of the _atrium_, where the Romans kept their family archives,
portraits, and works of art. Yet he must have quitted this kind of
service some time before his death, since we find him in the company
of Hadrian upon one of those long journeys in which an _atriensis_
would have had no _atrium_ to keep. By the time of Hadrian's visit
to Egypt, Antinous had certainly passed into the closest
relationship with his imperial master; and what we know of the
Emperor's inclination towards literary and philosophical society
perhaps justifies the belief that the youth he admitted to his
friendship had imbibed Greek culture, and had been initiated into
those cloudy metaphysics which amused the leisure of semi-Oriental
thinkers in the last age of decaying Paganism.

It was a moment in the history of the human mind when East and West
were blending their traditions to form the husk of Christian creeds
and the fantastic visions of neo-Platonism. Rome herself had
received with rapture the strange rites of Nilotic and of Syrian
superstition. Alexandria was the forge of fanciful imaginations, the
majority of which were destined to pass like vapours and leave not a
wrack behind, while a few fastened with the force of dogma on the
conscience of awakening Christendom. During Hadrian's reign it was
still uncertain which among the many hybrid products of that motley
age would live and flourish; and the Emperor, we know, dreamed
fondly of reviving the cults and restoring the splendour of
degenerate Hellas. At the same time he was not averse to the more
mystic rites of Egypt: in his villa at Tivoli he built a Serapeum,
and named one of its quarters Canopus. What part Antinous may have
taken in the projects of his friend and master we know not; yet,
when we come to consider the circumstances of his death, it may not
be superfluous to have thus touched upon the intellectual conditions
of the world in which he lived. The mixed blood of the boy, born and
bred in a Greek city near the classic ground of Dindymean rites, and
his beauty, blent of Hellenic and Eastern qualities, may also not
unprofitably be remembered. In such a youth, nurtured between Greece
and Asia, admitted to the friendship of an emperor for whom
neo-Hellenism was a life's dream in the midst of grave state-cares,
influenced by the dark and symbolical creeds of a dimly apprehended
East, might there not have lurked some spark of enthusiasm combining
the impulses of Atys and Aristogeito