eror was half a
god. He remembered how Zeus had loved Ganymede, and raised him to
Olympus; how Achilles had loved Patroclus, and performed his funeral
rites at Troy; how the demi-god Alexander had loved Hephaestion, and
lifted him into a hero's seat on high. He, Hadrian, would do the
like, now that death had robbed him of his comrade. The Roman, who
surrounded himself at Tivoli with copies of Greek temples, and who
called his garden Tempe, played thus at being Zeus, Achilles,
Alexander; and the civilised world humoured his whim. Though the
Sophists scoffed at his real grief and honourable tears, they
consecrated his lost favourite, found out a star for him, carved him
in breathing brass, and told tales about his sacred flower.
Pancrates was entertained in Alexandria at the public cost for his
fable of the lotos; and the lyrist Mesomedes received so liberal a
pension for his hymn to Antinous that Antoninus Pius found it
needful to curtail it.

After weighing the authorities, considering the circumstances of the
age, and estimating Hadrian's character, I am thus led to reject the
alternative of immolation. Spartian's own words, _quem muliebriter
flevit_, as well as the subsequent acts of the Emperor and the
acquiescence of the whole world in the new deity, prove to my mind
that in the suggestion of _extispicium_ we have one of those covert
calumnies which it is impossible to set aside at this distance of
time, and which render the history of Roman Emperors and Popes
almost impracticable.

The case, then, stands before us thus. Antinous was drowned in the
Nile, near Besa, either by accident or by voluntary suicide to save
his master's life. Hadrian's love for him had been unmeasured, so
was his grief. Both of them were genuine; but in the nature of the
man there was something artificial. He could not be content to love
and grieve alone; he must needs enact the part of Alexander, and
realise, if only by a sort of makebelieve, a portion of his Greek
ideal. Antinous, the beautiful servant, was to take the place of
Ganymede, of Patroclus, of Hephaestion; never mind if Hadrian was a
Roman and his friend a Bithynian, and if the love between them, as
between an emperor of fifty and a boy of nineteen, had been less
than heroic. The opportunity was too fair to be missed; the _role_
too fascinating to be rejected. The world, in spite of covert
sneers, lent itself to the sham, and Antinous became a god.

The uniformly contemptuo