Hadrian admits that he lacks originality as a writer; it is true that we have a very literary evocation of the time with Antinoüs. The latter is cast as a youthful hunter: ‘There was Bithynia and its sea of trees, the forests of cork-oak and pine ; and the hunting lodge with latticed galleries where the boy, once again in familiar haunts, would cast off his dagger and belt of gold, scattering his arrows at random to roll with the dogs on leather divans’ (156). Hadrian sets the scene in the mysterious forests of Asia Minor, with phallic emphasis on the strong, thick oaks and slimmer pine trees. In these scenes the youthful hunter has conquered the emperor with the arms of the goddess of Love. Antinoüs can be seen as both male beloved and female vanquisher, as ideal image and object of desire. This dual role assigned to Antinoüs is repeated in further mythological associations.
In Hadrian’s psychological portrait and personal narrative, drama and epic largely take over from any direct attempt at ekphrasis. Hadrian will occasionally employ this strategy but he instead uses sculpture as a metaphor for aspects of his relationship with Antinous. Hadrian is able to record his awareness of the changes in Antinous over time: ‘The boyish limbs lengthened out; the face lost its delicate childish round and hollowed slightly under the high cheekbones; the full chest of the young runner took on the smooth, gleaming curves of a Bacchante’s breast; the brooding lips revealed a bitter ardor, a sad satiety. In truth this face changed as if I sculpted it day and night’ (155-6).
Yourcenar’s Hadrian is preoccupied by the re-birth of Antinoüs. At the culmination of the first series of visits to mythological sites, the sanctuary dedicated to Neptune is placed in the womb of a new temple. Hadrian thereby returns the god of the sea to his origins and, adopting the role as symbolic mother, thanks Neptune for the ‘birth’ of his beloved. A column is erected to commemorate Epaminondas and a young companion; Hadrian’s parallel draws on his own experience of recalling a mythologised past of idealised male love: ‘a column whereon a poem is inscribed was erected by my order to commemorate this example of a time when everything, viewed at a distance, seems to have been noble, and simple, too, whether tenderness, glory or death’ (158).
In the ‘Golden Age’ section, Hadrian brings together Cupid and Narcissus in his account: ‘We were drawn by the hunt to the valley of the Helicon, then in its last bronzed red of autumn; at the spring of Narcissus we paused, near the Sanctuary of Love; there the pelt of a young she-bear fixed by golden nails to the temple wall was offered a trophy to Eros, the wisest of the gods’ (158). Narcissus is closely associated by Hadrian with his story following the meeting with Antinous, with Narcissus signifying both Hadrian’s search for himself in his past, and his view of Antinous as a beautiful young man with the fragility of a flower. The sacrificial bear is the female victim offered up to Amor: the sacrifice in love, which Hadrian argued for uncynically in the opening meditative section of the text, is transferred onto the ritual of sacrifice.