us tone of antique authorities almost
obliges us to rank this deification of Antinous, together with the
Tiburtine villa and the dream of a Hellenic Renaissance, among the
part-shams, part-enthusiasms of Hadrian's 'sumptuous' character.
Spartian's account of the consecration, and his hint that Hadrian
composed the oracles delivered at his favourite's tomb; Arrian's
letter to the Emperor describing the island Leuke and flattering him
by an adroit comparison with Achilles; the poem by Pancrates
mentioned in the 'Deipnosophistae,' which furnished the myth of a new
lotos dedicated to Antinous; the invention of the star, and
Hadrian's conversations with his courtiers on this subject--all
converge to form the belief that something of consciously unreal
mingled with this act of apotheosis by Imperial decree. Hadrian
sought to assuage his grief by paying his favourite illustrious
honours after death; he also desired to give the memory of his own
love the most congenial and poetical environment, to feed upon it in
the daintiest places, and to deck it with the prettiest flowers of
fancy. He therefore canonised Antinous, and took measures for
disseminating his cult throughout the world, careless of the element
of imposture which might seem to mingle with the consecration of his
true affection. Hadrian's superficial taste was not offended by the
gimcrack quality of the new god; and Antinous was saved from being a
merely pinchbeck saint by his own charming personality.

This will not, however, wholly satisfy the conditions of the
problem; and we are obliged to ask ourselves whether there was not
something in the character of Antinous himself, something divinely
inspired and irradiate with spiritual beauty, apparent to his
fellows and remembered after his mysterious death, which justified
his canonisation, and removed it from the region of Imperial
makebelieve. If this was not the case, if Antinous died like a
flower cropped from the seraglio garden of the court-pages, how
should the Emperor in the first place have bewailed him with
'unhusbanded passion,' and the people afterwards have received him
as a god? May it not have been that he was a youth of more than
ordinary promise, gifted with intellectual enthusiasms proportioned
to his beauty and endowed with something of Phoebean inspiration,
who, had he survived, might have even inaugurated a new age for the
world, or have emulated the heroism of Hypatia in a hopeless cause?
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