Murder on the Nile? (Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous - Royston Lambert)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous - Royston Lambert
Date:	20/07/00 (124 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Detailed examination of a fascinating episode from classical history.

Disadvantages: The prose is heavy going at times.

Antinoüs was the Bithynian catamite of the Emperor Hadrian and was discovered dead in the river Nile, apparently drowned, in the second century AD. Why and precisely how he died has never been discovered, but this book is a discussion of the theories that have been devised and of the way Antinoüs's death has influenced Western art and culture from his own times to the present day.

It's dense and sometimes difficult to read, with some spectacularly crass metaphors, but it's still worthwhile, if partly as an illustration of how biography is more a disguised (and sometimes not so disguised) way of talking about oneself than it is of talking about one's subject. Lambert was presumably a paederast in the classical sense, and all his talk of, respectively, the complexity of Hadrian's personality and the beauty of body and soul of Antinoüs was disguised autobiography and sexual fantasy. Still, it packs in a lot of classical history and was fascinating on the way the cult of Antinoüs was created by Hadrian and spread throughout the empire.

Among other fascinating sidelights was the story of the Paedogogium in Rome (Trajan's and, to a lesser extent, Hadrian's "harem") and the grafitti scratched there, which seems to record an early Christian pupil being mocked by his peers: a crude donkey-headed Christ crucified, with the subscription ALEXAMENOS WORSHIPS HIS GOD; elsewhere, Alexamenos seems to have struck back by proclaiming himself ALEXAMENOS THE FAITHFUL, which even I found rather touching. Elsewhere there was a good overview of the representation of Antinoüs in sculpture and coinage and Lambert manages to convey the power of his death in the Nile very well, describing the ancient worship of the river and the only occasionally successful attempts to placate its ferocity and caprice (anyone drowned in the river, however humble their origin, automatically became a god and had shrines erected to them).

The pos
sibilities of why and how Antinoüs died that Lambert discusses: a boating accident; a murder by jealous rivals; a castration operation for the preservation of his youth that went wrong; suicide triggered by disappearance of youth and hence, inevitably, of Hadrian's affections; as a sacrifice to reverse successive failures of the very important Egyptian grain-harvest, which would soon have triggered trouble throughout the Empire: traditionally the way to appease the Nile was to sacrifice to it.

Summary: