to the biographer in a jumble of words of the unfathomable local dialect with a single phrase in Greek, 'A miracle! A miracle!'
Suetonius thought this a quaint response as no miracle was immediately evident, unless he was referring to the dubious capacity of his rustic wooden tub to survive a river crossing. A Praetorian based at Alexandria who understood the local dialect spoke up.
'Sir, the ferryman says there's been a miracle today. An important man has been sacrificed to the river. Such a sacrifice joins the gods, becomes godlike, they believe.'
'An important man?' Suetonius asked doubtfully. 'He becomes a god?'
'Yes, the victim becomes a manifestation of Osiris. He is now Osiris who resurrects in two days time. The river's temper is appeased. That's the drift of the man's words,' the trooper said.
The biographer sunk into a thoughtfulness as the creaking tub flexed against the river's churn while its rowers thrashed at the flow. He wondered if the reputed sacrifice had anything to do with the passing of the emperor's favorite, Antinous. Surely not?
So Antinous was dead. The golden youth was no more.
Suetonius wistfully recalled his first sighting of the Favorite in the ninth year of Caesar's rule. It was when Hadrian and his cavalcade had returned from a lengthy tour of the Empire. Their journey had included a sojourn at that pivot of all Greek sentiment, the city of Athens in Achaea. Here Hadrian acquired a new consort in the form of the ephebe Antinous. Courtiers whispered Caesar was smitten by the young man.
Fired two years earlier from being Hadrian's secretary, Suetonius was awarded a small suite within the huge palace complex being constructed at The Villa Tiburtina twenty miles outside Rome. The entire Court withdrew to The Villa for Rome's summer. The biographer was encouraged by Hadrian to research his Lives of the Caesars in the Villa's new Library. Obliged to attend many of the daily rituals of palace life, his client's duty included attendance at assemblies, religious rites, dining occasions, public audiences, and the Villa's elaborate entertainments.
Hadrian and Sabina were always accompanied by their interminable human contubernium, their attached mass of courtiers and families. This Household included wheedling senators, consulting magistrates, clerks, supplicant clients, foreign emissaries, several seers, astrologers, priests, generals of the Legions, a cluster of personal friends of disparate genders, poets, architects, Horse Guards and Praetorians galore, assorted wives, extended families, three dozen fidgeting children of varying ages and relationships, and an array of servants or slaves on tap to provide creature comforts.
This retinue assembled in protocol array in the private garden of the Doric Atrium at The Villa at Tibur each morning. An augur performed the reading of auspices detected in a fresh-killed offering's liver. Prayers to the gods, for the people and senate of Rome, with a nod to Caesar and his wife, were obligatory.
Suetonius lingered at the edge of this seething mass of vassals to appear to participate without actually being involved. The Imperial couple are obliged to perform their daily duties in such populous company, sharing their dining, bathing, toilet, and enrobing, at each stage of duty from dawn to bedtime. Only secret state business, the discussion of diplomatic correspondence, or sexual relations are exempt from public attention, though suitably reliable slaves might attend in mute invisibility.
Among this congregation Suetonius spied a young man close by Hadrian's side he had never seen in the retinue previously. The fellow followed the imperial couple at a slight distance to one side, attending the occasion yet somewhat abstractly remote from the action at hand. He was tall, though not quite as tall as Hadrian. He was solid bodied in a young athlete's slender-waisted, broad-shouldered, firmly muscled way. He was an utter contrast to the usual run of either decrepitly weedy or obscenely portly courtiers of the imperial retinue.
Further, unlike other males of this company where balded pates predominated, the young man had his own hair. That is except Hadrian himself, who retains a full growth of gray-tinged locks with a close-cropped beard.
The lad's shock of hair was of a strikingly light blond tone. This indeed was a novelty at Court except among the flaxen-locked Germans of the Horse Guards or the occasional Celtic slave. The lad's mop was the color of pale straw whose sheen glinted in the sunlight. Its fulsome bulk tousled around his crown and rolled down his nape in luxurious coils. They signified a young man who hadn't yet trimmed his hair or first beard as maturity's offering to Jupiter. His height, his powerful build, his copious hair, and his obvious youth, coupled with a very un-patrician sporty tan, made him stand out among the senior grizzlies who attend Caesar. Most of these are of the short, sallow, Italian or Aegean racial types, and are neither sporty, nor tanned, nor young.is His
To Suetonius's eye the newcomer was eighteen years of age or older and shone with visible health. Translucency of skin and a peachy flush at his cheeks were set beneath inquisitive blue-gray eyes. Despite the Latin world's prejudice against the pale eyes of barbarians, in Antinous they had an appealing impact. They searched deep into one's spirit with piercing, enquiring but a friendly intensity. A fresh scar across his left cheek was the sole physical blemish in this flawless animal.
Only the newest slaves at Court or students of the Imperial College on assignment as pages, with the occasional son or daughter of a senator, displayed such youth. Even guardsmen are all well into their mid-twenties by the time they are sufficiently proven to warrant duties for the emperor. Amid this motley crew gathered from around the Empire, the sculpted features of the Bithynian were conspicuous to all.
Antinous was attired in a simple white toga virilis without status markings, fully slung around his body in the proper manner above a tunic. It revealed muscular shoulders and a crisply defined chest line beneath its under- tunic. The toga's woolen swathe was clasped with a rustic bronze fibula brooch of Greek ethnic design, not Roman; the sole indication of the young man's breeding.
There was no ostentation — no bracelets of precious metal, no jewels, no kohl eye-liner in the eastern fashion, no clan or caste tattoos, no evident perfume wafting to engage attention, no overwrought hairstyle augmented with an elegant corona or pierced with inserted decors, and certainly no iron, silver, or gold finger or thumb rings certifying status. There was a solitary blue-stoned ring on one index finger.
This lack of baubles probably endeared him to Caesar's renown undecorated tastes. Hadrian himself displayed no unnecessary frippery.
A simple leather band restrained the lad's mane, accompanied by a thong around his neck with an attached bulla locket. In Rome this is the tell-tale sign of a freeborn youth, probably of good birth. It warns the ambitiously promiscuous to keep their damn distance or risk dire consequences at the hands of family!
Gossip whispered how Antinous's manner would be accompanied by the nauseating bravado of those unbearded, spoiled young men who were specially favored at Court by virtue of their youth. There were several readily known and barely tolerated. Yet with Antinous no beard was evident. Perhaps blond tones camouflage whiskers into an invisible downy fluff? As for a privileged swagger, the young man moved with calm discretion and polite modesty which belied the usual posturing of the Court's inner circle.
Suetonius noticed how the bustling retinue surrounding Hadrian unwittingly gave the young man a clear circle of space in unofficial acknowledgement of his status as Caesar's special intimate.
The lad's height was balanced with a slim, sinewy silhouette. Obviously well exercised after a lifetime invested at the palaestra in sports and military exercises, his rangy, slinky-hipped figure was typical of those statues of Olympic athletes in bronze or marble wrested impulsively by past emperors from cities across the Aegean or at Olympia itself. These trophies are now displayed in Rome's public gardens for all its citizens to savor.
Mostly nude, such works of the stonemason's craft exhibit the male form in its ideal magnificence. It was a form which Antinous's own chiseled appearance proved was no heroic myth or sculptor's erotic fantasy. It was a physique not often evident among Rome's melange of gnarled or decrepit denizens except perhaps among the junior military, some sporty patricians, or the arena's fleet-footed gladiators.
Antinous had a lithe and proportioned frame which proclaimed mature muscular power coupled with the animal dynamism of youth. This was a bearing assured to attract the attention of admirers of both genders.
His sharply-cut muscles, defined chest line, orbed abdominals, and triangular upper frame above lean loins and an athletic butt expressed the alpha male physique readily recognized by any sexually aware mortal. It proclaimed him as a vital font of virile fertility.
Here was a living, breathing Adonis, or a flesh-and-blood mirror of divine Apollo himself.
Yet other than physical characteristics which shine for but a handful of years, plus sexually-charged contours of a similar ephemerality, one wondered what on earth could appeal to the sophisticated tastes of our imperial aesthete, Hadrian, beyond simple lechery? The young fellow was very appealing in a manly way, but so are many young people of health and shapeliness who may be accessible to an emperor's earthier gratification.
