MURDEROUS TRIUMPH OF THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE

“He lost his Antinous while sailing along the Nile and wept for him like a woman. Concerning this, there are various reports: some assert that he sacrificed himself for Hadrian, others what both his beauty and Hadrian’s excessive sensuality make obvious.”( from the Historia Augusta)

It was a monumental folly. South of Rome, the emperor Hadrian constructed a vast labyrinth of rooms, gardens, fountains, and colonnades. It was the largest, most luxurious, and certainly the most peculiar memorial ever left behind by a single man.

''Antinous was a youth of renowned beauty from Bithynia in north west Asia Minor (Turkey). He was the lover of the Emperor Hadrian and was deified (worshiped as a god) after drowning himself in the Nile in 130 AD. This statue, one of many carved after his death, is based on a classical Greek prototype of the 5th century BC. It was restored in the late 18th century by the Roman sculptor Pierantoni, whose additions include the cup and the jug. He has thus interpreted Antinous allegorically as Ganymede offering ambrosia to Jupiter (or Hadrian).''

Next door to a huge garden was an area known as the Fishpond Quadriportico. Here, a large pond, possibly it was a swimming pool, was enclosed by a quadriportico built on two levels. The upper level was a roofed colonnade and the lower, below ground level but lit by high up windows, was a cool and airy tunnel for walking on hot days. his architectural caprice, known as a cryptoportico, was a favorite with Hadrian. Psychologists , attempting to analyze the Emperor across the centuries, have said that his love for shadowy places, of the interplay of light and shade, and of the inconstant constancy of running water, indicates a tendency to restlessness, ambivalence , even schizophrenia. They point out also that the Villa is schizophrenically planned; it has no harmony as a whole but is divided into aesthetically unrelated complexes. Each building is oriented to sun and view rather than to its neighbors.

''We are very excited about the continuing progress on Clint Borzoni’s new opera Antinous and Hadrian. Composer Clint Borzoni, librettist Rochelle Bright, dramaturg Chuck Hudson and I held a nice productive meeting this past week. Clint and Rochelle have spent the summer hammering out a fully detailed synopsis. Rochelle has done brilliant work in fleshing out all of the characters and their relationships with each other, and has also ingeniously created some gripping thematic organization.''

If certain aspects of the Villa seem to indicate that hadrian was eccentric, others are monuments to his genius. For example, a certain room in the ”Bath Complex” is regarded as one of the wonders of modern architecture : its walls form an octagon, with alternately straight and convex sides, and its ceiling once soared dizzily for nine free-flying yards; a distance never achieved before and rarely since. Now, only a skeletal remnant of the vaults remains, and where rhe bathers used to congregate, great chunks of fallen masonry lie like burned out meteorites.

Hadrian had always had a restless spirit. He began sightseeing and traveling at an early age; first leaving his native Roman province for Rome in A.D. 86, on the death of his father, and was educated there under the supervision of his two guardians, one of whom was Trajan, at that time an important military commander. Hadrian’s tutors were Greek , and they inspired him with a lifelong love for Greek culture; his schoolmates called him the ”Greekling” . When he grew up, Athens, not Rome , was his favorite city, and most of his Villa is of Greek derivation.

Young Hadrian. ''After his death Antinous was worshipped as a god-hero throughout the Roman Empire. In our own times this worship continues in a transmuted form reflecting our modern preoccupations. I give below a Link to the Ecclesia Antinoi, the modern Church of Antinous.''

At fifteen Hadrian returned to Spain, and at nineteen began his long public career by serving as a tribune at the particular section of the Roman frontier that is now Budapest. Three years later, in A.D. 98, Trajan succeeded Nerva as emperor, and in A.D. 100 Hadrian was married to Sabina, Trajan’s great-niece and nearest living relative. It was generally assumed that Hadrian would succeed Trajan, but Trajan lived seventeen more years and not until he was on his deathbed did he make Hadrian his official adopted son and heir.

Hadrian had no son. His closest favorite was a young man named Antinous, and there are those who see in the Villa much evidence of Hadrian’s devotion to him. Statues of Antinous seem to have been there by the dozens. The childless and unhappily married Emperor, at any rate, put all his tremendous energies into work and continual activity. until he was well into his fifties, an old man, by Roman standards, he went on traveling, often marching great distances and sleeping in the open. From Scotland to the Euphrates, from the Rhine to the deserts of North Africa, everywhere he went he collected; not only objects but ideas. And one can imagine that during this time he amused himself by planning the great Villa that was to be an end-of-the-road for all his traveling and collecting.

an11" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/hadrian11.jpg" alt="Brian J. McMorrow. ''Statue of Antinous-Osiris, Roman Imperial Period (Hadrian) 131-138 AD''" width="402" height="600" />

Brian J. McMorrow. ''Statue of Antinous-Osiris, Roman Imperial Period (Hadrian) 131-138 AD''

Such a forgathering of the world,s most talented craftsmen and artists or such an amassment of precious materials has rarely been seen in the world before or since. Whole porphyry columns came by galley from Egypt, and from the quarries of North Africa, great slabs of serpentine, ”giallo antico” , and alabaster. It was quite impossible for Hadrian to be too lavish with himself; the notion that an emperor could be criticized for not watching expenses had not yet occurred to anyone.

Hadrian’s Villa was a vast toy chest to collect all the toys he collected including his favorite lover Antinonus, whom he treated like a toy, a form of human Barbie doll that he could be deified. Both their interconnected lives were part of a larger toy story that constituted the Roman principle of collecting  towns, cities and countries in a vast materialistic undertaking until eventually the toys came to life and caused the toy chest to crack asunder. Call the two the story of the Greekling and the Geekling.

Cryptoporticus with Mosaic Vault, n. 3a: mosaic ceiling with shells and glass decoration belonging to the cryptporticus and the basis villae of the ancient republican Villa, age of Sulla. Engraving by Agostino Penna, 1836.

Naturally, it fell into disrepair and was subsequently looted by both rich and poor. It was not only time that marred things at Hadrian’s Villa . Although the barbarians had taken away what was easily portable, such as candalabras, plates and jewels, and the citizens of Tivoli had managed to move a few larger items, it was left to the popes, cardinals and princes of the Baroque age to abscond with whole mosaics, inlaid marble floors, columns, capitals, and statues. By the eighteenth century, when ruins and archaeology became a fashionable intellectual interest and English noblemen made the Villa a scheduled stop on the Grand Tour, nearly everything beautiful that had been in sight had been carted away. Piranesi’s engravings show parts of the Villa looking just about as they do now, except much weedier. The stucco ceilings, like those at Pompei, inspired the British architect Robert Adam, who went home to adorn the great houses of England with the delicate stuccowork of the Romans. Here and there at the Villa are bits and pieces of ceilings which seem so typically Adam and eighteenth-century that it gives one a shock to realize they are fifteen hundred odd years older.

Hadrian's Villa Canopus

Scholar Sarah Waters has termed Antinous ” the most famous fairy in history” ; a figure that iconically represents the epitomy of homosexual fantasy who has been attributed proportions and mythological breadth far removed from the original form and character he was. He was the central figure that was shaped and manipulated by the late Victorian homosexual subculture. His beautiful profile and tragic fate often the subject of competing sexual and historiographical agendas. Antinous makes repeated appearances in Oscar Wilde’s work as a form of pulp fiction protagonist; reinvented in tales of exotic fantasies run amok or more straightforward expressions of forbidden desires.

”WHAT MAKES ONE, and keeps one, the most famous homosexual in history? What might such a role involve, and imply? In Ganymede in the Renaissance, a study of one strand of homoerotic representation in Eu- ropean visual art from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, James M. Saslow gives us some idea. In Greek mythology Ganymede was the beautiful Trojan shepherd boy whom Zeus abducted from Mount Ida and established, in Hebe’s place, as cupbearer to the gods. Saslow argues that, for a Renaissance culture that understood homosexuality primarily in terms of “relations between men and adolescent boys,” Ganymede
was a particularly suggestive icon: “the single most appropriate, if not the exclusive, symbol of male-male love.”  The congruence of Gany- mede’s career and dominant erotic models, in other words, ensured his continuing homosexual fame; it also obliged all those artists who ad- dressed his story to engage, implicitly or explicitly, in homosexual debate, and rendered their paintings and sculptures subtle but eloquent registers of the period’s sexual prejudices and codes.

Hadrian's Villa Canopus

As sexual models change, however, so do sexual icons. In the late nineteenth century–that decisive moment in modern homosexual
definition and organization–it is not Ganymede who can be found at the forefront of the homosexual imagination but a similar yet crucially different figure from classical history and myth: Antinous, handsome at- tendant to the Roman emperor Hadrian. Where Ganymede dominates homoerotic representation in the visual arts of the Renaissance, so Antinous reappears with striking regularity in the newly self-identified homo sexual literature of the late Victorian period.”

Eleanor Clark, however, cut more deeper to the chase in ”Rome and a Villa”. She asserts that what the statues of Antinous announce and glorify is sex, and less a fulfillment than a long languorous exacerbation, and a voluptuous delay unheard of at that time. The romantic obsession was a new kind of experience that was wrapped in a sensuality that was distinctly un-Roman. She claims this sultry shepherd child could have only come from the East; Antinous as incarnation of a lush middle-eastern handsomeness, somewhat gross and certainly empty; a cross between an Armenian rug salesman and King David; a shape of face that was unique and new within the Roman empire. …”The face , crowned with the richest ringlets yet seen in art, bends just a little downwards as in the resignation of the captive, nostalgic for a happiness he is no longer fit for and can scarcely remember…. The spring and tension of the perfect body have vanished; this one would change its pose only to sink, to fall, though in build it suggests great strength, more than Apollo; it is broad shouldered but passive… no little sleeping hermaphrodite, but a power to be shown on a scale with Hercules, a subtle and murderous triumph of the female principle. ”

''A view of the maritime theater from the South. It is possible to see the main axes meeting in the atrium in the center. The axes are partially delineated by the remains of column shafts that have been re-erected. There is a clear view through the columns along the main North-South axis of the island.''

”It is important when discussing the relationship between Hadrian and Antinous to give acknowledgement to the system of pederasty that existed their time. It was primarily a Hellenic institution and that Hadrian should have felt drawn to it is not at all unusual given his love of all things Greek. In the old Grecian way, the love of a man for a boy was considered to be the purest form of love. Love for a woman, ancient philosophers held, was a waste for a woman was an inferior being and lust felt for a woman was a dirty thing only necessary for procreation. But a boy was equal in all ways save age and hence worthy of adoration. The boy in such couples, known as the “eromenos,” would generally be entering puberty when the relationship began and would leave it when he began to show facial hair in his late teens or early twenties. Any male who preferred the submissive role in relationships after this point was refereed to as pathetic. The older man in the relationship, referred to as “erastes,” was usually between the ages of twenty and forty, for as was proverbially stated, “to be a lover when old is the worst of misfortunes.” (Obviously, Hadrian did not follow this advice.) In return for the respect, devotion, and sexual satisfaction offered by the eromenos, the erastes would provide the boy with training in mind, body, morals, customs, and responsibilities as well as devoted affection. As the boy’s family would most likely never have given him more than passing attentions, the affections of his erastes were seen as healthy and good for the child. That spiritual love should also have a physical component was seen as obvious and proper in most circles and hence few thought anything at all wrong or even odd about the system of pederasty. In deed, so much poetry and art was dedicated to it that even men who never took eromenoi and who seemed to have actually preferred the attentions of a woman often wrote verses praising boys anyway, just so that they would be accepted by their peers.”

''A view of the nymphaeum. There are six niches which alternate between rectilinear and curvilinear shapes. These niches would have held the fountains of the nymphaeum. There is a grate in the ground which covers the channel that would have allowed water to run from the nymphaeum to the pool in the courtyard''