Articles

Last year we stationed a number of poets in the Museums and Archives of London to report back on the queer histories hidden therein.  Celebrated poet John McCullough explored the British Museum, where he took a bust of the boy god Antinous as his inspiration.

The bust is from Rome, Italy AD 130-140  and represents the emperor Hadrian’s young lover Antinous.  Antinous was Greek and born in Mantineum, a small place near the city of Bithynion-Claudiopolis (now northern Turkey). This bust originally belonged to a full-length statue, which was found in the eighteenth century, built into a wall on the Janiculum Hill in Rome. It is known that the Roman emperor Hadrian passed through the area where Antinous was born in AD 123 and many scholars believe this was when they met. Later sources make it very clear that Hadrian and Antinous formed a homosexual relationship.

Although we know little of their personal relationship, it is understood they shared a passion for hunting. In AD 130 Hadrian visited Egypt with the imperial entourage, including his wife Sabina and Antinous. After an extended stay in Alexandria, they embarked on a voyage up the River Nile. On 24 October Antinous drowned in the river, on the same day the locals were commemorating the death, by drowning in the Nile, of the Egyptian god Osiris.

Hadrian maintained Antinous’ death was an accident, nevertheless, malicious rumours soon spread. Some thought he had committed suicide or that he had been sacrificed. Others claimed Antinous sacrificed himself to prolong the life of the emperor. For the Romans homosexual relationships were not unusual, but the intensity with which Hadrian mourned Antinous’ premature death and encouraged his cult in the eastern empire was without precedent.

We think John has beautifully imagined the passion and agony of this ancient love affair, see what you think...

Antinous

By John McCullough, commissioned for Write Queer London 2012

He rose through Hadrian: a winding steam

that cooked each swollen vein and bone.  A lad

so fathomless and blue a river thought

he was the sky, plunged down his throat.

His lover made all Rome lament, decreed

the birth of towered cities for a god,

each dominated by the marble stares

of busts of that sweet head, remote as stars.

They weren’t enough.  The emperor’s blue wound

remained.  He cursed the world, its lustful noise.

Hadrian, who could not stop the waves

that sizzled on the shore, the thunder’s boil

and, round his busts, the scratch of shrivelled leaves,

transported by a promise from the wind.

Image © Trustees of the British Museum