the dying savior god Jesus, went to great pains to create some significant distance between them. Thus, Antinous influenced not only early church writings, but perhaps also the iconography of Jesus himself. (195) There is also some evidence that devotees of Antinous were among the last pagan holdouts as Rome converted to Christianity.

What, one might ask, was the wellspring of this tremendous influence? How did an unknown Greek boy from a minor province come to claim the rapturous attentions of the mightiest ruler in the ancient world, and influence the course of history, even from beyond the tomb? There was little written about Antinous the person during his life, nor much written after his death. However, there is plenty of evidence of his later deification, primarily in the visual arts – cult statues and commemorative coins and stone talismans. This evidence suggests that perhaps the single most remarkable quality of Antinous himself was simply this – his astonishing beauty. German art historian Winckelmann, who helped to champion the aesthetic appreciation of Antinous in the 18^th century, declared the Mondragone head [Fig. 3] to be “one of the most beautiful things in the world” and proclaimed it and the Albani relief [Fig. 4] to be “the glory and crown of art in this age as well as in all others.” (Lambert, 9) His distinctive features, while parting company with the previous classical ideal, were so enrapturing that his depictions established a new ideal of male aesthetic perfection. (4) In a culture which had not yet seriously undertaken to sunder the body from the spirit, his physical appearance itself was like a mark of divine grace, a fact which must have surely contributed to the wide, rapid spread of his cult. Royston Lambert, whose book Beloved and God is the first thorough and unflinching treatment of its subject, says simply, “In Antinous the ancient classical idea of the divine immanent in man received a final and spectacular affirmation.” (177)

The beauty of Antinous was undoubtedly a pivotal fact about which his destiny hinged; but it was a necessary rather than a sufficient contribution to his overall appeal. By contemporary accounts, he was also highly intelligent, athletic and courageous, and restrained in temperament; these were all seen as virtues of manly excellence in Greek culture, and they earned him the admiration of the emperor and, later, of his devotees. After death, he acquired additional virtues: protecting travelers, healing the sick, ensuring the fertility of the fields, interceding with the gods on behalf of mortals, conducting the souls of the dead. (181-2) In 1907, peasants in Campagna began to dig the soil of a marshy field, fallow for centuries, in preparation for planting a vineyard; their shovels encountered a Roman-era stone relief of Antinous surrounded by grapevines, preparing to harvest them with a sickle. [Fig. 2] Even at that late date, a measure of faith in his powers was renewed. (11)

II. The Story

The fate of Antinous was intimately bound up with that of the emperor Hadrian. Hadrian ascended to the imperial throne upon the death of Trajan in 117 C.E., a point in time that marks the peak of the Roman empire. Trajan sought to expand the empire; Hadrian focused on securing it. He was a wandering emperor; incessantly traveling the length and breadth of the imperial territory, he personally inspected the Roman troops, built or refurbished major cities, and enriched temples and religious cults all over the empire. (43) He was also an avid Hellenophile, a lover of all things Greek, and sought to bring about a renewed sense of panhellenic unity as one of the key elements in the overall cultural diversity of the Roman empire. He seemed to see the role of Rome as the protector and propagator of Greek culture. (41) Later acknowledged as one of the greatest of the Roman emperors, he was nevertheless moody, intense and difficult to know; he was also suspicious of those around him, and earned their suspicion in return. Hadrian seems to have been deeply religious, given to mystical longings and occult leanings, and committed to the propagation of mystery religions such as the cult of Demeter and that of Dionysos. (38) He sought to excel in all things, including architecture, and left his unique aesthetic stamp on many Roman buildings, such as the rebuilt Pantheon, the dome-shaped temple to all the gods, and his own private retreat, the Villa Adriana at Tivoli.

Hadrian was trapped in an unhappy marriage which had been arranged for political reasons; he found his wife Sabina difficult and shrewish. Like many upper-class Roman men of the time, and like Trajan before him, he enjoyed the love of young men. (84-6) Pederasty in Greek culture was an esteemed social institution, in which an older man provided not only emotional and romantic companionship to an adolescent boy, but also saw to many crucial aspects of his education and social upbringing. While pederasty never attained quite the same social significance in Roman culture, Hadrian’s predilection towards Greek modes of behavior probably influenced how he saw his relationships with boys. In the case of Antinous, it seems that the emperor conceived himself as a mentor and guide, as well as a lover.

Antinous himself was Greek, a fact which no doubt appealed to Hadrian; he was from Bithynia in Asia Minor, with ancestry probably from Arcadia. Born around 111 C.E. to what was probably an upper class but otherwise undistinguished family, he probably joined the imperial court around the age of thirteen, acting as a page. (22, 62) By sometime before 128 C.E., he had been thrust from obscurity into the imperial limelight, having become the emperor’s favorite companion and one of the most publicly visible figures in Rome. Not much was written about Antinous during his life; it appears that he was circumspect in his behavior and disinclined to use his position to personal advantage.

Hadrian and Antinous traveled extensively together, including a trip to Athens and an initiation into the mysteries at Eleusis. (102) A later religious statue of Antinous depicts him as the young initiate. [Fig. 8] These mystery rites, associated with the grain goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, were a highly revered and closely guarded secret of the ancient world; two thousand years later, we still cannot be certain what transpired there. However, we do know that the rites centered on the theme of life, death and rebirth, as mirrored in the natural yearly cycle of vegetation; initiates often came away “born again,” spiritually renewed and awakened, with a sense of immortality. It is highly significant that Hadrian and Antinous shared this profound spiritual experience; it may well have formed a sense of a mystical bond that would outlast life itself, and may well have contributed to Antinous’ later apotheosis. (64) Dionysos, the god of wine and ecstasy, was also associated with these rites, as well as having a mystery cult of his own. (105) In addition to being a god of fertility and passion, he was a dying and resurrected savior god who promised immortality to his devotees; when Antinous was later deified, he was frequently assimilated to the figure of Dionysos, and often shown with grapevines or other Dionysiac attributes. [Figs. 1, 9, 10] In Egypt, where Antinous would eventually lose his life to the Nile, the god Osiris shared many of these same qualities of the dying and resurrected savior, god of fertility. Antinous was later depicted as assimilated with Osiris or other Egyptian gods, in Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli and at his sacred city of Antinopolis. [Fig. 7]

Hunting was a favorite activity of Hadrian and Antinous, and one which was also steeped in symbolic and moral significance. Hunting tested men’s mettle, and made them stronger, braver and wiser. Hunters were beloved by the gods, especially Artemis and Apollo; sacrifices were made before setting out on a hunt, and the first parts of the slain animal were offered to the gods. (65) Both Hadrian and Antinous were bold hunters, and Lambert speculates that their relationship “ripened in this atmosphere of shared danger and excitement...masculine bonhomie...and mystical sublimation.” (66) A famous series of medallions [Figs. 14,15] depict Hadrian and Antinous engaged in hunting, including a lion hunt that occurred shortly before Antinous’ death, an episode in which they hunted a marauding lion in Libya. It culminated in success, but only after an incident in which the emperor risked his own life to save that of his lover. (120) The gratitude and indebtedness which Antinous must have felt regarding this heroic act may have influenced his subsequent actions a few weeks later, as their boat slid slowly down the dark waters of the Nile.

It was 130 C.E. Egypt was in trouble that year. The Nile delta was a rich agricultural region, a ‘breadbasket’ which helped to feed the empire; but it was entirely dependent upon the annual flooding of the Nile to irrigate the crops. For the second year in a row, the floods were seriously deficient; the ghost of famine loomed in the near future. (122) From times immemorial, it had been an Egyptian custom to offer sacrifices to the Nile in an attempt to induce the river god to be generous and pour forth abundant water. (123) Hadrian and Antinous made their journey in late October of 130 C.E., shortly after the festival of Osiris. (127) The Egyptian god, often linked with Dionysos, was also a dying and resurrected deity linked with fertility, vegetation and the underworld. Hadrian had spent much time with the priests, oracles and magicians of Egypt; he may have consulted them with regard to his own health problems as well as those of the empire. (124-6) Doubtless, too, he had heard their concerns about the drought. The situation may have seemed to demand some extraordinary means to turn it around; and the requisite means may have found its focal point in an extraordinary person.

On October 30, a few days into the voyage, the body of the beautiful Antinous was fished from the dark waters near Bes. Hadrian later wrote, simply: “He fell into the Nile.” (128) The Historia Augusta says of Hadrian: “He lost his Antinous while sailing along the Nile and wept for him like a woman.” (131) It also added, with regard to Antinous’ death, that “some assert that he sacrificed himself for Hadrian...” Some even hinted at implicating Hadrian. Lambert dismisses this, noting that it is inconsistent with the fact that Hadrian had recently saved Antinous’ life; also, Hadrian’s policy was to rigorously enforce prohibitions against human sacrifice. (133-4) In noting the particulars of Antinous’ death – the time (around the rites of Osiris), the place (Bes was linked by name with Besa, where Hadrian was enlisted as an Athenian citizen), and the circumstances (the Nile drought and the possible ill health of the emperor) -- Lambert finds evidence for the voluntary sacrifice theory. (136-40) The sacrificial interpretation would also fit well with both Antinous’ involvement with the mystery cult at Eleusis, and his later assimilation to sacrificial gods of resurrection like Dionysos and Osiris. (142)

The apotheosis of Antinous was immediate and enthusiastic. In Egypt his body was whisked away for mummification and later interment. The forlorn spot where his body was recovered swiftly became a monument and a shrine to his divinity – the great city of Antinoopolis, with colonnaded streets, temples and countless images of Antinous. (149) Poets sang his praises, oracular shrines were founded, and ecstatic mystery rites. (186) From all over the empire, vast numbers of sculptures, coins and gems bearing the likeness of Antinous were produced, virtually all of them in the eight years between his own death and that of Hadrian. Some depicted him as Osiris, Dionysos or Hermes; others simply as “Antinous, the God.”

This artistic outpouring included, in one recent estimate, some two thousand sculptures alone. (3) Lambert says, “Perhaps never in antiquity had so many and so varied images been produced of one individual in so short a time.” (3) Within a few short years, the face of Antinous became one of the most widely known and recognized images in the ancient world. As for the grieving emperor Hadrian, he seems to have found some measure of solace in his continuing devotion to Antinous and in the propagation of his cult. Perhaps, in his private moments at the Villa at Tivoli, surrounded on all sides by memorials to the new god who was his beloved eromenos, the line between erotic longing and religious rapture blurred into insignificance. By the time Hadrian died eight years later, a sizable portion of the Roman empire had come to share his love for Antinous.

III. The Art

The final resting place of Antinous has never been found; a fitting mystery, perhaps, for a god. (155) An engraved obelisk [Fig. 16] declares that it marks his burial spot, but the obelisk itself had been moved repeatedly. (157) It contains an epitaph for Antinous in the words of Hadrian himself, clumsily rendered into Egyptian-like hieroglyphics; at one time it graced the emperor’s villa at Tivoli, perhaps along with the remains of Antinous. The obelisk is important as a contemporary written account of Antinous’ life and death, but much is missing or hard to decipher. (49) Another contemporary source of information is found in a set of large bronze medallions [Figs. 14, 15] which later came to decorate the Arch of Constantine in Rome. (50) They depict Hadrian in a series of hunting scenes, at least two of which also include Antinous – one showing a boar hunt and the other the hunt of the Libyan lion. The second is notable for depicting a somewhat more mature Antinous [Fig. 13] than is found elsewhere; he has short-cropped hair and the beginnings of a beard, both marks of manhood. (51, 118)

The likelihood that Antinous was physically maturing into manhood was significant; normally it would have signaled the end of his role as an eromenos. In the socially sanctioned institution of pederasty, the older lover would generally be between twenty and forty years of age, and the younger would be in his teens. To continue to take the passive, or receptive, role in lovemaking past the age of maturity was frowned upon. Most pederastic love affairs were therefore fated to end within a few years; although there were doubtless couples who flouted this tradition. But for the emperor himself to have a grown man as a lover might have been considered unseemly; this would imply that the love between Hadrian and Antinous was doomed to end shortly. (119) Some have read this as a possible reason for suicide on the part of Antinous. However, suicide does not seem in keeping with what we know of Antinous’ character, whereas the possibility of voluntary self-sacrifice does.

Of the thousands of sculptures of Antinous, many were deliberately defaced by later Christians or barbarians; others were carefully hidden, often buried, in order to avert that fate. The statue at the sanctuary of Delphi [Fig. 6] had its arms broken off after being knocked from its pedestal; it was later carefully placed upright again, and it was found still standing in 1893. (6) What remains of the sculpture seems to divide into two major groups, according to Lambert. The first type is a ‘softer’ or more feminine version – a brooding, melancholy youth, aloof and dreamy, with downcast eyes. [Figs. 1,6] (66-7) These various works [seem to have all been based upon a single model which was later lost. (210) The second type -- a ‘harder’ or more masculine version -- is more varied, and includes a wide variety of moods, but generally with a more alert, active and penetrating appearance. [Figs. 11,12] (67-8) Some authors claim that the all portraits are idealized and divinized, making it hard to know what Antinous really looked like in life. (Ramage, 199) Lambert, however, finds it likely that this second type, as well as the original model for the first type, were based upon Antinous’ actual appearance in life. He makes the point that the boy was one of the most visible persons in Rome, being present both in public and also when the emperor entertained in private; this fact, as well as his exceptional beauty, makes it likely that artists would have drawn sketches of him at the time. (54)

Another fact that points to the accuracy of the sculptural portraits of Antinous is their unique features. He did not so much fit the classical ideal of the time as he utterly transformed it. As Lambert says, “Even his severest Christian critics readily admitted that ‘his beauty was unequalled’. But it was of a novel kind, with distinctive features which...established a new fashion of male perfection for decades thereafter.” (69) Among these distinctive features were: a broad face and thick neck; small, deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes spaced widely apart; a thick mass of hair curling in tendrils; long, almost straight eyebrows; a broad and blunt-tipped nose; full cheeks with high cheekbones; and a full, sensuous mouth with sharply arching upper lip. (70) So distinctive was the face of Antinous that, even in the varied iconography of his syncretic religious images, his identity was immediately recognizable. However, since he did come to set a new standard for male beauty, “it is now difficult for art historians to tell whether some works are actual portraits of him or approximations to his ideal.” (4)

The historical fate of the images of Antinous is itself part of the story; it tells of not only his pagan deification, but also of the eventual damning judgments on his life and his cult by later generations of Christians. Many of his images were defaced by Christian vandals, or hidden by his devotees to protect them from such harm. In addition, there was a steady stream of invective from the church fathers, fulminating against the supposed horrors of both pagan religion and homosexual love. St. Athanasius in 350 C.E. declared the new god Antinous to be a “wretch” the “slave” of Hadrian’s ‘unlawful pleasures,’ and his deification a testimony of “how entirely the Emperor’s unnatural passion survived the foul object of it.” (7) One senses that the dignity of Antinous’ beauty was a challenge and a threat to some of these nay-sayers, many of whom marveled at his face in the very same breath that they insulted his humanity. Still stranger attitudes followed. The early Christians could not believe there was anything noble about Antinous because of the nature of his love for Hadrian; while some later Victorian writers found dignity in his image and the story of his sacrifice, others found the story so scandalous that they expunged textual references to Antinous and dared not even gaze at his image in museums. (9-10) As Lambert put it, “Art historians now developed painfully acute moral qualms in front of inanimate marbles.” (10)

Still later generations, finding classical nobility in Antinous, found it necessary to deny his sexuality and invent a new, disinfected, Platonic version, purified of the taint of fleshly love; ultimately some of them came to see in the Bithynian youth the foreshadowing of Jesus himself. (10) Such denials and machinations may seem laughable today, but in their time they did much to hamper an accurate understanding of classical culture; they distorted the historical, human truth of Hadrian and Antinous and created a grotesque caricature in its place. At the root of the distortions was the Christian insistence on seeing the sensual and the spiritual as two mutually exclusive categories, an idea alien to most of the ancient world. (57) The refusal to allow for a love that encompassed both body and soul was most acute when it involved homoerotic love. The utter toxicity and loathing of the invective that the church writers heaped upon the pair of lovers seems to us today to reflect more upon its authors than upon the subjects.

IV. Conclusion

In the meteoric rise of the young new god Antinous, one can trace the patterns of the culture that birthed him. In art, he represented the final flowering of a classical ideal of male beauty, grace and perfection. In his short and remarkable life, he exerted a deep and lasting influence over the emperor Hadrian, and hence may have helped shape the currents of history for centuries to come. In death, he came to be the last known representative of an ancient and venerable type of pagan god – the dying and reborn god of nature and fertility, through whose mysteries one comes to confront and ultimately to conquer death itself. In tracing the history of his image and how it was perceived by later generations, we find a mirror for our own shifting cultural attitudes towards body, soul and their erotic conjunction.

The devotees of his cult may have provided some of the last real pagan resistance before the takeover of Christianity in the fourth century. The colossal bronze statue of Antinous at Antinoopolis was torn down after 375 C.E. However, even at that late date, a series of medallions identify him with the thoroughly pagan god Pan, and boldly proclaim him to be “God.” In this Lambert sees perhaps a “last, aggressive, pagan challenge to the sensibilities of Christianity; “Devotion to Antinous,” he says, “persisted in places to the very end.” (6)

But this begs the question: when did the ‘very end’ of paganism come about? Some, noting the current rise of the neo-pagan movement in a remarkable popular groundswell of polytheistic devotion, might legitimately claim that ‘the very end’ never came, and perhaps never will. Pagans today once again honor the gods of their ancestors: Dionysos, Hermes, Pan, Osiris, Demeter, and more. Maybe there is a place for Antinous in all this. Perhaps there will be new generations of pagan devotees stretching out in a long unbroken line into the distant future; perhaps they will read about Antinous and be touched by his story, his sacrifice, his grace and his divine beauty; perhaps they will put him on new altars and carry his image with them as talismans. Perhaps he will once again be proclaimed “Antinous, the God.” As far as we know, his star will be burning for ages to come.

REFERENCES:

Main reference (all page numbers without author listed refer to this book):

Lambert, Royston. Beloved and God. Carol Publishing Group, New York, NY, 1984.

Additional references:

Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987.

Evans, Arthur. The God of Ecstasy. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1988.

Halperin, David M., Winkler, John J. and Zeitlin, Froma I. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990.

Ramage, Nancy H. and Ramage, Andrew. Roman Art, second edition. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1996 (1991).

Turcan, Robert. Translation by Antonia Nevill. The Cults of the Roman Empire. Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA, 1996.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:

(Photos and captions taken from Beloved and God, by Royston Lambert;

reference numbers in parentheses are from the book.)

[Dates of all works are assumed to be between 130-138 C.E., unless otherwise noted.]

1. (60): Antinous the god: the colossal statue of Antinous-Dionysos in the Sala Rotonda of the Vatican, ‘the Braschi’ (Alinari)

2. (5): The relief of Antinous as Sylvanus signed by Antoninianus of Aphrodisias (German Archaeological Institute, Rome)

3. (8): The Mondragone head in the Louvre (Alinari)

4. (9): The relief at the Villa Albani (Alinari)

5. (7): The intaglio sardonyx gem of Antinous

6. (2, 59): The Delphi statue: Antinous as the divine ephebe (Ecole Francaise d’Archeologie, Athens) ; and detail of head.

7. (57): Head of Antinous as Egyptian god from Dresden

8. (30): Antinous confronts the mysteries of Eleusis, as Dionysos Zagreus, from Eleusis Museum (Alinari)

9. (27): Antinous-Dionysos statuette from Berlin, Staatliche Museen

10. (28): Antinous-Dionysos from Aidepsos, Chalkis Museum (Photo Volan, Athens)

11. (23): Antinous, penetrating and intelligent: the Museo delle Terme head no. 200 (Alinare)

12. (24): Antinous, virile and energetic: the Copenhagen head, Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek no. 685, restored (Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek)

13. (14) : Antinous, shortly before his death, as a shorn and whiskered young man, from a cast of the lion hunt tondo, Museum St Germain

14. (12): Hadrian and Antinous hunt the boar, tondo, Arch of Constantine, Rome (Alinari)

15. (13): Hadrian and Antinous stand on the mane of the conquered lion of Libya, tondo, Arch of Constantine, Rome (Alinari)

16. (10): The obelisk on the Pincio, Rome, containing Hadrian’s epitaph for Antinous and the secret of his grave (Fototeca Unione)