[Hadrian 284a.jpg] Inscription in Honor of Hadrian as Archon of Athens Athens, Theatre of Dionysus
[Hadrian 284bc.jpg] Hadrian?s Address to the Troops at Lambaesis Algiers, Stephane Gsell Museum
Inscription of Fraternity of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium Rome, National Museum
[Hadrian 284d.jpg] Hieroglyphic Insert Recording Funeral Ceremonies of Antinous Rome, Obelisk of the Pincio
of the Imperial Health. I have already told you the reasons for which such a belief, salutary for them, seems to me not absurd. A blind old woman has come on foot from Pannonia, having undertaken that exhausting journey in order to ask me to touch her eyes; she has recovered her sight under my hands, as her fervor had led her to expect; her faith in the emperor-god explains this miracle. Other prodigies have occurred, and invalids say that they have seen me in their dreams, as the pilgrims to Epidaurus have visions of Csculapius; they claim that they have awakened cured, or at least improved. I do not smile at the contrast between my powers as a thaumaturge and my own illness; I accept these new privileges with gravity. The old blind woman who made her way to the emperor from the depths of a barbarian province has become for me what the slave of Tarragona had formerly been, namely, a symbol of the populations of the empire whom I have both ruled and served. Their immense confidence repays me for twenty years of work which was itself congenial to me.
Phlegon has recently read me verses of a Jew of Alexandria who also attributes to me superhuman powers; without irony I welcomed that description of an elderly prince who is seen going back and forth over all the roads of the earth, descending to the treasures of the mines, reawakening the generative forces of the soil, and everywhere establishing peace and prosperity; the initiate who has restored the shrines of all races, the connoisseur in magic arts, the seer who raised a youth to the heavens. I shall have been better understood by this enthusiastic Jew than by many a senator and proconsul; this adversary now won over looks upon me almost as does Arrian; I am amazed to have become for people just what I sought to be, after all, and I marvel that this success is made up of so little.
Old age and death, as they approach, begin to add their majesty to this prestige; men step reverently from my path; they no longer compare me, as they once did, to serene and radiant Zeus, but to Mars Gradivus, god of long campaigns and austere discipline, or to grave Numa, inspired by the gods. Of late this pale, drawn visage, these fixed eyes and this tall body held straight by force of will, suggest to them Pluto, god of shades. Only a few intimates, a few tried and cherished friends, escape such dread contagion of respect. The young lawyer Fronto, this future magistrate who will doubtless be one of the good servants of your reign, came to discuss with me an address of mine to be made in the Senate; his voice was trembling, and I read in his face that same reverence mingled with fear. The tranquil joys of human friendship are no longer for me; men adore and venerate me far too much to love me.
A happy fate not unlike that of certain gardeners has been allotted me: everything that I have tried to implant in the human imagination has taken root there. The cult of Antinous seemed like the wildest of my enterprises, the overflow of a grief which concerned me alone. But our epoch is avid for gods; it prefers the most ardent deities, and the most sorrowful, those who mingle with the wine of life a bitter honey from beyond the grave. At Delphi the youth has become the Hermes who guards the threshold, master of the dark passages leading to the shades. Eleusis, where his age and status as a stranger formerly prevented him from being initiated with me, now makes of him the young Bacchus of the Mysteries, prince of those border regions which lie between the senses and the soul. His ancestral Arcadia associates him with Pan and Diana, woodland divinities; the peasants of Tibur identify him with the gentle Aristaeus, king of the bees. In Asia his worshippers liken him to their tender gods devoured by summer heat or broken by autumn storms. Far away, on the edge of barbarian lands, the companion of my hunts and travels has assumed the aspect of the Thracian Horseman, that mysterious figure seen riding through the copses by moonlight and carrying away souls of the dead in the folds of his cloak.
All of that could be merely an excrescence of the official cult, a form of public flattery or the adulation of priests greedy for subsidies. But the young face is escaping from me to respond to the aspirations of simpler hearts: by one of those shifts of balance inherent in the nature of things that somber but exquisite youth has taken his place in popular devotion as the support of the weak and the poor, and the comforter of dead children. His image on the coins of Bithynia, that profile of the youth of fifteen with floating locks and delighted, truthful smile (which he kept for so short a time), is hung at the neck of new-born infants to serve as an amulet; it is nailed up likewise in village cemeteries on the small tombs. In recent years, when I used to think of my own death, like a pilot unmindful of himself but trembling for the ship’s passengers and cargo, I would tell myself bitterly that this remembrance would founder with me; that young being so carefully embalmed in the depths of my memory seemed obliged thus to perish for a second time. That fear, though justifiable, has been in part allayed; I have compensated for this premature death as well as I could; an image, a reflection, some feeble echo will survive for at least a few centuries. Little more can be done in matters of immortality.
I have again seen Fidus Aquila, governor of Antinoopolis, as he passed on his way to his new post at Sarmizegethusa. He has described to me the annual rites celebrated now on the banks of the Nile in honor of the dead god, to which pilgrims come by thousands from the regions of the North and the South, with offerings of beer and of grain, and with prayers; every third year anniversary games are held in Antinoopolis as well as in Alexandria, and in Mantinea and my beloved Athens. These triennial festivities will recur this autumn, but I do not hope to last out until this ninth return of the month of Athyr. It is the more important, therefore, that each detail of such solemnities be determined in advance. The oracle of the dead youth functions inside the secret chamber of the ancient Egyptian temple restored by my care; its priests distribute daily some hundreds of responses already prepared for all those questions which human hope or anguish may pose. I have incurred reproach for having composed several of these answers myself. I did not intend, in so doing, to be lacking in respect towards my god, or in compassion for the soldier’s wife who asks if her husband will come back alive from a garrison in Palestine, for the invalid hungering for comfort, for some merchant whose ships ride the waves of the Red Sea, for a couple who desire a son; at the most I was continuing in this way the games of logogriphs and versified charades at which we used sometimes to play together. Likewise there was comment because here in the Villa, around that chapel of Canopus where his cult is celebrated in Egyptian fashion, I have encouraged the establishment of various pleasure pavilions like those of the suburb of Alexandria which bears that name, and have offered their facilities and distractions to my guests, sometimes participating in them myself. He had grown used to that kind of thing. And then, one does not enclose oneself for years in a unique thought without reintroducing into it, little by little, all the mere routines of a life.
I have done all they say to do. I have waited, and sometimes I have prayed. Audivi voces divinas… . The lightheaded Julia Balbilla believed that she heard the mysterious voice of Memnon at dawn; I have listened for the
[Hadrian 288a.jpg] Antinous of Antonianos of Aphrodisias Rome, Osio Collection
[Hadrian 288bc.jpg] Marlborough Gem, Antinous (cast) Rome, Sangiorgio Collection
Marlborough Gem, Antinous (sardonyx) Rome, Sangiorgio Collection
[Hadrian 288d.jpg] Coin of Antinous as Bacchus Coin of Tion, Asia Minor
night’s faintest sounds. I have used the unctions of oil and essence of roses which attract the shades; I have set out the bowl of milk, the handful of salt, the drop of blood, supports of their former existence. I have lain down on the marble pavement of the small sanctuary; the light of the stars made its way through the openings of the wall, producing reflections here and there, strange, pale gleams. I have recalled to myself the orders whispered by the priests in the ear of the dead, and the itinerary written on the tomb: And he will recognize the way… . And the guardians of the threshold will let him pass… . And he will come and go around those who love him for millions of days… . Sometimes, after long intervals, I have thought to feel the slight stir of an approach, a touch as light as the contact of eyelashes and warm as the hollow of a hand. And the shade of Patroclus appears at Achilles’ side. … I shall never know if that warmth, that sweetness, did not emanate simply from deep within me, the last efforts of a man struggling against solitude and the cold of night. But the question, which arises also in the presence of our living loves, has ceased to interest me now; it matters little to me whether the phantoms whom I evoke come from the limbo of my memory or from that of another world. My soul, if I possess one, is made of the same substance as are the specters; this body with swollen hands and livid nails, this sorry mass almost half-dissolved, this sack of ills,
