he link between him and Hadrian formed less by the boy's beauty
than by his marvellous capacity for apprehending and his fitness for
realising the Emperor's Greek dreams? Did the spirit of
neo-Platonism find in him congenial incarnation? At any rate, was
there not enough in the then current beliefs about the future of the
soul, as abundantly set forth in Plutarch's writings, to justify a
conviction that after death he had already passed into the lunar
sphere, awaiting the final apotheosis of purged spirits in the sun?
These questions may be asked--indeed, they must be asked--for,
without suggesting them, we leave the worship of Antinous an almost
inexplicable scandal, an almost unintelligible blot on human nature.
Unless we ask them, we must be content to echo the coarse and
violent diatribes of Clemens Alexandrinus against the vigils of the
deified _exoletus_. But they cannot be answered, for antiquity is
altogether silent about him; only here and there, in the indignant
utterance of a Christian Father, stung to the quick by Pagan
parallels between Antinous and Christ, do we catch a perverted echo
of the popular emotion upon which his cult reposed, which recognised
his godhood or his vicarious self-sacrifice, and which paid enduring
tribute to the sublimity of his young life untimely quenched.

The _senatus consultum_ required for the apotheosis of an Emperor
was not, so far as we know, obtained in the case of Antinous.
Hadrian's determination to exalt his favourite sufficed; and this is
perhaps one of the earliest instances of those informal deifications
which became common in the later Roman period. Antinous was
canonised according to Greek ritual and by Greek priests: _Graeci
quidam volente Hadriano eum consecraverunt_. How this was
accomplished we know not; but forms of canonisation must have been
in common usage, seeing that emperors and members of the Imperial
family received the honour in due course. The star which was
supposed to have appeared soon after his death, and which
represented his soul admitted to Olympus, was somewhere near the
constellation Aquila, according to Ptolemy, but not part of it. I
believe the letters [Greek: e.th.i.k.l.] of Aquila now bear the name
of Antinous; but this appropriation dates only from the time of
Tycho Brahe. It was also asserted that as a new star had appeared in
the skies, so a new flower had blossomed on the earth, at the moment
of his death. This was the lotos, of a pe