Hadrian's antinous : the ephebe-hero portrait type

Abstract

Nearly 2000 years after his death in the Nile, Antinous remains in the public eye. That fact cannot be avoided when there are over 130 surviving portraits of the young Bithynian, from statues and busts to reliefs, coins, medallions, and gems. Needless to say, the memory of Antinous would never have made it this far or, even into the century after his death, had it not been for the fact that he was the eromenos of the emperor Hadrian. Hadrian ensured that Antinous would be remembered far beyond his mortal years by deifying him, instituting in his honour mysteries and games in the style of the age-old Greek games, distributing his portrait across the empire, and last but not least building a city to commemorate the site of Antinous' death and naming it Antinoopolis. The venture was entirely successful, and cemented Hadrian's own immortality because one could not mention Antinous without also mentioning the god-maker himself. In the surviving portraits Antinous is represented in a wide variety of godly guises, bearing attributes of Bacchus/Dionysus, Sylvanus, Ganymede, Hermes, Apollo and Osiris among others. The general consensus is that Antinous required the attributes of established gods because he was simply not an acceptable god in his own right. Not only was Antinous not of the royal family, he was also non-Roman, had possibly been a slave before he was included in Hadrian's retinue, and he had been the emperor's homosexual lover. These were not the type of credentials to encourage worship. Assimilating Antinous with established and popular gods, however, enabled Hadrian's directives for the worship of and belief in Antinous to be considered less the action of a maniacal egotist than first thought. No matter what god Antinous is portrayed as or what attributes he is carrying he is always recognisable as Antinous; this often means that Antinous is considered a portrait type in his own right. Yet, just as with other large collections such as those of Augustus or of Hadrian himself, the portraits of Antinous can be split into smaller groups. In most cases these groups relate to the deity Antinous is portrayed as and not without reason given that there are reasonable numbers of portraits bearing the attributes of Bacchus/Dionysus or of Osiris among others. However, although groups of portraits may bear the same attributes (such as an ivy wreath) more often than not the portraits themselves are sculpted in entirely different styles, with little else in common. As random as the multiple sculptural styles might make the corpus appear to be, one specific portrait type can be identified. This is the ephebe-hero portrait type. Clearly, this portrait type depicts Antinous in his own right, as the ephebe he was at his death. The type, although some of the members are located on Italian soil, was created for a Greek audience and relied on the tradition and history of the ephebe as well as the respect which the ephebe was accorded in society. Antinous did not need to be associated with another god to be successfully worshipped. The research contained herein briefly considers the existing scholarship on Antinoite portraits as well as examining the evidence for how much of a hands-on role Hadrian had in directing how Antinous was to be portrayed. Portraits of Antinous from Hadrian's own villa act as a control group for discussion because of their direct link with Hadrian, while a set of portraits without villa provenance are used to demonstrate that Hadrian was involved in portrait direction outside the villa as much as he is within. Members of the ephebe-hero type are then discussed in relation to their remarkable similarities as well as to the evidence garnered of Hadrian's hands-on role in directing how Antinous was to be portrayed for posterity.