God of HomoLove

GOD OF HOMOSEXUALITY

Antinous The Beautiful
His face is full of Grace,
His Countenance is Beautiful.
The Restorer, The New Dionysus
Whose Salvation Has been Accomplished
He has again been Raised to Life.

ANTINOÜS, a beautiful youth of Claudiopolis in Bithynia, was the favourite of the emperor Hadrian, whom he accompanied on his journeys. He committed suicide by drowning himself in the Nile (A.D. 130), either in a fit of melancholy or in order to prolong his patron's life by his voluntary sacrifice. After his death, Hadrian caused the most extravagant respect to be paid to his memory. Not only were cities called after him, medals struck with his effigy, and statues erected to him in all parts of the empire, but he was raised to the rank of the gods, temples were built for his worship in Bithynia, Mantineia in Arcadia, and Athens, festivals celebrated in his honour and oracles delivered in his name. The city of AntinoOpolis was founded on the ruins of Besa where he died (Dio Cassius lix. I I; Spartianus, Hadrian). A number of statues, busts, gems and coins represented Antinoos as the ideal type of youthful beauty, often with the attributes of some special god.

Antinous was born in Claudiopolis, a city in the Roman province of Bithynia, in the year 111 A.D. or the thirteenth year of the reign of Trajan (98-117 A.D.) He was of humble parentage, his father perhaps held a position of prestige in the city. Claudiopolis, now the city of Bolu in modern Turkey, was situated at a major crossroads of the highway that led from Greece to Syria. Almost all land transport coming from the rich cities of the east, or from Europe passed through Claudiopolis. Antinous was therefore born in the right place and at the right time to be found by the only Emperor to personally travel by land to every corner of the Empire.

Hadrian toured Greece, Asia Minor and the Danube in the year 123 A.D., he would surely have passed through Claudiopolis, and it is during this tour that he most likely found the thirteen year old Antinous. Exactly how is unknown, all attempts to portray the event are just elegant poetry. Margaret Youcenour in her Memoirs of Hadrian gives us the Emperor surrounded by the noble youth of the city with a quiet, mysterious boy at the back of the crowd, listlessly gazing into a fountain. A scene in which Socrates would have been comforted. What ever may have been, Hadrian was overcome by Antinous. The event seems to have occurred in June of the year 123.

From Claudiopolis, Antinous was taken to Rome, presumable not by force, but most enigmatically with the good will of his parents. This was a time far removed from our present abhorrence both of Homosexuality and of Pederasty. To be chosen by the Emperor for explicit reasons was seen not as shameful but as a wonderful opportunity for advancement. The Platonic concept of love for boys with the aim of their education and furtherance was prevalent, acceptable and encouraged. Antinous was lifted up from the obscurity of his birth and sent to the extravagance of the greatest metropolis of the time, and installed in the Paedagogium, a finishing school for boys. Officially designed to prepare the most promising youth of the day for positions in the government, it had an alternate purpose as a training school for the male concubines of the rich who preferred polished, educated, well mannered boys to ruffians, of which they had many. Antinous found himself surrounded by the finest boys of his day, from all around the Empire, beauties of extraordinary grace of whom he was the star. There they were educated in Latin, Literature, Philosophy, Mathematics, and most importantly physical training. It was essentially a place for Antinous to become exposed to the grandeur of the Roman court into which he would soon find his place.

Though of Humble background, it is plain to see that Antinous was no ordinary boy. He must have possessed a penetrating mind, a depth of feeling, or that certain magnitude of soul that draws both the wise and the simple inexorably to him. He was captivating enough to forever change the Emperor of Rome. Hadrian was of course no ordinary Emperor, his wide record of accomplishments is proof enough. To capture him required divine qualities, beauty alone was insufficient, and there were certainly many rivals in his youth-loving court who might even have surpassed Antinous in this regard. If his beauty was combined with a profoundness of mind unlike anything in Rome, one can begin to see where the broad intelligence of Hadrian might have been intrigued. But this can only have been the beginning, like any love affair, there is a moment of love-at-first-sight that either dissipates like drunkenness, or intensifies as the petals slowly open, revealing an ever-deepening transportation. This can only have been the case, the circumstances of Hadrian and Antinous's love must have been above and beyond the usual story of Emperor and favorite. Had Antinous been female, we might have had another Justinian and Theodora.

Antinous is mostly unknown, like a myth or a legend, his own words have vanished, whether because they were ignored, or perhaps destroyed, lost, or covered in dust and decay, one can never know. That he was not a saint in the canonical sense is immediately apparent, there are no tales of miraculous deeds, nothing resembling charity, not a single austerity during the course of his life. His first virtue, his most overpowering, the one of which we can be certain, is that he is among the most beautiful and perfect of all creations. He is a beauty that transcends the stone into which it was invested by inspired ancient sculptors. This is his power and his virtue, this is why he deserves to be understood as a god.

He came to flower during the spring of the most glorious period of western civilization, a golden age known as the reign of the Antonines. The subjugation of the ancient world was accomplished, almost simultaneously with the birth of Antinous, during the wars of the Spanish born Emperor Trajan. His chosen successor Hadrian preferred to improve the interior of the civilized world over further vainglorious conquests. His public works and monuments are among the only remnants of the greatest and most lasting culture the western world has ever known. But until recently, these massive efforts have been almost completely ignored because of two actions which Christian moralists have viewed as completely detrimental to his character, both religious and even to our modern minds radical and shocking. The first was Antinous, and the second the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jews.