Quotes About Antinous

One of the strengths of the belief in Antinous was its appeal to the most sensitive and inward of mystical natures as well as to the exuberant, joyous and ecstatic sides of human experience.

Antinous is dead, is dead for ever, Is dead for ever and all loves lament Venus herself, that was Adonis lover, Seeing him, that newly lived, now dead again, Lends her old grief's renewal to be blent With Hadrian's pain.

Antinous sighed. 'The gods wanted to destroy us,' he said. 'That's everyone's excuse for behaving badly,' I said.

History and speculation have placed Antinous at Hadrian's side as the one great attachment of the emperor's life, the loss of whom caused this mature, sophisticated and highly experienced ruler to allow himself to be subsumed by grief.

A belief in Antinous' posthumous power seems to have exceeded even the formal declaration of his new status. Although there was greater resistance to the acceptance of an emperor's sexual partner as a god in the more urbane society of Rome, in the Greek east Hadrian's own philhellenism assured the new god's absorption into the Greek pantheon from the moment the emperor decided on his deification.

Hadrian, for whom it was rumoured the beautiful Antinous had sacrificed himself in the hope that his lover might find health and an extended life, died on 10 July 138 CE, less than eight years after his companion.

Antinous became a god within weeks of his death, and the new cult was taken up swiftly by devotees throughout the empire. Although it was never to be as popular in the Roman west, worship of Antinous flourished in the east and reached its apogee, unsurprisingly, in Antinous' homeland of Bithynia. In some places it continued until it was finally displaced by the state adoption of Christianity.