Antinoüs in Dublin

Above: A statue of Antinoüs in the 14 Henrietta Street Museum in Dublin, Ireland.

See also the previous posts:
• Antinoüs
• The Death of Antinoüs
• Antinoüs Unearthed
• Ganymede and Zeus

Recommended Reading:
• Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert
• Eromenos by Melanie McDonald
• Antinous: A Romance of Ancient Rome by George Taylor

Image: Photographer unknown.

Antinoüs Unearthed

This well preserved marble sculpture, unearthed during excavations in Delphi in 1894, portrays Antinoüs (or Antinoos), a Bithynian Greek youth of extraordinary beauty, who became the beloved companion or lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Antinoüs reportedly drowned in the Nile in 130 C.E. and was subsequently deified by Hadrian, who was so shattered by his premature death that he ordered statues and busts of the beloved youth placed in various cities, temples, and sanctuaries throughout the Roman Empire, including in the Temple of Apollo.

This particular work measures 1.84 meters in height and is housed in the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum of Delphi.

The Statue of Antinoüs at Delphi exemplifies the evolution of ancient portraiture. Its melancholy beauty, the graceful angle of the head and the high polish of the marble surface embody the spirit of the Roman Imperial age, when there was a tendency to revive classical Greek ideals of masculine beauty.

The photograph above (photographer unknown) shows the excavation site at Delphi on the day that the statue was discovered in 1894. It was unearthed by a team of French archaeologists who in 1891 were granted permission by the Greek government to excavate at Delphi. Most of the workers were locals from the village of Kastri which, before it was relocated, was built almost on top of the ancient religious site.


Related Off-site Link:
Mesmerizing Photo the Moment Ancient Masterpiece Is Unearthed at Delphi – Tasos Kokkinidis (Greek Reporter, Juky 22, 2018).

See also the previous posts:
• Antinoüs
• The Death of Antinoüs
• Ganymede and Zeus

Recommended Reading:
• Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert
• Eromenos by Melanie McDonald
• Antinous: A Romance of Ancient Rome by George Taylor

Image: Photographer unknown.

The Death of Antinoüs

By Mark Doty


When the beautiful young man drowned –
accidentally, swimming at dawn
in a current too swift for him,
or obedient to some cult
of total immersion that promised
the bather would come up divine,

mortality rinsed from him –
Hadrian placed his image everywhere,
a marble Antinoüs staring across
the public squares where a few dogs
always scuffled, planted
in every squalid little crossroad

at the farthest corners of the Empire.
What do we want in any body
but the world? And if the lover’s
inimitable form was nowhere,
then he would find it everywhere,
though the boy became simply more dead

as the sculptors embodied him.
Wherever Hadrian might travel,
the beloved figure would be there
first: the turn of his shoulders,
the exact marble nipples,
the drowned face not really lost

to the Nile – which has no appetite,
merely takes in anything
without judgment or expectation –
but lost into its own multiplication,
an artifice rubbed with oils and acid
so that the skin might shine.

Which of these did I love?
Here is his hair, here his hair
again. Here the chiseled liquid waist
I hold because I cannot hold it.
If only one of you, he might have said
to any one of the thousand marble boys anywhere,

would speak. Or the statues might have been enough,
the drowned boy blurred as much by memory
as by water, molded toward an essential,
remote ideal. Longing, of course,
becomes its own object, the way
that desire can make anything into a god.



Taken from Love Speaks It's Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems, selected and edited by J. D. McClatchy (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001).

For a video of Mark Doty talking about Hadrian and Antinoüs and reading his poem "The Death of Antinoüs," click here.


See also the previous posts:
Antinoüs
Ganymede and Zeus

Recommended Reading: Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert.

Opening image: "Antinous" by Teotemerity.

Antinoüs

Here’s a second excerpt from Vittorio Lingiardi’s excellent book Men in Love: Male Homosexualities from Ganymede to Batman.

For the first excerpt from Lingiardi’s book, click here.

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The Zeus-Ganymede relationship served as a model for many famous love stories in the ancient world, such as the love between the emperor Hadrian and his Greek eromenos Antinoos [or Antinous]. These two met in Bithynia, the younger man’s native country, around 123 B.C. . . . Hadrian abducted the boy and was devoted to him for the rest of his life. Inseparable companions, they always traveled together, and together took part in the Eleusinian mysteries.

Identifying himself with the king of Olympus, the emperor decided to restore all temples and statues dedicated to Zeus, including the Olympieion of Athens, with its huge statue of the god in gold and ivory sculpted by Phidias. In their turn, as a sign of gratitude, the Athenians dedicated a statue in the Parthenon to Hadrian. Throughout Greece, the Roman emperor came to be worshipped as a god in his own right, and thus, the new Greco-Roman religion acquired its own trinity, made up of Zeus, Jupiter, and Hadrian.

Consequently, the process of Antinoo’s divinization began while the young man was still alive and reached its apotheosis after the younger man’s mysterious death by drowning in the Nile.

Antinoos, the last divinity of the ancient Mediterranean world, was revered in ways similar to the cults of Osiris, Dionysus, Hermes, and Eros. Innumerable statues, coins, temples, and even a city, Antinoopolis, would bear for all time the name of melancholy Emperor Hadrian’s lost love. Before a bust of Antinoos on exhibit in the British Museum, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson “bent forward a little and said in a deep slow voice: ‘Ah – this is the inscrutable Bithynian.’ There was a pause and then he added, gazing into the eyes of the bust: ‘If we knew what he knew, we should understand the ancient world’” (C. Tennyson 1949, p. 395).

SpiralSea17's portrait of Antinous (2006).

Like Ganymede, Antinoos for centuries stood as a symbol of same-sex love, and also as a platonic ideal of spiritual love. Like Ganymede, Antinoos was transformed into a star: wanting his lover to be remembered for all eternity, Hadrian named a constellation after him. In the Almagest, Ptolemy’s first great compendium of Greek astronomy, the stars of Antinoos are mentioned as part of the Aqila (Eagle) group; in various ancient maps of the heavens.

Andrew Prior’s portrait of Antinous (2008).

Recommended Reading:
Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert.