formed the last great literary triumph of the age.
Religion had degenerated under the twofold influences of scepticism
and intrusive foreign cults. It was, in truth, an age in which, for
a sound heart and manly intellect, there lay no proper choice except
between the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and the Christianity of the
Catacombs. All else had passed into shams, unrealities, and visions.
Now Hadrian was neither stoical nor Christian, though he so far
coquetted with Christianity as to build temples dedicated to no
Pagan deity, which passed in after times for unfinished churches. He
was a _Graeculus_. In that contemptuous epithet, stripping it of its
opprobrious significance, we find the real key to his character. In
a failing age he lived a restless-minded, many-sided soldier-prince,
whose inner hopes and highest aspirations were for Hellas. Hellas,
her art, her history, her myths, her literature, her lovers, her
young heroes filled him with enthusiasm. To rebuild her ruined
cities, to restore her deities, to revive her golden life of blended
poetry and science, to reconstruct her spiritual empire as he had
re-organised the Roman world, was Hadrian's dream. It was indeed a
dream; one which a far more creative genius than Hadrian's could not
have realised.

But now, returning to the two alternatives regarding his friend's
death: was this philo-Hellenic Emperor the man to have immolated
Antinous for _extispicium_ and then deified him? Probably not. The
discord between this bloody act and subsequent hypocrisy upon the
one hand, and Hadrian's Greek sympathies upon the other, must be
reckoned too strong for even such a dipsychic character as his.
There is nothing in either Spartian or Dion to justify the opinion
that he was naturally cruel or fantastically deceitful. On the other
hand, Hadrian's philo-Hellenic, splendour-loving, somewhat tawdry,
fame-desiring nature was precisely of the sort to jump eagerly at
the deification of a favourite who had either died a natural death
or killed himself to save his master. Hadrian had loved Antinous
with a Greek passion in his lifetime. The Roman Emperor was half a
god. He remembered how Zeus had loved Ganymede, and raised him to
Olympus; how Achilles had loved Patroclus, and performed his funeral
rites at Troy; how the demi-god Alexander had loved Hephaestion, and
lifted him into a hero's seat on high. He, Hadrian, would do the
like, now that death had robbed him of his comrade. T