Sometimes fate is determined by the outcome of a battle and other times by the bite of a single mosquito.

Antinous walked to the bottom of the Palatine and rode through the city at dusk, past the empty forum and the House of the Vestals where the sacred virgins slept. Most merchants and shopkeepers were locking their shutters, except for the scythemakers, who sharpened their wares until the day's last light. The sound of iron against steel screamed in his ears and sent a shiver down his spine. He clutched the reins tighter and the horse clamped down on the bit. He wondered which was stronger, the metal that sharpens the blade or the blade itself.

Night fell and he travelled on the Via Tiburtina to Hadrian's Villa, galloping beneath the constellations. The Great Bear hung low in the northern sky with the Little Bear nipping at its tail. According to Roman myth, jealous Juno turned the beautiful Callisto into a bear believing Jupiter had fathered her son, Arcas. While in bear form Callisto encountered Arcas. He would have killed her had Jupiter not intervened and turned Arcas into a bear too and placed both mother and son in the heavens.

He tore his eyes away from the sky and fixed them on the road ahead. The stars had a way of conspiring against him. 

The groom met him by the stable and haughtily examined the horse's hooves and coat.

"Did you give him water?"

"In the Subura."

"Might as well let him drink from a latrine," he grumbled.

Antinous admired his love for these animals but the poor old fellow loved them to a fault. No one was good enough to ride the horses he so meticulously cared for and if he had his way, no one ever would.  

When he looked up at the Emperor's domus he spotted a candle flickering in the window. Hadrian was waiting for him.

The Praetorian Guard stepped aside like an opening jaw and let him pass. They found it amusing when their Caesar fought with his lover. "Uh oh. Trouble in paradise," they snickered. The large one called him a catamite behind his back, usually accompanied by a lewd thrusting motion with his hips and kissing sounds. This time he used his sword as a phallus and waggled it at Antinous as he passed. Reprimanding these men only made their taunts worse so he ignored them.

He crept up the marble staircase, his leather sandals making only the slightest squeak on each step.

Hadrian was bent over his desk almost exactly where Antinous had left him. It was as if time stood still when he was not with his beloved.

Only, he was no longer reviewing his maps.

Antinous unfastened the belt on his tunic and placed his bracelets in their ivory box, waiting for the impending lecture about riding alone at night.

"Aren't you going to ask me where I've been all this time?"

"No." He wasn't writing, he was drawing.

Whenever he was quiet like this, Antinous knew no good could come of it. He anticipated the worst.

Hadrian turned around in his chair and beckoned him.

"You have every right to be angry with me. I treated you like a child." 

He was not going to talk Antinous out of his anger with his golden tongue and quick wit, was he? Or perhaps this surrender precipitated another maneuver that Antinous could not foresee.

The Emperor handed him the piece of parchment he was drawing on. In addition to being a poet and a philosopher who loved to speak in riddles, Hadrian was also an artist. It was the plans for a sculpture of a man in the Dionysian pose wearing a flowing chiton and holding a long staff. On his head was a wreath of leaves with ivy berries, and a diadem.

He watched Antinous' face until he realized who the man was.

"Is it me?"

"It's going to be a statue of you, yes."

The Emperor had commissioned many nudes of him as a nubile eromenos when he was a boy and later as a nymph-like youth. He adored these pieces and some days he spent more time admiring Antinous' image than he did Antinous.

This was, notably, the first commission where Antinous was dressed as a man. A powerful man. A God. It was a copy of the Greek master, Pheidias, but with a brooding romance that belonged solely to Hadrian. Curls tumbled artfully over his brow and down the side of his neck. There was particular emphasis placed on his full lips. One could feel their pillowly softness through the page. The eyes too were as lively and expressive as Antinous' own after kind word and a gentle touch.

If love were a statue, there was no greater love than Hadrian's love for Antinous.

"I see the error of my ways."

"What does that mean?"

Hadrian took his insolence in stride.

"I promised you that I would let you grow up and I never did, not because I don't love the man you've become, but because I could not bear to part with you. Well, now I've found a way to celebrate the glorious man that you are without you ever leaving my side."

Antinous handed back the sketch.

The Emperor grabbed his wrist. "Won't you forgive me?"

He tried to wriggle free but his grip was too tight.

Hadrian let go and kissed the red mark his hand left behind. He buried his face in the soft folds of his beloved's tunic.

"Everything I do, good and bad, is to make you happy."

He was weeping.

Antinous was impassive.

"I only hurt you because I love you so much, can't you see that?"

If you love me, set me free, Antinous screamed inside his head.

His obstinance only made Hadrian want him more. Hate was not the opposite of love, Antinous learned during his time with the Emperor, they were two blades forged in the same fire.      

Hadrian lifted the tunic over Antinous' thighs and belly before roughly pulling it over his head and tossing it to the ground. He ran his fingers over Antinous' naked flesh, which was still sweaty from his travels, and obsessively followed the smooth contours of his chest to his navel and between his legs.

Antinous' body betrayed him and forgave what his heart and mind could not.    

His eyes glazed over and fell to the desk. The sketch of the statue sat atop an earlier sketch of the Pantheon. They were no different. Hadrian not only wanted to possess Antinous, he had convinced himself that Antinous was carved from his very imagination and not his mother's womb.

🌿

The next evening the Emperor held a farewell feast to mark his departure from Rome. Poets, actors, acrobats, mimes and musicians, were invited to perform for Hadrian and his honored guests.

Antinous passed the long rectangular Canopus pool, its water black as polished obsidian, and the manmade grotto, Serapeum, named after the Egyptian city and temple respectively. Soon he would see the actual places for which these parts of the villa were named. 

Fanning himself in the villa's stadium, he waited for the performance to start. He spotted Plotina a stone's throw from the platform with only her handmaiden for company. She was ill and could not join the tour. The physician said she didn't have much time and recommended she stay in bed. Plotina would not be bested by death. She dyed her white hair with red henna and wore her brightest stola and jewels. He imagined the Empress in her prime, commanding the legions by Trajan's side. He didn't know who was right, Sabina for critiquing her husband's power or Plotina for trying to steal it.

Every noble Roman family and those from neighboring provinces were in attendance.   What if Leonides had managed to receive another invite to the villa, Antinous thought? He knew it was impossible but stranger things had happened.   

Remus narrowed his eyes. "What are you thinking about?"

"Nothing."

"Your brow is furrowed and you're staring at the stage when the performance hasn't even begun." 

Remus and his brother Romulus sat on the other side of him, chirping like two magpies.

"He always looks like that," Romulus observed. "Not a single thought enters that pretty little head of his, I assure you."

"It's not that pretty," Remus said flicking one of his curls.

"Can we please just enjoy the acrobats!" 

"The stage is still empty just like your head."

Romulus was telling Remus about his new post as Aedile. His office was responsible for the maintenance of public buildings and the regulation of festivals. Antinous had lived in Rome for five years and he hadn't a clue how Roman politics worked. There were senators and consuls, magistrates and assemblies, junior and senior offices. It seemed like politicians were forever campaigning and rarely governing, and when they did try to govern they couldn't agree on anything. Romulus thrived in this bureaucratic cesspool. In rhetoric, his speeches were memorable for their linguistic flourishes, never for the substance of his arguments.    

He was discussing abolishing the grain dole and just when Antinous thought conversation couldn't get duller, Romulus mentioned that the senator in favor of the dole was Maximianus. He recognized the name. It was Leonides' father. His ears perked up.

"He's a populist. They say he'll be consul in a year if he isn't assassinated first. It's not like his son can take up the cause. You can imagine old Maximianus' disappointment that Leonides' is a hulking athlete who can hardly write his own name let alone deliver a speech. It just goes to show, you can be from the right family and still do all of the wrong things. Why, he was propositioning every Patrician on the Palatine to receive an invite to tonight's feast!"

"Was he successful?" Antinous asked, keeping his voice steady. Leonides was trying to come and see him. His pulse quickened.  

"What do you think?" Remus laughed.

"He's been invited to the villa before."

"As a victor of the games, along with plebeians and freedmen."

"He was invited back to advise on the tour."

"Yes, in his capacity as a legionnaire, not as friend of the Emperor." 

"The sycophant has a certain roguish charm," Romulus noted, holding his pointed chin, "but that isn't going to win over the shrewd minds in Hadrian's inner circle."

He was insulting Leonides but mainly complimenting himself. It was laughable. The twins' inclusion in the Emperor's circle was anything but effortless. It depended entirely on the whims of Commodus and the noble was easily bored.    

Antinous hung his head with disappointment but not defeat. Their departure from Rome was in nineteen days. There was still a chance Leonides would find a way to see him before he left. Please find a way.

Hadrian stood by the lip of the stage kissing Plotina's hand. He beckoned Antinous to join him. The small stadium was shaped like a half moon with the Emperor's seat at its center. Antinous took his place on the Emperor's right while Commodus took a seat on his left.

With Seutonius exiled, Hadrian had to find another writer to entertain his guests. He chose Juvenal, the Roman satirist. He wasn't liked enough to attract a patron but was the son of a wealthy freedman and could therefore support himself. While Greeks invented, comedy, tragedy and poetry, satire was purely a Roman invention. Sometimes crass, often insulting and always obscene, it was no wonder it was so popular with this set.  

There was much excitement among the guests, but they were also filled with melancholy at the Emperor's impending departure. He was often gone from Rome for years at a time. They grew used to be ruled from afar by their worldly Caesar, but like a child who misses his father the people hated to see him go.

"Perhaps for the next feast we should invite more guests. Open it up to the legionaries. The people are so sad to see you depart."

Commodus arched an eyebrow.    

"There won't be time for another feast. I've decided we should embark on the tour early," Hadrian said taking a cup of wine from a page boy. "The augury predicted that a skirmish would befall our retinue on the third day before the kalends. Better to fight on land than water."

Taking the auspices was the Roman practice of interpreting omens from the flight pattern of birds. Greeks too looked to birds to predict the future but did not have an elaborate system that incorporated formation, species, combinations thereof and even the behavior of domesticated birds! They made a tidy business of it too. If he told his people back home that Roman augurs were getting paid to read the signs from a sacred chicken, they would have laughed themselves silly.    

"Early? When?"

"Tomorrow."

"That's so soon."

Now there was no chance he would see Leonides before he left.

Commodus twirled his hair skeptically. "You hate Rome. Aren't you thrilled to be heading East, Greek?"

He smiled weakly. "Yes, of course. I only meant us to stay a while longer for the peoples' sake."

Juvenal took center stage. He had a scooped chin and eyebrows as thick as caterpillars, with a thin crown of hair and wisps about his ears. Actors wore masks while satirists transformed into the very thing they ridiculed. For this playlet he wore a white toga, the toga pura, meant to resemble those worn by senators. His favourite subject. There was nothing Hadrian loved more than seeing the pious leaders who abhorred his sexual appetites, openly ridiculed at court.

"O Father of our city, whence came such wickedness among thy Latin shepherds? How did such a lust possess thy grandchildren, O Gradivus?" 

While he was giving this mock oration, an actor in a gladiator costume came up behind him and lifted his toga. Juvenal's voice rose to the pitch of a woman.

"Behold!" he said, pointing to a Patrician youth in the audience with his head in the lap of his male lover. "Here you have a man of high birth and wealth being handed over in marriage to a man, and yet neither shakest thy helmet, nor smitest the earth with thy spear, nor yet protestest to thy Father?"

By that point another actor had circled behind Juvenal, and another. The three actors took turns pretending to give it to him up the arse as he delivered the final lines of his oration with a gasp.

"Away with thee then; begone from the broad acres of that Martial Plain which thou hast forgotten!"

The guests screamed with laughter as the satirist reached his proverbial and literal climax.

Commodus took a rose from his hair and threw it up on stage. Even Hadrian wiped away a tear of laughter.

"Sophos! Well done, Juvenal!" 

Romulus did not take too kindly to his colleagues being mocked and pursed his lips.

On another night Antinous might have laughed along with them. Now he wasn't sure he could ever find pleasure in the court's entertainments. When one is unhappy even the funniest barb sounds like a funeral march. 

The years stretched out before him. Long lonely years. How free life seemed when he was sitting with Leonides in his garden. Free precisely because he did not know what would happen next, because he could do or say anything he wished. Life with Hadrian was like being a statue in his villa. Frozen in one place collecting moss, the seasons changing around him while he remained exactly the same. 

The feast went on all night but Antinous was uninterested in the revelries.

On his way back to his rooms, he spotted Commodus by the reflection of the Canopus pool. Remus and Romulus had too much wine and splashed in the water, which rose to their hips, soaking their togas.

In daylight, the great columns and arches that surrounded the pool were reflected in the water but at night it was only the moon and stars. The architecture of the gods.

Commodus instructed the twins to go to his guest domus. He would meet them upstairs.

When they were alone he said, "I heard about your mother," and handed him a rose from his flower crown, one slightly less tattered than the rose he tossed to Juvenal.

Antinous set it down by the pool's edge in case it was poisoned. 

"I'm not a monster," he said coolly. "I care." 

Antinous was unconvinced.

"I consider us—well, not friends because you're a low born foreigner—acquaintances."

"Thank you?"

He nodded solemnly. "It's no trouble, Greek." This was the most generous thing Commodus had ever said to him. "Oh, and you might want to be more discreet."

"About?"

"'I only meant us to stay a while longer for the peoples' sake.'"

He was exposed but recovered quickly. "What can I say. I've warmed to you Romans."

"Some more than others, I suspect."

Antinous' expression remained blank. He had counted on Hadrian weighing every word he said forgetting that the Emperor's allies often listened more closely.

The noble swept the dyed fabric of his toga over his shoulder and made his way to the guest domus where the twins were waiting.

Trying to regain his footing, he delivered a sharp rebuke. "Please don't tell me you're going to have both Remus and Romulus in the same night. In the same bed. I know they'll do anything you ask but they're brothers. Even Juvenal would disapprove."

"Do you think so little of me, Antinous?"

He was ashamed for a moment.

"I'm not going to fuck both brothers." Commodus twisted a thorny rose stem between his fingers. "I'm going to make them fuck each other."

🌿

The next morning, Antinous rose from Hadrian's bed and stepped into the sunlit corridor. There was a gap in the line of the guard, like a wolf missing a tooth.

He tightened the sheet around his waist.

The augur was right about the terrible incident that would befall Hadrian's retinue but he was wrong about when it would happen, for it did not occur on the third day before the Kalends, it had occurred the previous night, the fourth day before the Ides, after merry Juvenal performed his playlet, and the Emperor had gone to bed. And the cause?

The augur had predicted a skirmish would lead to one of his men's fall and leave the Emperor vulnerable. The large one was driven through the gut by a sword. But it wasn't rebels, or dissidents, or assassins who killed him. As several witnesses could attest, he was attacked by nothing more than a single mosquito and in a rage tried to swat the creature with his blade when he lost his footing and took a tumble down the stairs and impaled himself on his own sword.

"I guess the chicken got it wrong," Antinous said as the slaves scrubbed the blood out of the marble. "Who would have thought?"

Hadrian was unamused.  

With only a short time to replace him, the Emperor looked to Sextus, who hand-picked the guard from the best legionary soldiers.

"The situation in the East is precarious, what with Judea perpetually on the brink of revolt. Jewish rebels are swarming Alexandria. I need someone exceptional."

The general paced the atrium, sword swinging on his hip. "There is one man I can think of, but he's a Patrician from an esteemed family. Too esteemed to have the son act as a personal guard. He's being groomed to be General. He'll do what duty requires but his father will be deeply insulted."

"Who is his father?"

"The senator Maximianus."

A chance to insult a pious senator, and a populist at that, was a temptation too sweet to resist.

"Leonides. I remember him. He's perfect. Don't worry Sextus, I'll write to the father and make the necessary overtures."

The General gave a dissatisfied grunt.

Hadrian turned to Antinous, his most trusted confidant. "What do you think? Am I being too brazen?"

Antinous glanced at Sextus and then at Hadrian. The path of virtue and the path of vice. He wanted to protect Leonides but he longed to be close to him. Two contradictory impulses each one made stronger by the other. Perhaps there was a little Juvenal in him too.

"Your instincts are right, Caesar. Leonides is the best choice."

A/N: Road trip! (Or... sea trip!)

Is Antinous selfish for letting Hadrian choose Leo? 

Next chapter, we set sail ⛵️First stop, Athens.

To clarify about the Roman calendar, months are divided by Kalends (1st of the month), Nones (7th or 5th depending on the length of month) and the Ides (the 15th or 13th). So, the third day before the Kalends is roughly the 30th of the month; the fourth day before the Ides is the 10th.

The constellations Antinous sees at the beginning of the chapter are Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. We know them by their brightest stars, the Big Dipper/Little Dipper. Homer thought they look like wagons 🤷🏻‍♀️

Juvenal was a real Roman satirist and Hadrian's contemporary. I used the text from one of his satires for the playlet in this chapter. The title of the chapter is also a quote from Juvenal: who will watch the watchers?

This is the statue of Antinous as Dionysus that Hadrian commissioned. He commissioned statues of Antinous as various gods, including Athena. At the end of this book I will try to include all of Hadrian's known statues of Antinous but it might take me a while because he was obsessed...

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