Leonides had not been back in Rome in over three years.

After that fateful night on the Nile, he was dismissed from the Praetorian Guard and ordered to return to his legion. It wasn't long before tensions rose in Judea once again. The attack on the Imperial retinue in Athens had not been an empty threat. The second Roman-Jewish war was upon them.

All of the rebuilding Hadrian had done in the aftermath of Nero's war to assimilate the Jewish Temple to the Roman Imperial-cult, was meaningless. While the Roman Pantheon welcomed new gods from their conquered territories, monotheists like Jews and Christians, only recognized one. Hadrian's gifts and good intentions were not enough for those who demanded spiritual autonomy.

They had already lost over a thousand men and the war was far from over.

Through his valour, Leonides rose to the rank of General. It was in this capacity that he was able to take leave for a short period of time and return to Rome on personal business.

He rode north to Antioch, then west to Ephesus, sailed across the Aegean and travelled through Athens. Now he remembered why he was hesitant to leave his legion. Being on the battlefield was less painful than his past. Everywhere he went he saw his face.

It was carved into marble, stamped into coins. Even in the far reaches of the Empire and small villages he would find a statue of the boy, contrapposto, chin tilted, looking down on him with a sphinxlike smile.

When Hadrian had his young lover deified, everyone thought he had gone mad. A catamite from Bithynia a god? It was unheard of for a ruler to honour a male lover in this way. It was odd then that the person he despised most was the only one who understood him. Leonides created a temple in his heart. He could never speak freely of their love, but it burned fiercely within him, just as the incense did on those altars.

The cults that sprang up to worship Antinous were made in Hadrian's image. They were devoted but obsessed. First shrines and altars were dedicated to him in existing temples, then they built him his own temples and the cult spread across Rome to Athens, the Greek islands, Bithynia and of course Egypt. Hadrian founded Antinopolis in his name on the east bank of the Nile where he drowned.

Worshippers were as transfixed by his beauty as Hadrian had been. They held games in his honor every year, celebrating the male form, called the Antinoeia, and at night participated in wild orgies.

In Mantineria, a young priestess who worshipped at one of the more lavish temples was on all fours kissing the feet of his statue. She looked up at him adoringly like he might spring to life if she was faithful enough to stoke his passions. She noticed Leonides watching her and approached him about joining the temple. She told him to bring an offering of gold.

"Antinous doesn't much care for gold."

She folded her arms. "All gods care for gold."

"His tastes are quite simple actually. Some sweet meat and a kind word would do. Better yet, a fig and a song."

"And how would you know?" 

His chest heaved, burdened suddenly by the weight of his armor. "I knew him when he was alive."

She clicked her tongue and let out a high-pitched laugh. "Everyone from Rome claims to have met him. If I had coin every time I heard that!"

The priestess shooed him off the temple steps and told him not to come back until he brought an offering worthy of the sacred temple of Antinous.

In Rome, an obelisk not unlike the one they saw in Heliopolis was erected in the young god's honour. Carved on a tetrapylon were tondos depicting Hadrian and Antinous hunting together, their love elevated to myth. The sun pierced through the columns. He shielded his eyes. The closer he drew to Hadrian the more powerful Antinous' cult and the more keenly Leonides suffered.

The Emperor's villa looked more like a glorified mausoleum than an Imperial estate. Here, his lover existed in every iteration one could think of. There were statues of Antinous as Osiris, as Dionysus, as a boy, as an older youth, as a man. In one part of the garden you might find him broad chested, holding a staff, and in another vulnerably edging the pool, slender stone fingers curled on his thigh.

The plot of land that had once nursed tall grass and wildflowers now belonged to a large temple.

Leonides handed the reins of his horse and that of a second horse with no rider, to the haughty groom, who led the beasts into the stable where he promptly examined their hooves for caked mud.

The Praetorian Guard stood outside the temple. All averted their eyes, even Brutus. After years of witnessing their master's pain he understood why they would be loyal. The Emperor's grief was now his legacy. Julius Caesar would be remembered for war, Augustus for reform, Nero for his indifference. Hadrian would be remembered for losing Antinous. Their names were synonymous. It was an interesting twist of fate considering Antinous' entire identity was subsumed by the Emperor when he was alive.

The Emperor stood by the alter with his back to him. He still wore his darkened mourning toga. Incense burned and lingered in thick plumes of white smoke.

He said, "I didn't think you would dare come back here, Leonides."

"I certainly didn't think I'd be lucky enough to find you alone."

When he requested an audience with the Emperor he assumed he would be turned down, or at best asked to communicate through a member of his inner circle.

The old man turned. His face had aged decades in the few short years since Antinous' death.

"I have very few companions now. Commodus has taken ill, as I'm sure you've heard."

"He's lived a rather reckless life."

The Emperor pursed his lips. He didn't like hearing his boy beauties criticized.

"I would call it spirited. But he has a poor constitution. I am forced to name another heir. Have you heard of a young man named Marcus Aurelius? No, probably not. You don't run in the same circles. He has the habits and dress of a philosopher."

"He sounds like you."

"Without my vices, yes."

Leonides neither agreed nor disagreed.

"Surely there must be someone in your life you can call a companion. Remus?"

"He's become a priest."

"A priest! Now that is a surprise. Of which cult?"

"The cult of my Antinous of course. He's very devout, I'll have you know. His brother Romulus is one of the temple's worshippers."

Leonides wondered what Antinous would have thought knowing the boys who tormented him at school now worshipped him.

"Why have you come, Leonides?"

"You know why."

He changed the subject again. He may have been old but he still knew how to command a room.

"The likeness is remarkable, isn't it?" he said, pointing to one of the many sculptures.

Leonides marveled at how closely they resembled Antinous without actually capturing him at all. The traits Leonides admired could not be conveyed in stone.

"I prefer my memories of him."

Hadrian tried to maintain his composure but his carefully cultivated veneer of calm cracked. For Rome's sake, he hoped this Marcus Aurelius, whomever he was, was as even-tempered as the Emperor said he appeared.

"When did it start?"

It clearly pained him to ask and it would kill him to know but he couldn't resist. He was driven mad by the thought that there was any part of Antinous' life that he did not possess.

"I suppose it started the first time we met at Caelian Hill. Nothing happened between us, you understand, but we'd formed an emotional attachment as school boys often do."

"When did it start in earnest?"

There was blood on the altar. They had sacrificed a lamb earlier that day. Tufts of downy fleece had fallen to the ground. This meant there would be feast later. One that he would most definitely not be invited to.

If Hadrian could see into his mind it would likely be his blood that was spilled. When did it start in earnest? He could feel himself slipping between the boy's thighs like it was yesterday, rocking together on the pallet soaked in sweat, coaxing sweet cries from his lips.

The man wouldn't rest until Leonides divulged every secret, but some memories belonged to him alone.

"We didn't make love until we reached Athens."

His chest caved in as though Leonides had slid a sword inside him.

"And did he like it?"

Why was he doing this to himself? He already knew the answer. Hadn't they suffered enough without relitigating the past?

Leonides was taller than Hadrian and his shoulders broader. The soldier's full, red mouth responded, as though it weren't obvious, "Yes, very much."

He may have been outmatched intellectually, but in matters of the body Leonides was unbeatable.

Hands clasped behind his back, Hadrian paced around the temple's cella.

"What did he look like laying there as you devoured him?"

Leonides blushed, which surprised him. There was not much nowadays that could make him blush. Those feelings died with Antinous.

"It was the other way around mostly. He liked to stare at my body. Touch me. Kiss my—"

The Emperor raised his hand. He could take no more.

"I don't believe Antinous liked being looked at," Leonides went on, in a slight rebuke of the statuary around them. "In matters of intimacy he preferred to do the looking."

The Emperor stopped in his tracks.

"Don't speak to me as if you know him. I lived with him for seven years. And I wasn't just his lover, I was his father, his mother, his teacher, his friend. You did not clothe him, feed him, arrange his education, read to him, discipline him, play dice with him, stay up with him when he was ill until his fever broke. I saw the best and the worst of him. We were more than just a few nights of passion. He was my child."

The words hit harder than a slap. Leonides was ashamed for moment and then recovered.

"I don't doubt the depth of your love for him. But children grow up."

He raised his fingers to his temples, as they elderly do when they are trying to remember something or desperately trying to forget.

"I ask again, why have you come?"

This time he wouldn't let the Emperor change the subject. 

"If you knew him that means you knew that his greatest dream was to be a soldier."

"He didn't understand what it meant to be a soldier. He had a boy's notion of war. I couldn't allow him to run off and get himself killed."

They were silent because that is precisely what he did in the end.

"I think that's what the Greeks would call the definition of tragedy. By trying to outwit fate your actions caused the very fate you were desperate to avoid."

He smiled weakly. "I suppose that makes me the tragic hero of this story. But then what does that make you?"

He tried to think of a clever retort but none came to mind.

"Exactly. You may have had a place in his bed but you never had a place in his story."

It was true, he didn't. They wrote stories about Emperors and their great loves, not school boys who ate sweet meat at the Flavian, who sang in their bedchamber, who swam in the sea and slept on each other's chests. Artists made tondos of noble events like the hunt, not twirling your lover's hair and convincing him to run away with you. It may not have been a story but it was something. He needed to keep that part of Antinous alive. Honour it, because no one else would.

His mission suddenly felt more vital than ever.

"You know why I'm here. I ask that you bequeath Antinous' slave Orodes to me. I am General now and I need a trustworthy page."

"Ah, here it is," he mused. "Why Orodes?"

"You have your statues and I have my memories. Orodes shares many memories of Antinous. I would like him to be by my side. I have...I am lonely. The presence of his friend makes me feel closer to him."

"Can't you take a lover?"

"Can you?" he countered. Leonides composed himself. "It was Antinous' wish before he died that Orodes attend us in battle one day. I plan to free him and have him attend me as long as he likes. He will have a full life."

"You say this as though I am not the Emperor that has spearheaded the establishment of rights and freedoms for slaves across the empire."

"I say this to someone who has difficulty letting go of the ones he loves."

He stroked his grey beard, not wanting to say yes, but too tortured by Antinous' memory to dismiss the request outright.

"And what does Orodes say? He's served me for nearly half his life, you know. Is he looking forward to living behind a battle line?"

"We've written to each other and he said he would like to join me."

The slave had entrusted a fellow house slave who was educated to read and respond to him in Latin. He couldn't write well but was able to communicate in the affirmative.

"Is there anything else you would like to take from me, Leonides?"

He wanted to say: I didn't take Antinous from you, he was never truly yours to begin with. For Orodes' sake he bit his tongue.

"This is the last time I will ask anything of you. I swear it."

Hadrian touched the stone hand of one of the statues, as though he was conferring with it.

He hung his head. "Very well. If it is Orodes' wish to serve you, then it is my wish for him."

"Thank you, Sacratissime Imperator." He kneeled and kissed the Emperor's signet ring.

As Leonides was about to step out onto the portico, Hadrian stopped him and said, "I guess we will never know for certain."

"Know what?"

"Which of us loved him most."

"I know," Leonides said.

Hadrian's eyes shone with madness or tears or both.

"I made him a god."

"I made him happy."

Orodes was waiting by the edge of the Canopus, a rectangular pool that was as large as a lake. He held his satchel against his chest with one hand and dipped the other in beneath the water's glassy surface. He was in profile, his cheek unblemished, like that of any handsome young man with his whole life ahead of him. But Leonides knew that once he turned, the scar on other side of his face told a very different story.

Leonides often wondered if perhaps it was the slave who had suffered most upon Antinous' death. Hadrian had an entire empire to return to and Leonides had the legionaries. Orodes had only ever had Antinous. He devoted his life to serving his friend and master. A slave's grief was not only unrecorded, it was invisible, the way they cleaned a domus or a palace before dawn. Everything was polished to a shine with no one to witness the love and care they showed these objects, except of course the objects themselves.

When he spotted Leonides, he stood, his lips in a predetermined frown.

"He said no."

He took the satchel from the slave and began carrying it to the gate. Orodes chased after him.

"He said yes!"

"He said yes."

"But why?" He was out of breath trying to keep up with the soldier's long strides.

"Perhaps everything that's happened has changed him." Then as a plucky aside, he said, "Or perhaps I'm very convincing."

The slave leapt up in the air and gave a loud cheer. He was carrying a wooden sword on his hip. He with withdrew it from his belt and began swishing it around in the air.

"I would advise you carry something a little sturdier when we reach Judea. You're not going to fend off any rebels with a children's toy."

"This belonged to Antinous," he said, affronted. "He whittled it himself from beachwood in his homeland. He never owned a real sword."

Leonides stopped and examined the sword. Orodes held it out to him. He touched the ridges and the small grooves on the hilt where a knife had carved into the wood by Antinous' very own hand. He thought of the care the boy had put into making it and the pride he must have felt when it was finished. 

He cleared his throat and steadied his voice. "You must carry it always, Orodes. Carry him into battle with us."

"Just like he always dreamed."

They reached the gate where two horses were saddled and waiting. The nude statue of Antinous in the courtyard saw them off. Here he was depicted as a youth, seventeen, likely not long after they were reunited. He seemed older at the time but now he appeared impossibly young. Forever young.

"I still can't believe you survived that night," Orodes said in awe. "I can't believe you went on to become General. I can't believe Hadrian allowed me to leave with you! Master, you must be the luckiest man in Rome."

Leonides took one last look at the statue's smiling lips before he mounted his horse.

"The gods have always favored me."

A/N: This is sadly the end. Leo and Antinous may not be together but Leo has another god to watch over him.

Thank you all for coming on this journey with me. You have been lovely readers and it's an absolute pleasure to read your comments. I'd love to know what you thought of the story!

What was your favourite scene?

Who was your favourite character?

Who is your favourite Greek/Roman god/goddess?

I'm starting to plan my next project. This is the first time I'm not locked into a new idea. I'm hoping to write something contemporary, but I'm open to suggestions.

What do you think I should write next?