Free EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian by Melanie McDonald

or sang, or played a melancholy air upon the flute. That was an instrument I always avoided for fear that playing it made my face appear ugly and ridiculous. (I deferred to the wisdom of Athena, who, disgusted by her reflection in a river while playing, once tossed her own flute away.) But I did often accompany him upon the lyre, which I might play with proper decorum. I also recited the verses of Sappho, though I never recited for him my own cento based on her work. I admired the tenth muse, but also recognized that I myself was not one.
    Hadrian once confessed to me his youthful nickname, the Greekling, with its veiled insults implying effeminacy and treachery, after I told him how the Roman boys teased me, referring to me as young Ulysses. Romans consider our Greek Odysseus too sly in his reliance on wit, rather than strength and courage. Yet it was he who thought up the horse which broke the Trojans.
    P LOTINA, THE WIDOWED empress of Trajan and Hadrian’s adoptive mother, now took an interest in me. This woman, Hadrian’s greatest political ally and mentor, had arranged for his marriage to Trajan’s great-niece, Sabina, in order to cement his alliance with her husband. The union proved a political success, if not a fruitful one, and assured Hadrian’s succession to the throne upon her husband’s demise. Plotina’s ambitions for Hadrian were exceeded only perhaps by his own; she believed him capable of greatness.
    I came upon her as if by accident one afternoon in the palace gardens, where she sat on a marble bench beside a shrine graced with a statue of the goddess Aphrodite and her companion nymphs. A fountain burbled behind them. Topiary shrubs spiraled around the flagstones of the path, and from pear trees nearby came the chirruping of birds kept in one of the aviaries.
    “Good afternoon,” she said, acting as if she were surprised to discover me there as well. “A lovely day, isn’t it?”
    Plotina must have gleaned from some of the servants that I often walked there when I had a few moments of free time. I wondered how long it took her to pick her way to that bench through the droppings from the free-roaming flock of peacocks. She had taken care that their ubiquitous excrement should not soil her dainty sandals.
    Like Lucretia reborn, Plotina always appeared to embody purity, as befits an aristocratic Roman matron. Despite knowing, from a comment Hadrian once made, that her elaborate hairstyle alone required an hour of dressing by her attendants each morning, I do not believe she was a vain woman at all. Her coiffure, like the heavy gold jewels and tasteful, expensive clothing she wore, merely announced her status, confirmed her position in society—wife to one emperor, foster to another. That elaborate styling became as much a component of a designated uniform as the crested helmet worn by a centurion.
    I greeted her with deference, and she asked me to be seated. After we chatted for a few moments, she began, with her customary diplomacy, to sound me out about the depth and dimensions of my fledgling relationship with her foster son.
    Soon satisfied, or so it appeared, by my answers, and deeming her task accomplished, she took her leave of me with a paean of praise for Hadrian and a proffering of advice to me.
    “Be kind to him, Antinous,” she said, looking deep into my eyes. “Like Atlas, he bears the world upon those shoulders.”
    Her stern gaze softened as she spoke.
    “Be sweet and loving, and listen to him, without judging or competing. Let others try to impress him by showing off. In time, a successor will be found from among the aristocracy, someone like Lucius Commodus, or even Hadrian’s own nephew, Pedanius Fuscus. What he needs right now, above all, is someone who is appreciative, all-accepting—someone who will love him just as he is.”
    I took those words to heart, gratified by her faith in my ability to love Hadrian as he needed to be loved. In those halcyon days, I still saw in him