raeco-Roman Paganism, Celsus could hardly have ventured to
rest an argument upon his worship, nor would Origen have chosen to
traverse that argument with solid reasoning, instead of passing it
by in rhetorical silence. Nothing is more difficult than to
understand the conditions of that age or to sympathise with its
dominant passions. Educated as we have been in the traditions of the
finally triumphant Christian faith, warmed through and through as we
are by its summer glow and autumn splendour, believing as we do in
the adequacy of its spirit to satisfy the cravings of the human
heart, how can we comprehend a moment in its growth when the
divinised Antinous was not merely an object offensive to the moral
sense, but also a parody dangerous to the pure form of Christ?

It remains to say somewhat of Antinous as he appears in art. His
place in classic sculpture corresponds to his position in antique
mythology. The Antinous statues and coins are reflections of earlier
artistic masterpieces, executed with admirable skill, but lacking
original faculty for idealisation in the artists. Yet there is so
much personal attraction in his type, his statues are so manifestly
faithful portraits, and we find so great a charm of novelty in his
delicately perfect individuality, that the life-romance which they
reveal, as through a veil of mystery, has force enough to make them
rank among the valuable heirlooms of antiquity. We could almost
believe that, while so many gods and heroes of Greece have perished,
Antinous has been preserved in all his forms and phases for his own
most lovely sake; as though, according to Ghiberti's exquisite
suggestion, gentle souls in the first centuries of Christianity had
spared this blameless youth, and hidden him away with tender hands,
in quiet places, from the fury of iconoclasts. Nor is it impossible
that the great vogue of his worship was due among the Pagan laity to
this same fascination of pure beauty. Could a more graceful temple
of the body have been fashioned, after the Platonic theory, for the
habitation of a guileless, god-inspired, enthusiastic soul? The
personality of Antinous, combined with the suggestion of his
self-devoted death, made him triumphant in art as in the affections
of the pious.

It would be an interesting task to compose a _catalogue raisonne_ of
Antinous statues and basreliefs, and to discuss the question of
their mythological references. This is, however, not the place for