The Gospels of Hadrian Part II: Death on the Nile

The death of Antinous by drowning in the sacred waters of the Nile was pregnant with religious significance for a very large cross-section of the culture within which the event occurred.  Too often modern and ancient historiography has treated the death of Antinous and the establishment of a cult around his persona as the deranged and aberrant actions of an absolute ruler, the jealousies of his court, and the games played by a Ganymede.  The question remains, have we weighed the sources and the evidence objectively?  How do we explain the rise of a cult that coexisted with Christianity and Judaism for the first centuries of the current era? [photo by Madelaines - use here is for an academic purpose]

Antinous, Hadrian and the Resurrection of Roman Popular Religion

When Antinous, companion of Emperor Hadrian, slipped beneath the surface of Egypt’s holy river Nile for the last time in October, 130 CE, he took with him any possibility that the mystery surrounding his death on the Nile, as well as his subsequent apotheosis and deification, would ever accurately be worked out. We do not know if there was a Tennyson-like moment, with the youth enraptured by the even then immemorial landscape, the low moan of collared doves, or the royal murmuring of bees within hives of unbaked clay, these human details of the mortal Antinous in Egypt are lost.

Left is Hapi in the aspect of Nile god juxtaposed with a bust of Antnous-Osiris.  Hapi, with breasts, a pregnant stomach, and a male form, symbolized the regenerative, destructive, and ultimately transcendent power of the river.  Are we to see any parallels with Antinous? The powerfully athletic youth portrayed by history in a sexually inverted role as paramour of a divine emperor?

As Antinous drowned, the Nile waters filling his lungs began the magical operation of his transformation into a minor Egyptian deity under the auspices of the god Hapi. Hapi, among the most ancient and mysterious gods numbering among a pantheon shrouded deeply in the mists of pre-history, is typically found depicted as an androgynine: a male form with female breasts and stomach symbolizing the both the potential destructive and life-giving forces of the Nile. Hapi was also associated with a cult popular among the villages of Egypt, the cult of the drowned. Thus, anyone who succumbed to the waters within Hapi’s Nile realm, by operation became a deity.[i]

Tertullian, or the pseudo epigraphic writer and chronicler we identify for simplicity as Tertullian, was very well versed in the lore of magic practices predominant in his era.  De Baptismo V is a problematic passage whose correct translation presented decades of debate until language usage evident in the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) demonstrated that Latin versions of Tertullian’s De Baptismo (see Troyes (Clairvaux) MS 523 (saec. xii) uncovered in 1916) contained  a transliteration of the Greco-Egyptian lexeme esietas denoting “drowned.” In the Greek usage current in Hellenistic Egypt, esietas, under the influence of local beliefs, connotated the theological meaning of the drowned soul achieving an “undying happiness.” in a slightly different version of the same Journal article in English, presumably owing to editorial and translation choices made by the French, see:  A. Souter “The ‘Acta Pauli’ etc. in Tertullian”The Journal of Theological Studies, 25 (1923-4) p. 292, which reads:

Here our MS reads soetos (or perhaps scelos), which does not help us. But M. Isidore Lévy pointed out in 1922 that the Egyptians used esies in the sense of ‘a happy soul’, and that death by water was considered by them as the path to happy immortality (cf the case of Antinous, who is several times mentioned or hinted at by Tertullian). All that we require to do is therefore to alter esietos to esietas. With D'Ales and Lupton I should regard the difficulty as now solved.[ii]

for drowned or with the Latin necaverunt (they were killed) one may determine that death by drowning was the agent only by juxtaposition with the Latin noun for water.

The point of this particular digression is simply to illustrate that scholars have presented enough evidence to indicate that Tertullian, a fluent and educated writer of Latin and Greek[iii], retained an ancient lexeme of Egyptian origin that conveyed meaning best in a magical and theological sense. Moreover, this sense was related to deification through drowning in holy waters, a practice Tertullian’s contemporary readership was expected to understand through the use of such words.

As Tertullian’s discussion in De Batpismo V likely suggests, in the two generations after Antinous’ sacred drowning in the Nile, there continued to be wide-spread popular belief in the power of water to make holy and deify. Taking this idea a step further, and recognizing Hadrian’s deep interests in religious policy, in the death and apotheosis of Antinous we may argue therefore in favor of a very close and intentional association on the part of Hadrian and his religious advisors of the cult of Antinous-Osiris with the imperial cult. Moreover, it should be understood the Antinous cult contained a strong imprint of popular magic beliefs and practices (as we shall see later in the discussion). Lastly, Antinous-Osiris, and Emperor as expressed in Hadrian’s religious construct, appears to be aimed not just at the elites within the empire, but also its lower social orders as well.

To draw back for a moment, the Antinous-Osiris religious policy of Hadrian, far from being a depraved supercilious act on the part of an absolute ruler, should perhaps better be viewed as a supremely cruel but rational, given the beliefs of that age, attempt at confronting popular religious messianic movements head-on by fighting fire with fire, as it were.

At its core, the apotheosis of Antinous was made possible by the ancient and elemental Egyptian deity, Hapi. By the Ptolomaic period; however, Hapi, as a god, had already undergone a significant evolution, or perhaps better put, the god had his powers and persona assimilated into a more powerful and heterogeneous deity whose main expression was Ptah.[iv] While retaining his popular reverence in the cult of the drowned, by Hadrian’s day, Ptah-Seker-Osiris embodied attributes of both a divine creator of all things divine and mortal as well as a god of reincarnation. The ancestral doctrine of the Ptah-Seker-Osiris trinity was a direct outgrowth of the so-called Memphis theology, itself the complex product of the interplay between belief, economics, and politics.

However, since we will be returning to the subject of the evolution of the Ptah-Seker-Osiris doctrine in later posts, the major point to hold in mind with respect to Hadrian and Antinous is this: Hadrian and his Egyptian religious advisor had identified in the drowning cult of Hapi a mechanism through which, under the proper sponsorship, a commoner could undergo apotheosis and be taken up into the pantheon of Egypt’s deities, and not simply as a minor deity at that: Hapi was an aspect of Ptah, who in turn was one with Osiris. Of course Antinous having Hadrian as a sponsor (himself both divine and a bridge to the otherworld) meant that the cult of Osiris could be fundamentally re-ordered in accordance with the needs of the Roman imperial regime.

Antinous was thus launched upon a post-mortem career of no minor importance in the historical development of western civilization as we have come to know it.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. (1 Corinthians 13)

John Dominic Crossan in a work he jointly authored with archaeologist Johnathan Reed, titled In search of Paul, posited one of the more significant counterfactual questions related to Roman history during the Imperial period: What if Judaism rather than Christianity had become the religion of Rome? What if the Roman Empire had become Jewish rather than Christian?[v]

By Hadrian’s reign, the Roman Empire had been involved in three very costly full-blown wars within its both its richest and economically strategic territories. All three of these conflicts, the First Jewish Revolt, the Kitos Revolt, and the Bar Kosiba Rebellion¸ centered on issues related directly to the position and practice of Judaism within the empire. HHI has posted several articles noting the close intermarriage and political alliances within several of the most powerful and politically elite gens of Imperial Rome. Although Crossan and Reed do not stress this pont, these authors are right to call attention to the ratio of favorable, to neutral, to positive comments, found across a span of time from Herodotus (fifth century BCE ) through the sixth century CE. Drawing on statistics compiled by Menahem Stern, the following ratios are presented:

In volume I, from Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E. through Plutarch in the first century C.E., 47 notices are favorable, (16 percent), 69 are unfavorable (24 percent), and 165 are neutral (60 percent). In volume 2, covering the period from the second through the sixth century, 54 are favorable (20 percent), 61 are unfavorable (21 percent), and 174 are neutral (59 percent)…In other words, cumulatively, ‘according to my count, 101 (18 percent) of the comments by pagans in Stern’s collection are substantially favorable, 339 (59 percent) are more or less neutral, and only 130 (23 percent) are substantially unfavorable.[vi]

It would be of great interest to take a very close look at these statistics within the span of only the first and second centuries C.E.; nevertheless, we are left to ponder the broad implications of the Crossan-Reed counterfactual carefully: in weighing the question, we may well be weighing the relative success and failures of policies set in motion during Hadrian’s reign. Did Hadrian have some sense of the great demographic shift in religious power seemingly evident in Stern’s rough statistics?

Many major events during Hadrian’s reign suggest that he and his government were cognizant of the religious demographics within the empire and the introduction of the Antinous cult as well as the panhellenism projects of his reign, which we will discuss in the next post in detail, indicate that this may very well be the case. In weighing the interaction between Hadrianic religious policy and the subsequent development of both Christianity and Judaism, it may also come to light that our historical and archaeological lines of demarcation between Panhellenic religion, Judaism, and Christianity are far too rigidly framed and interpreted. As historians and archaeologists, we have a duty to ask the sources, in our case the ancient chroniclers, are there events alluded to, warped, and glossed over which posterity is mislead from understanding? How much is history and how much is historical trompe l'oeil? Repeatedly one come across evidence in the long record of research already covered and comes away from the experience that one is peering through a smoky lens at what should be familiar and yet somehow face to face with another truth.

Several popular histories treat the Emperor Hadrian as one among the five good emperors, it is almost axiomatic to teach and read the rote summaries of his reign: he strengthened the defenses of the empire, held the limes established by his predecessor Trajan. When it comes to Antinous, the historiography lapses into moral interpretations and emotional motivations concerning the emperor’s relationship and alluded sexual preoccupation with this youthful male companion. Given our modern attitudes and cultural struggles with the issues of homosexuality, bisexuality, and all things sexually defined as perverse by Judeo-Christian morality, it is difficult to adjust one’s perspective on Hadrian’s relationship with Antinous, at once homosocial and perhaps sexual without writing, as the historiography so often has done, a narrative defined by the character of a sexually depraved emperor and his kept catamite. The historical and archaeological disciplines need to move beyond these modern back readings and perhaps attempt to discuss the events surrounding the creation of the Antinous cult as a serious and coldly premeditated series of actions.

In the light of available evidence and sources, in an empire riven with what was essentially internal ethnic, religious, and economic conflict since the Kitos revolts (115-117 traditionally), that an emperor with the religious interests of Hadrian would intervene in the process of popular religious development by advancing a syncretic version of his own should hardly surprise posterity.

The Antinous obelisk at its present location in the Pincio gardens, Rome.

Francis Llewellyn Griffith, the eminent and autodidact British Egyptologist cites the following original in situ discussion of what was known of the Antinous obelisk at the close of the 19^th century:

Rome. Inscription on the obelisk of Antinous (the Barbarini obelisk), edited from two published copies and translated (Erman, Mitth.d.Deutch. Arch. Inst. Rom. Xi. 115). The writer shows that, contrary to the received opinion, this obelisk was set up in Rome originally, and that the tomb, or at least a cenotaph of Antinous, was at Rome. Huelsen thereupon (p. 122) endeavors to locate the tomb of Antinous, and would place it at the S.E. corner of the city where the broken obelisk appears to have lain in the 16^th century.

In the twenty first century, Italian archaeologists Zaccaria Mari and Sergio Sgalambro argue that the The Barberini Obelisk of the Pincio Hill (Antinous Obelisk) was possibly situated within the Antinoeion complex at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli.

In the middle of the sanctuary, between the two temples a concrete basement has been found. It measures 3×3 m. The archaeologist who discovered the Antinoeion , suggests that the Barberini obelisk, dedicated to Antinous could have stood on this basement.

The augural side of the obelisk, the one dedicated to Emperor Hadrian and to his wife Sabina, was possibly placed facing the entrance, towards the Cento Camerelle, the other three faces, dedicated to Osirisantinous, facing the two temples and the exedra.

One of the sides of the obelisk states: “Antinous who is buried here inside of the garden owned by the Prince of Rome”. (Translation by J.C. Garnier). This makes plausible the location of the obelisk in the sanctuary of Antinous. [vii]

This is not the end of the Antinous obelisk mystery. It should be noted that if the obelisk originally stood at the Antinoeion within Hadrian’s villa, who attempted to transport it to Rome and why? That is to say, way was the obelisk not simply toppled where it was erected and forgotton?

Below is a translation from the western face of the Antinous obelisk that archaeologists suggest once stood at the center of the Antinoeion Hadrian built at his villa in Tivoli[viii]:

WEST FACE

The God, Osiris-Antinous the Justified, has become a youth, with perfect countenance and festively-decorated eyes, …strength, whose heart is glad like the heart of a strong-armed hero, after he received the order of the gods at the time of his death.

On Antinous will be repeated every ritual of the hours of Osiris together with each of his ceremonies in secret. His teachings will be spread to the whole country, helpful in the instruction and effective in the expression.  Nothing comparable has been done for the earlier ancestors until today;

And the same goes for his altars, his temples and his titles while he breathes the air of life and his reputation comes to being in the hearts of mankind.

Lord of Hermopolis, Lord of the Words of Gods, Thoth!  Rejuvenate Antinous’ Ba [soul] like all things at their time, in the night and by day, at all times, and every second!  The love for Antinous is in the hearts of his followers and the awe of him with all…and his praise with all his subjects when they worship him.

He takes his seat in the Hall of the Just, the transfigured and the clarified and the splendid, who are in the entourage of Osiris in the Realm of the Dead, while the Lord of Eternity gives him justification.  They let his words endure on the Earth, because their hearts are pleased by him.

He goes anywhere he pleases.  The doorkeepers of the underworld, they say to him, “Praise to you!” They loose their door-bolts and open their gates before him from millions of millions of years every day.  His lifespan, never will it wither.

Consulting the inscriptions on the other three cardinally positioned faces is worthwhile; however, in the interest of brevity we shall very briefly discuss a few basic points evident in the west face, and refer to elements very important in the other three cardinal surfaces of the obelisk. First, the inscriptions on the obelisk link Antinous through Hapi directly with the god Osiris. This is particularly strong in the west face inscription which was oriented toward the dying solar disc, the underworld, and mythology of the resurrected sun. The east face inscription is given over to the ascendant solar deity, Re-Harakhte. It is on the east face also that we see the imperial cult and Hadrian individually stressed:

“O Re-Harakhte, highest of the gods, who hears the calling of gods and men, the transfigured and the dead; hear also the call of Hadrian, who approaches you!  Give Hadrian reward for this, who has done this for me, Antinous, your beloved son. (East face)

The translator comments on what he considers the poor use of hieroglyphs with the inscription, so it would be wise not to place over reliance on the precise syntax of the translation itself; however, the sense, if correct, is that Hadrian requests divine honor from Re-Harakhte for what is presented as the self-sacrifice of Antinous.

The North face, aside from discussion the establishment of the games in honor of Antinous, contains elements strongly associated with the popular magic of Egypt wherein Antinous has the power to send healing dreams to the devoted:

He goes out of his places to numerous temples in the whole country and he hears the pleas of he who calls upon him; he heals the diseases of the needy ones by sending a dream.  Once he has accomplished his works among the living, he takes on every shape of his heart,

Whatever one thinks of emperors, catamites, that which is usually described as pagan, it must be evident that whatever the cult of Antinous was, it certainly was not a poorly thought out whim with no basis in Egyptian Hellenistic theology and popular practical magic. That an otherwise ruthless and coldly practical ruler would expend the resources of the empire on creating and sponsoring this cult bespeaks a need rooted in the realities and challenges Hadrian confronted as he sought to pacify the eastern empire. The evidence suggests that there was a direct and pressing need for the ruling elites in the empire to confront a popular and growing grass-roots religious movement with one of their own as a counterbalance. That Hadrian’s reign was bracketed by seriously destructive Jewish revolts suggests that the Antinous cult was established to counter a movement originating out of Judaism. Hadrian’s imperial political and philosophical response was to bring the resources of the empire to bear on the single aim of syncretising Judaism into the panhellenic empire of the divine Augustus.

One last point on the Antious cult that requires stress: it was a religion invented by the elite class in Roman society within which the common classes were encouraged to participate. When Justin Martyr writes:

We think it not improper to mention among these things also Antinous, our contemporary, whom everyone was coerced to worship as a God on account of fear, although they knew who he was and where he came from.[ix]

Justin cites Antinous as an example of a ridiculous caricature of religious creation in contrast to Christianity, but laying aside the polemics for a moment, it is worth noting from an imperial and elite perspective, the fact that Antinous was a commoner from Bithynia and companion of Hadrian, that is to say in Justin’s turn of phrase, that everyone knew who Antinous was and where he came from was precisely the point of centering a cult around the youth.

Again turning to our Victorian generation for final comment on Antinous, and this quote is offered by way of elevating the tone and seriousness of the discussion of Hadrian, Antinous, and the cult that rose in his name, we close as we opened with a word or two from Lord Tennyson, who, when pausing before a bust of Antinous located within the collection of the British Museum, is said to have remarked:

Ah – this is the inscrutable Bithynian. If we knew what he knew, we should understand the ancient world.[x]

Alfred, Lord Tennyson by John Everett Millais

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Related posts:

1. The Gospels According to Hadrian, Part III: The Aelian Canon and the Main Hand of God
2. The Gospels According to Hadrian (part one)
3. Lifting the Vaults of Heavenly and Earthly Peace
4. Resurrection in the second century
5. Mauretanian glassmakers in Roman Britain
6. Hadrian’s perverted insanity
7. Chrestians and the lost history of Classical Antiquity
8. Manimekalai: Dancer with Magic Bowl
9. The God of Silence and Secrecy
10. Persian, Greek and Roman syncretism in the Kharga Oasis
11. Archaeology of the earliest canonical gospels
12. The Lysimachus Dynasty
13. The Loss of Reason
14. Eleazar, Saul and a Deed of Gift at Qumran
15. The God-Idea of the Ancients Or Sex In Religion