Antinous: The Pederastic to the Divine

Abstract

No face is more recognized as the ideal of ancient male beauty than Antinous and yet little is known about his life. Scholars have used his relationship with the Emperor Hadrian as evidence for their own means. This relationship has gone from a sordid and scandalous affair to purely platonic and educational, depending on the personal orientations of the scholars and the cultural trends of their age. The controversy about Antinous began immediately: the establishment of his cult after his death was mocked by contemporaries as an exaggeration and inappropriate mourning. Soon after it was fuel for Christian critics about the arbitrary nature of pagan deities. However, in Hadrian’s lifetime the cult became an established sect of the Imperial Religion, spreading throughout the Eastern provinces. Why did this cult function successfully in the East, while being scorned in the West? My paper will explore the reasons for the different response. I will argue that the pederastic relationship had been a long established tradition within the East but mocked as inappropriate in the West, at least in a public setting. In Greek culture there were numerous cases of such relationships in myth. The contemporaries who criticized the relationship of Hadrian and Antinous, and especially his cult, were reacting against a trend of Hellenization of Roman culture. This had been a debated issue since the Roman conquest of the East, and many times before, the champions of Roman tradition had depicted the spread of Greek ways as the triumph of moral corruption.