Hadrian was born the son of empire. His father was a high-ranking and wealthy Roman senator who, as a soldier, had fought in the Roman provinces in modern-day North Africa, and was the cousin of the future emperor Trajan. Hadrian, like his father and Trajan, was probably born in Italica, the first Roman city to be built outside Italy, near modern-day Seville, in January of AD 76.
Hadrian’s family had settled in the Roman province of Hispania Baetica hundreds of years before he was born. An ancestor, probably an Italian who had fought to conquer the region for Rome, was given some land in the newly subdued territory upon his retirement. He married a local woman and became a farmer, a common story typical of Rome’s strategy of colonization and empire-building. To control the territory was not enough: an empire was built on cultural dominance, and the Romanisation of new provinces happened by ensuring the ruling elites of those territories were acculturated into Roman habits, tastes, and values, often through marriage. Baths and amphitheatres were built, gladiatorial games introduced, and (in much of the empire) Latin adopted as the official and primary language. From these colonies new generations of soldiers could be raised, resources could be extracted, and in time the people would come to regard themselves not as vanquished, but as Roman. At the same time, the colonies could have an influence back at the centre of Rome – some desired, some more insidious – including new ideas around sexuality.
Hadrian’s family, like Trajan’s, held political power, providing senators for Rome going back over five generations. Mr and Mrs Hadrianus were an exemplary provincial family in this regard, and their son, little Publius Aelius, may have expected to follow this tradition of making war and retiring into minor public service. The growth of the empire meant that the senate was now populated with senators from further afield than Italy and Rome, especially Spain, with its prosperous silver resources, and Greece, whose classical culture was hugely influential in Rome itself.
But trauma at a young age diverted Hadrian from his family’s well-worn path. In AD 86, when Hadrian was just ten years old, both of his parents died. According to Roman custom, the young orphan and his sister were then adopted by a wealthy male relative; it was just Hadrian’s luck that his new guardians were an official named Publius Acilius Attianus, and his father’s cousin, a young military officer named Marcus Ulpius Traianus, the future emperor Trajan. Ostensibly, this guardianship was for the safe protection of the orphan’s inherited property until he was old enough to take care of it himself, but it seems Trajan extended his role into a more paternal one, and set about planning the education of Hadrian. When Hadrian turned fourteen, Trajan sent for him in Rome.
The Roman Empire was barely 100 years old when Hadrian arrived. Just twenty-five years earlier the city had been devastated by a great fire under Nero; during Hadrian’s lifetime the Colosseum was opened, the volcano of Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii, and numerous military victories were achieved on the empire’s northern border in the Dacian Wars. It was a golden age, with a great flourishing of economic and cultural wealth. Even for a youth as well travelled as Hadrian, it must have been a thrilling place to find himself.
Hadrian took to his education well; he had a taste for earlier writers such as Cato the Elder, rather than the preferred statesman of his tutors, Cicero.1 But most notably, even at that young age, he fell in love with Greek culture, a love affair that would shape both his life and the Roman Empire. His passion for Greek literature and history was intense enough to earn him the nickname Graeculus, or ‘Greekling’, which was not entirely flattering. Greece had been a dominant Mediterranean power long before the rise of Rome, and what was known as ‘Hellenistic Greece’, a loose affiliation of sometimes warring, sometimes allied city-states and leagues, survived right through the period of the Roman Republic. It was not until the time of the first emperor, Augustus, that Greece was finally annexed in 27 BCE. By this stage, Greek influence was already deeply seated in Roman art, philosophy, architecture, administration, banking, and literature. Trade between the two cultures was long established, and young Roman men were sent to Greek cities to learn from the schools there. Many Romans could speak Greek, facilitated by the large numbers of Greeks, freemen and traders as well as slaves, who lived in Rome.
Despite their nascent strength as a republic, and Greek’s waning influence in the region, there was something in Greek culture that the Romans not only admired but aspired to. In the third Century BCE, the Roman nobility became increasingly Greek in their habits, a phenomenon known as ‘Hellenization’, and those with a particular taste for Greek culture were known as ‘philhellenic’. Under the rule of the emperor Nero, a notorious tyrant who, incidentally, was said to have twice been in a same-sex union (a truly Bad Gay), philhellenism became even more pronounced.
Yet there was also an ambivalence in this relationship. The Romans, after all, had conquered the Greeks, and to what extent could you truly want to replicate a loser’s culture? They filled their homes with Greek sculptures; but they were looted sculptures, their display as much a mark of subjugation as respect. When Greek-speaking Romans addressed the Senate, their words were translated into Latin, as much as a sign of inferiority as to help with comprehension. Even within the more Hellenistic aristocracy, there were significant figures who saw Greece as a moral threat, if not a military one. Indeed, Cato the Elder, whom Hadrian studied enthusiastically, was one such figure. Greece, Cato felt, was a degenerate and decadent culture and its adoption would bring trouble for the Romans, whom he saw as a people of noble simplicity and strength. Addressing his own child he said, ‘I shall speak of those Greeks in a suitable place, son Marcus, telling what I learned at Athens, and what benefit it is to look into their books, – not to master them. I shall prove them a most worthless and unteachable race. Believe that this is uttered by a prophet: whenever that folk impart its literature, it will corrupt everything.’2
This Roman ambivalence, that the Greeks were both wise and decadent, worthy of study but worth being wary of, rang down through history, and has had a significant impact on the history of homosexuality. As the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans was supposedly ‘rediscovered’ by scholars in western Europe in the Renaissance, many adopted the same prejudices and intellectual arguments that were being fought almost two millennia earlier. Greek attitudes towards same-sex relationships were known about, and were hard for good Christian academics to square with their otherwise fulsome admiration of the virtues of classical Greece. While most Victorian scholars were disgusted by the ‘unspeakable vice of the Greeks’, as the uptight Mr Cornwallis refers to it in E.M. Forster’s Maurice, those who found their desires drifting in a similar direction found in Greek culture a heroic example that their sort had indeed always existed, and began mining Greek literature for heroes and storylines that might serve as a defence of the unspeakable vice. The works of Greeks like Plutarch and Plato were used to help imagine a positive model for male and female same-sex relationships, although, as we’ll see, neither the Greeks nor the Victorians had quite the same concept of the ‘homosexual’ that we have today.
For the Greeks, the concept did not meaningfully exist at all; the social identities we today understand in the West as a gay man or a bisexual woman, for example, simply weren’t something that people recognised. Greece was not a single political entity with a set of laws and customs that everybody followed; different city-states developed different sexual cultures. Across Greece, sexual activity between men was common; the important prohibitions were not focused on gender, but status (and hence age).
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes uses a myth to demonstrate the nature of love, explaining that lovers are the two reunited components of single souls split in two by Zeus. This myth of soulmates is not as structured around ideas of heterosexual compatibility as you might presume. Aristophanes explicitly mentions same-sex relationships, but the important qualification is that they are between men of different ages. For Aristophanes, if not necessarily for Plato, sex between men and boys was not merely tolerable, but noble in itself. Of such people, Aristophanes says that ‘while they are boys … they fall in love with men, they enjoy sex with men and they like to be embraced by men. These boys are the ones who are outstanding in their childhood and youth, because they’re inherently more manly than others. I know they sometimes get called immoral, but that’s wrong: their actions aren’t prompted by immorality but by courage, manliness, and masculinity. They incline towards their own characteristics in others.’3 Worryingly for us, he says such men go on to become politicians.
What is fundamental to understand, of course, is that this form of relationship is only seen as good and honourable between men and teenage boys, while sexual behaviour between men of the same age was taboo. This is an inversion of our own social norms. Today the defining characteristic of such a relationship to observers would be the abusive power imbalance. In the same manner, in Greek society it would also be the age difference that would be regarded as the core characteristic of the relationship, although in a positive way, and not the gender roles.
This form of pederastic relationship was seen to have many qualities; in the Symposium, Phaedrus suggests that the loyalty between male lovers and their aversion to being shamed in front of each other by acts of cowardice offered them a unique advantage in organising a society, claiming that ‘the best possible organisation [for a] battalion would be for it to consist of lovers and their boyfriends … A handful of such men, fighting side by side, could conquer the whole world’.4 In fact, such a battalion did exist in the city-state of Thebes. The Sacred Band of Thebes was a military unit made up of 150 pairs of male lovers and was regarded as the most elite unit in the Theban army, its soldiers being of unusual bravery and moral character.
Still, the acceptance of a certain type of same-sex behaviour is littered with qualifications concerning status. Often, sexual relationships between men involving anything up the bum were frowned upon, because anal sex is too close to penis-in-vagina sex. This would make the receptive partner in anal sex something like a woman or a prostitute, as in many circumstances ‘homosexual anal penetration [was] treated neither as an expression of love nor as a response to the stimulus of beauty, but as an aggressive act demonstrating the superiority of the active to the passive partner’, a drop in status too humiliating to be sanctioned.5
To be the receptive partner in anal sex was regarded as being kinaidos, or effeminate: there’s no escaping it, bottom-shaming is as old as European civilization itself, baked into the deep misogyny of patriarchal societies. This prohibition on anal did not apply to men visiting male sex workers, or men having sex with enslaved males, so long as the man of higher status was the one doing the penetrating, a good illustration of how, in Greek society, status was the key determinant of the nature of sexual activity.
This early history of same-sex relationships in Greece and Rome is vital to understanding Hadrian’s story. The philhellenic Romans took up many of the same concepts and attitudes towards homosexuality, but with an important difference. While for the Greeks the pederastic relationship had a pedagogical and philosophical basis – to ensure the induction of noble males into the intellectual and political society they were to dominate – for the Romans the focus was instead on the sensual.
Roman culture was openly celebratory of male dominance and power. There are no European cultures for whom the hard cock was such a symbol of worship; indeed the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, literally attended to the cult of Fascinus, a deity depicted as a disembodied erect penis, usually with wings. Their role was to tend to the holy fire at the centre of Rome, from which any Roman citizen could light their own fire. As such, the fire symbolised the continuance of Rome and the integrity of the state. That a hard cock was one of the subjects of the Vestal’s adoration is no coincidence, as the integrity of the male body was a symbol of a free Roman’s political status.6
That’s because for a free man, a citizen of Rome, to be the penetrated partner in a same-sex act was, in some way, a violation of the integrity of his body. To be a free Roman meant your body could not be violated. In the words of historian Amy Richlin, ‘To be penetrated, for a Roman, was degrading both in a physical sense of invasion, rupture, and contamination, and in a class sense: the penetrated person’s body was likened to the body of a slave.’7 This emphasis on virility and conquest is slightly different to the Greeks’ obsession with pederasty and pedagogy, but to much the same ends, and, as we will see in later chapters, becomes part of the dynamic of the politics of masculinity, and the masculinity of politics, throughout modern European history.
When Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus accused his enemy and co-consul Julius Caesar of being ‘Queen of Bithynia’, the accusation was not that that Caesar was gay, but that he had been fucked in his younger days by Nicomedes IV, the king of Bithynia. These accusations clearly stuck. Even in Caesar’s moment of triumph, having crushed the Gauls in the Gallic Wars, a popular rhyme in Rome began ‘Gallias Caesar subegit, Caesarem Nicomedes’ (Caesar subjugated the Gauls, Nicomedes subjugated Caesar). It seems to be true what the senator Haterius said, that ‘unchastity (impudicitia: allowing anal penetration) is a source of accusation for a freeborn (male), a necessity for a slave, and a duty for a freed slave’.8
Status and freedom, then, were vital to Roman conceptions of both sexuality and society. Indeed, after his education, Hadrian took his first official appointment, as a member of a decemviri, a ten-man commission that ruled upon the formal status of people. It was a minor role but accepted as a fitting first step into a future senatorial career. From there, he took up the role of a military tribune with the Legio II Adiutrix, a military legion stationed in Aquincum (modern-day Budapest).9 A military tribune was a high-ranking officer who was organisationally, although not militarily, second-in-command of the legion. An appointed position, it required administrative skill, but it was also a position for young members of the senatorial rank to learn the qualities and competencies deemed necessary for future service as a senator.
It was expected that most young men on such a career path would become a military tribune for a short time. Hadrian, however, served in the role three times, for three different legions, giving him significant political advantages in the future. More than this, according to his biographer, Anthony Birley, it was in Aquincum that Hadrian developed his lifelong ability to talk to people across the class system.10
When Hadrian was twenty-two, serving his second tour as a tribune, Emperor Domitian, a ruthless and moralistic autocrat, was assassinated in a palace coup. His enemies in the Senate damned his memory, melting down his statues and pulling down his victory arches, and replaced him with a safe pair of hands, Nerva. The toppling of Domitian had been unpopular with his elite Praetorian Guard, and Nerva was probably a compromise candidate between the guard and the Senate, not least because, being old and childless. He left the door open for either side to make the political manoeuvrings to secure their own candidate not too far down the line. Nerva attempted to soothe both sides, but pleased no one. His authority was fatally compromised, so he named a successor in the hope that this might buoy up his flagging regime. He chose a popular young general who was busy fighting for the empire on its Germanic borders, Marcus Ulpius Traianus. In the Historia Augusta, the general was said to have been told the news by a special messenger dispatched to Upper Germany: the future Hadrian.11 It’s no surprise Hadrian wanted to bring these good tidings, for Marcus Ulpius Traianus was his adoptive guardian: Trajan.
Trajan did not have to wait long to become emperor. The following year Nerva suffered a stroke and died, and with his death, new opportunities opened up to the young Hadrian.
By age twenty-five he was back in Rome, acting as go-between for the emperor and the Senate. In short order he became first the Senate record-keeper, and then the tribune of the plebs. Originally this role had been reserved for non-noble Romans, and was elected by their assembly. Among their rights and duties was the ability to lay the demands of the people before the aristocrats in the Senate, to intercede on the people’s behalf in disputes with the magistrates, and to propose legislation. For the next decade or so, Hadrian ping-ponged between working in Rome, including as a praetor, and fighting on the empire’s northern borders in what is now eastern Europe.
In Rome, Hadrian managed to integrate himself even further into Trajan’s life, becoming increasingly close with the emperor’s family, especially his wife, Pompeia Plotina. Plotina was, like Hadrian, born in Hispania, and was a keen advocate of Greek culture and values. It was probably Plotina who found him his political roles on Trajan’s staff, and it was almost certainly she who arranged for him to be married into the family, to Trajan’s grand-niece VibiaSabina.12 Sabina had been raised by her mother in Trajan’s household since she was a baby, following the death of her father.
Given what we know already of Roman obsession with status and sexual mores, it should come as no surprise that marriages within the senatorial rank tended to be political rather than romantic, but Hadrian’s was far from a love match. Sabina was intelligent and educated, but she and Hadrian were said not to get on, and he treated her shabbily throughout their marriage. This was not helped by the fact that Hadrian clearly preferred boys, and Sabina was, according to some sources, the lover of her best friend, Julia Balbilla.13 This lavender marriage produced no children, but she performed her political duty and stayed close to Hadrian’s side for most of his life, eventually dying just a year before him.
Some such arrangements work surprisingly well, but theirs was a cold and cruel marriage. It probably didn’t help that Hadrian’s love for younger men, in the Greek manner of erastes and erom-enos, the ancient equivalent of a daddy top and twink bottom, was already a key part of his sex life, and was getting him in trouble. It seems that, as a younger man working for Trajan, he overstepped the bounds and started hitting on boys that the emperor himself regarded as his, demonstrating how deeply the pederastic model ran through the upper reaches of the empire. But he didn’t leave it at that; in fact, one of the key criticisms of Hadrian was not merely that he had sex with younger men, something the philhellenic Romans tolerated, but that he fucked adult men, his peers, too.14
The twink theft of the perpetually horny Hadrian did not go unanswered and caused a serious rift between him and his benefactor, a situation that had repercussions later. Waiting for more benefaction, he received neither a job as a consul nor the expected announcement that he was ‘Caesar’, the heir to the emperor.
In the meantime, his location was not certain, but it seems likely that he was sent to Greece around 109, a trip that must have greatly excited and influenced him. It was an important time for the empire, and the focus of its cultural and military might was turning east. The Parthian Empire, which stretched from Armenia to the Hindu Kush, had ruled its territory for over three hundred years and had been pushing its borders up against the empire. The Parthians had long fought with Rome over both territory and client states, and Trajan wished to suppress and conquer them. He had already extended Roman territory into the Middle East, turning former client kingdoms into Roman provinces. Athens was rising in prominence and importance, and it was clear the empire needed another centre of power in the East.
Like every gay who goes on holiday to Greece, Hadrian grew a beard (distinguishing himself from the clean-shaven Romans), wined and dined with Athenian society, took in lectures and talked with philosophers, and became smitten with the culture. The feeling was mutual: Athens made him a citizen and in 112 he was made eponymous archon, the position of magistrate and ruler of the city, which he held for a year. The trip was clearly influential on him, imbuing in him not just a desire to further Hellenize the Roman Empire as a whole (and not just the aristocrats in the city of Rome), but also a desire to travel, and to rule directly.
Yet his stay in Greece was brief. In 114 Trajan began his military campaign against the Parthians, and Hadrian took control of a legion as a legate. Trajan’s war was far more successful than previous Roman campaigns, allowing the empire to push into Mesopotamia for the first time. But it was undermined by a wave of rebellions throughout the eastern part of the empire, including a rebellion of Jews in the Kitos War, the suppression of which drew resources from the Parthian campaign and fatally undermined Roman attempts to finish them off. In 117, on campaign, Trajan had a stroke. He had made the empire larger than it had ever been, but also stretched to its limits, and, catastrophically, without an heir.
This was a crucial moment. As he lay on his deathbed, without a named successor, the fate of the empire hung in the balance. Luckily, a woman was at hand to sort things out. Plotina announced that her husband had named his heir, and it was to be her favourite, Hadrian. We will leave aside that Trajan himself never formally adopted Hadrian as his successor; the important thing was that the empire was not left leaderless. Hadrian informed the Senate in a letter that travelled with the dead emperor’s ashes that the job was done, and he had the support of the troops of the eastern legions who felt Rome could not be left leaderless a second longer.15 The Senate confirmed him, and he rewarded the soldiers with a bonus. He never forgot Plotina’s role in his accession; upon her death four years later, she was, like her husband the emperor, deified and made part of the official imperial cult.
Hadrian’s position was hardly safe. He had influential enemies and a demoralised army along its vast borders, spreading from modern-day Scotland to the Black Sea, from the Arabian Peninsula to the Straits of Gibraltar and beyond. He faced rebellions, insurrections, and incursions. Acquiring new territories was out of the question. So, instead, Hadrian marked his reign by consolidating what he had, attempting to create an integrated empire with a shared cultural foundation in Hellenism, and by building. And boy, did he build!
Hadrian’s legacy is in his buildings, a project deeply tied in with his campaign to pacify and consolidate the empire. Wherever he travelled, he left everything from enormous fortifications to new temple complexes, walls, arches, and gates, even whole new cities. While most Roman emperors stayed in Rome, too paranoid to leave their scheming senators or Praetorian Guard unattended, Hadrian spent the majority of his rule travelling outside Italy. But before his campaign to turn the empire into a stable, peaceful polity could begin, he had to pacify the frontiers. With the help of his Greek friend (but of course), the fabulously named Marcius Turbo, as his closest, more trusted military adviser, he crushed the Jewish revolt in Roman Judea. Crushing more rebellions in North Africa, he left Turbo in charge of two provinces on the Mediterranean coast, returning to Rome to try and clean up a different mess. At home his Praetorian Guard had put down an alleged conspiracy against Hadrian in Rome with astonishing swiftness and brutality, a move that forever tarnished his relationship with the Senate.
He then began a series of sweeping reforms, both to sort Roman finances and win some political capital. New systems for child support and help for widows were announced, and a system for funding magistrates’ travels from central coffers, rather than on the back of local communities, were introduced. But most significantly of all, Hadrian organised a forgiveness of private debt, symbolically burning the records of debt in the centre of the city. This not only won him friends, but effectively served as an economic stimulus package, putting money back into the pockets of Roman consumers.16
Pacification also included bold new building projects, such as a temple, altar, and basilica dedicated to his recently departed and much beloved mother-in-law, Matidia, and a temple to his adoptive father, Trajan. Also, the Pantheon, a temple to all the gods, to replace the one that had burnt down in the reign of Trajan. The new Pantheon was an architectural marvel, with a rotunda some 150 Roman feet wide and 150 Roman feet tall. When it was built, with its oculus that allows in light, air, and rain, it was the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, a record it still holds almost two thousand years later.
Having settled disquiet at home, Hadrian began to visit his empire, leaving his old friend Marcius Turbo in charge of the Praetorian Guard, overseeing the city. He travelled first to the Germanic borders, where he set about restoring discipline with new sets of military codes that removed the luxuries that had set in.17 It seems likely that while this new regime was not popular with the officers, it might have gone well with the lowly legion-arii, especially when Hadrian himself renounced the luxuries of his position and joined them in the mud, eating the same basic meals and wearing a simple uniform. He aimed to project an image as a good, fair, and honest military leader, who led from the front and was imbued with all the qualities of his best predecessors.
Not just to keep the German tribes out but also to keep the Romans in, Hadrian ordered that a vast palisade wall across the Germanic frontier be built of huge wooden posts to delineate and fix the border. The message was set quite literally in stone when Hadrian visited Britain in 122 with Sabina. Veteran soldiers were to be made citizens, and, in a move common across his reign, the land’s incarnation in the form of a woman – in this case, Britannia – was deified, and a shrine built in her honour. He also continued the consolidation of territorial gains, the firming up of the borders: in this case, by commissioning the construction of a wall that crossed the entire country.
Hadrian’s Wall is a perfect symbol for the man’s reign, demonstrating his desire to ensure internal peace as a priority over expansion, and demonstrating that stability and his own personal power through the metaphor of stone. The Wall is colossal in its ambition, the most impressive frontier defence of the Roman world. It was over seventy miles long, stretching from coast to coast, splitting the island in two. But for the emperor, it was more than a fortification; it was a statement of political intent for the course of his reign, to literally build peace by preparing for war. Hadrian left within the year, and the wall would be completed about six years later. In the meantime, however, he was about to embark on a relationship that would change his life.
After his time in Britain, Hadrian continued his travels, including returning to his homeland of Hispania. He then travelled back towards the Black Sea and the Middle East, aiming to reach an agreement and end hostilities with the Parthian Empire. It’s highly possible that it was while in Nicomedia, a Greek city in modern-day Turkey, that he first set his eyes on a youth named Antinous.
Antinous was from a Greek family who lived in the nearby city of Claudiopolis, named after the Roman emperor Claudius. Hadrian craved the Hellenic, and his feelings towards Antinous were no different. He was greedy for the Greek boy and yearned to possess what he had to offer: beauty and youth. Antinous was probably in his early teens when they met; Hadrian was in his late forties. There is some dispute over whether they knew each other so early, but according to Royston Lambert, the evidence points to that summer of 123.18
It is unlikely that Hadrian’s desire was instantaneous, or if it was, that he consummated their relationship at that point. Instead, following the Greek model of pedagogy and pederasty, Hadrian decided to send the young man to Rome for an education, just as he had been sent thirty years before. Meanwhile, the emperor continued on his travels through Asia Minor and North Africa. He again helped shore up the overstretched military, and contributed funds, as he had throughout his reign, to rebuilding cities devastated by the Jewish revolts or by natural disasters. He then spent a year in Greece, succeeding in bringing the aristocracy into a closer political alignment with their Roman conquerors.
Despite Roman supremacy, the old elite and their political systems were still largely intact. Hadrian, an admirer of their system, persuaded two Greek noblemen to join the Roman Senate for the first time. He encouraged the citizens of Athens to start funding their own civic infrastructure, in part by himself establishing two foundations to support Athens’s popular public games, including a horse race among athletic younger men. Out of the goodness of his heart, he decided to attend the boys’ race personally and preside over them: truly, when it came to helping support muscular young men, his generosity knew no limits.19
He built temples and a huge library for the city of Athens. He even ensured the completion of the enormous Olympieion, the temple to the Olympian god Zeus. The building was begun seven centuries before Hadrian but he ensured, at vast expense, that it was completed on his watch. His generosity and affection for the Greeks was mutual; he was rewarded not just with statues, but with the nickname ‘Hadrianos Sebastos Zeus Olympios’, with some identifying him with no less than the God of Gods himself.20
Hadrian returned to Rome. In 126 he began to fall ill, and it seems it was at this time that he found comfort in the arms of Antinous, who was now in his late teens. Hadrian was, without doubt, a difficult man: tight-lipped and secretive, prone to rage, he made and lost friends quickly. But, for a man who conducted his political life with such austerity, he threw himself into love with grand, high passion.21 He wrote poems for the boy, while continuing to humiliate Sabina. Later authors, writing a few hundred years after his death, depicted Antinous as ‘the slave of Hadrian’s lust’, his ‘husband’, and ‘the love of his heart’.22 But was Hadrian’s affection and love for Antinous purely paternal-istic or platonic, an admiration for his youth and beauty? Put simply: did they fuck?
Given the lascivious nature of both contemporary sources and Hadrian’s own words, the depictions of the young man (usually depicted as a muscular, handsome, and radiant youth of twenty) that littered Hadrian’s villas, and the contemporary context of both Roman sexuality and philhellenism, it’s hard to imagine that they could not have. Such a pederastic relationship would have been familiar, even perhaps expected, by Greek Antinous. Beyond that, though, Hadrian clearly felt something more for Antinous than just desire for his body. On an obelisk he devoted to the youth, Hadrian described him as intelligent and wise, and the two seemed to share an almost spiritual bond. Such infatuation must have been a huge burden for the younger man to bear.
In 128, Hadrian took Antinous to Greece. There they took part together in the Eleusinian Mysteries, a week-long religious initiation ritual into an archaic agrarian cult, probably dating back to Minoan civilization. Performed largely by women, the rituals included feasting, procession, vigil, and pilgrimage, although most of the details, kept secret by initiates upon pain of death, were never revealed. Some modern scholars suggest that the ritual involved the consumption of hallucinogens; coming at the end of such a spectacular ritual, with the initiates being informed of holy mysteries, any trip must have been powerfully intense. Hadrian had already been initiated into the first order on a previous trip, but for Antinous, it was his first time.
The rituals climaxed in a dark, crowded hall on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Gulf of Elefsina. The high priest would appear in a flash of intense light by the altar. In the words of the historian Plutarch, ‘Just before the end, the terror is at its worst. There is shivering, trembling, cold sweat, and fear. But the eyes perceive a wonderful light. Purer regions are reached and fields where there is singing and dancing, and sacred words and divine visions inspire a holy awe.’23
For Hadrian, this second initiation signalled a rebirth, a rejuvenation. For the much younger Antinous, the vision of death and afterlife may have been more disturbing. From that point on, the relationship between the man and the boy gained an almost religious dimension. Hadrian began to revel in the Greek conception of him as Zeus, and as he grew more philhellenic than ever, an avowed Emperor of the East, the relationship with his young lover became increasingly public and formal. Taken with his role, Hadrian decided to continue the Hellenization of the wider Roman Empire. He decided to found a league of Greek city-states, in emulation of Pericles. He also wanted to emulate the work of Alexander the Great, another Bad Gay whose conquests across Asia Minor and the Middle East had kickstarted a Hellenic culture hundreds of years previously. Hadrian called his project the ‘Panhellenion’, but it failed as a political project, instead working mainly as a cultural and religious organisation. Still, Hadrian’s verve to spread Hellenism was far from dimmed.
Meanwhile, the entire imperial entourage continued their journey onwards towards the Middle East. Arriving in Egypt, Hadrian set to work on his favourite hobby, rebuilding destroyed monuments. Alexandria was, at this time, still a Greek city, although the rest of Egypt worshipped its old gods, and he was as beguiled by the potential of drawing them into his syncretic religion as Zeus. From Alexandria, the men set out on a lion hunt in Libya. Antinous was no longer a boy, but a young, virile man, handsome but outgrowing the Hellenistic relationship that Hadrian had cultivated. On the hunt the men cornered a ferocious lion and, in an act of strength and bravery, Hadrian killed it just as it seemed to be sure to devour Antinous – or so the stories and monuments commissioned by Hadrian say.
Back in Alexandria, the imperial procession prepared for a trip by boat down the Nile River. The trip was long – around six weeks, and throughout the journey Hadrian and Antinous spent considerable time partaking in the rites and rituals of traditional religions, as well as magic ceremonies. They would have heard the origin myths of a religious practice deeply tied to the Nile, around which Egyptian society literally and symbolically congregated, its annual flooding being the source of life and prosperity for the Egyptian kingdom. These included the story of Osiris, the god of judgement, the bringer of life, who controlled the Nile and who was described as ‘He Who Is Permanently Benign and Youthful’. Antinous, himself worshipped by a god-king, must have recognised a kindred spirit in that description; portentously, the story of Osiris ends with his murder, drowned in the very waters of the river.
Antinous drowned in the Nile. More than this, we cannot say for certain. Perhaps it was an accident; Hadrian himself recounts that he fell into the river. Others are not so sure. After all, Hadrian was not merely a scholar of the religious and occult, but a true believer. Antinous, his only true love, was growing physically out of his role. They had experienced a profound, disturbing, and abusive journey together, with both becoming, in Hadrian’s eyes, increasingly divine in the process. Perhaps the temptation to offer to the Nile a sacrifice to love, or greatness, was too much. According to Cassius Dio, a historian writing after Hadrian’s death, ‘Antinous died either by falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or, as the truth is, by being offered in sacrifice.’24 According to the Roman historian Sextus Aurelius Victor, Antinous was a sacrifice, but a willing one, prepared to offer his life for the prolongation of his emperor’s.
The relationship, disturbing enough to modern ears as it is, takes a profoundly dark turn with these allegations. Each account, accident or sacrifice, is feasible; if it was a sacrifice, it suggests both a religiosity and a sense of loyalty and devotion that is hard for us to comprehend, where desire and violence, sex and divinity come together in a relationship of toxic and passionate intensity. One thing we do know is that after his death, Hadrian regarded Antinous as nothing less than a god. He was immediately deified as a god by both Hadrian and the local priesthood, who formed a cult devoted to him and identified him with no lesser a figure than Osiris.
Antnous’s deification was extremely unusual, as the deification of people who weren’t members of the imperial family was prohibited, and it occurred without the consultation of the Senate. Hadrian also decreed that a city should be built at the site of the young man’s death, named Antinoöpolis in his honour. It was the first Hellenic city so far down the Nile, and was the site of worship for a cult that formed around Antinous. The cult became uncommonly popular, spreading throughout the empire; the boy-god was a figure of devotion, with shrines and statues built in his honour, especially in the East. Rumours abound, fittingly, that secret rites in Antinoöpolis included orgies in the dead of night.
While Antinous’s cult was to be held in deep affection, and would last for hundreds of years, until eradicated by the Christians, any potential sacrifice towards Hadrian’s longevity was in vain. The remainder of his life was taken up fighting a resurgent Jewish insurrection in Judea, the Bar Kokhba revolt. The revolt was largely a result of Hadrian’s own hubris: as well as banning the religious practice of circumcision (according to the Historia Augusta), he decided to re-establish the holy city of Jerusalem, still in ruins after its destruction sixty years prior, as a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina (after his family name) and the Roman god Jupiter. He built a temple to Jupiter in the centre of the new colony – on Temple Mount. The ensuing war, which lasted for around four years, was incredibly bloody. Cassius Dio claims that over half a million Jews were killed; their homes, villages, and farms destroyed; and the name Judea wiped from the map.
By the end of the revolt, still mourning his lover, Hadrian had returned to Rome. He was close to a broken man, in ill health and miserable. His unloved and humiliated wife Sabina was to die soon after his return, followed by his named successor Lucius Aelius Caesar. He tried, and failed, to commit suicide rather than endure further illness, but on the 10th of July in 132, he was to die at his villa outside Rome. He was sixty-two. Fittingly, for a man who devoted his life to building and to stability, he was buried in a colossal mausoleum that he had commissioned for himself. It was the tallest building in Rome upon its completion. Having been converted into a fortress in the mediaeval period, it still stands today, and is known as the Castel Sant’Angelo – the Castle of the Holy Angel.
Hadrian’s life is a compelling one. His official biography as an emperor tells a traditional story of the consolidation of an empire, the suppression of rebellion and the building of great structures, the sort of story that has filled history books for hundreds of years. However, behind this desire for order was another less traditional story, one of an overwhelming, all-consuming passion for a beautiful man he quite literally worshipped as a young god. On one level, it’s clear that this devotional desire was integral to Hadrian’s legacy: to ignore Hadrian’s love for Antinous is to ignore the central pillar around which Hadrian built his life. But on another level, Hadrian’s story is also hugely illuminating for our understanding of homosexuality through history.
In the Victorian era, European men searching for historical examples of their own same-sex desires would find in the Greek and Roman worlds a new model for their own sexuality, men who loved other men without shame, and who weren’t regarded by their peers as aberrant, diseased, and disgusting, as they themselves were. A story was constructed that said homosexual men have always existed. Yet a closer look at the nature of same-sex love in the society in which Hadrian lived, and his obsessive love for a much younger man in particular, complicates the idea of an unchanging thread of homosexuality that passes through history, sometimes suppressed and sometimes celebrated, of same-sex relationships that looked the same and felt the same. As we will see, the designation of gender as the most important distinguishing feature of sexual identity is not historically universal, and the meaning of gender is not fixed through history. Hadrian’s story tells us of the importance status, power, education, and sexual role has had in the story of same-sex desire, something that will have a huge impact on the Bad Gays that followed him.