The Death of Antinous || bxb ✔︎

GRAVIORA MANENT

When Antinous wept so did the gods. 

It rained for ten days and ten nights after Leonides left the villa. The Tiber flooded and swept away the dock at Ostia. Sailors desperately patched their ships. Merchants rerouted to land and vendors cursed the sky.

Hadrian was uncharacteristically distracted. 

His only concern was that the weather not impact his upcoming journey east. As a ruler, it was no secret that he spent more time touring his empire than he did governing in Rome. He would be bringing Antinous with him on this tour. Antinous had been on shorter trips to Capri and Sicily for weeks at a time but the tour would last years. As such, the entire imperial retinue would be joining them. Including Commodus, and even Sabina, on their own ships.

For all intents and purposes Antinous was Hadrian's spouse and the Emperor made no attempt to hide it, but there were certain provinces that frowned upon the Roman custom of having a male consort and he was advised that Sabina should sit in where the boy's presence might offend. He agreed to bring the Empress but he had no intention of bending Roman custom to suit conquered foreigners.

"They will get on their knees and kiss your ring," he reassured Antinous.

"And if they refuse?"

"Graviora manent." Great dangers await. He mimed the wielding of a sword and swiped at Antinous' legs playfully.

On his previous tour east, Commodus and Hadrian travelled as companions, and he wanted Commodus to travel with him again, but when the noble learned that Antinous would be joining the tour he refused, saying the emperor's towering galley ship could not accommodate both of them because Antinous was the favorite and Commodus was second to no one.

It seemed to him some horrible joke that five years earlier Leonides had left him for the other side of the world and now that he was back in Rome, it was Antinous who would be travelling east. They were like two spokes on a wheel, spinning around an axis, never to meet.

He knew it was for the best. Leonides was safe now. That was all that mattered. Contact with Antinous was risky if not deadly. Yet locked away in a quiet corner of his heart was the small hope that there would be one more word, one more smile.

It was not all melancholy and gloom. He may have lost Leonides but he would be travelling through Bithynia on the tour and hoped to be reunited briefly with his family in Claudiopolis. His father's correspondence had been sparse and mostly about the land and local politics or what little he gleaned of it from gossip in the public latrine. Antinous longed to see his brothers and sisters but especially his mother who was so dear to him. She could not read or write but he often imagined what her letters might say if she could.

When it rained, Hadrian like to read to Antinous by the hearth in his library until the storm passed. The thunder frightened him when he was a little boy. Perhaps it still did.

His head rested on Hadrian's lap, while the Emperor twirled a finger around one of the boy's dark curls. He was reading from Hellenica, Xenophon's history of Greece in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. It was the story of his ancestors. The blood spilled in those battles was his blood.

"I am anxious about the tour," he confessed.

Hadrian brushed back his curls and pressed a hand to his forehead. He often treated Antinous' melancholy like a fever that could be broken. "What troubles you?"

Lightning flashed in the window, casting a sharp shadow across the divan where they lay.

"Last night I dreamt of all of the places we would be visiting: Libya, Sparta, Athens, Pelusium in Egypt, the Nile. But I awoke before I dreamt of returning to Rome. Is this a bad omen?"