ts our curiosity, for ancient writers are neglectful
or tantalisingly bald in their allusions to Antinous. We are told only
that he was the favourite of Hadrian, the most magnificent and
enlightened of all the Roman emperors, who loved the gentle Bithynian
youth so extravagantly that he made him his inseparable companion and
even contemplated him as his successor; that during the fateful Egyptian
journey an oracle announced that the Emperor must shortly die unless a
voluntary victim could be found to take upon himself the doom with which
he was threatened; and that Antinous unhesitatingly laid down his life
for his patron. "Greater love hath no man than this," and Hadrian's
ostentatious lamentation, and even his deification of his friend, seems
puerile in comparison with the devotion of Antinous.

No modern author has developed this alluring theme in a satisfactory
manner. Ebers in his novel _The Emperor_, is inadequate. He laboriously
loads its pages with his carefully verified material, but his
imagination is wingless, the result far from convincing.

[Illustration: Ruins of a Gallery of Statues in Hadrian's Villa

From an etching by Piranesi]

One poet there was, he whose lines head this chapter, endowed with the
inspiration to divine, and the power to worthily reveal the secret of
the sadness in that haunting face, to which sculptors alone have done
full justice. There are hints scattered through his poems that
startlingly supplement the vague clues which now tantalise and baffle as
we trace the story of Antinous in Hadrian's villa.

For where history and literature fail us archaeology supplies its
circumstantial evidence, and if we scan, through the crystal lenses of
uncoloured truth, the stage where the drama which we seek was enacted we
shall see the sculptured semblances of the vanished actors, and be able
to surmise in part the lost book of the play.

The ruins of the great pleasure-palace, where the Emperor and his
favourite resided during the opening scenes of their history, now lie
bleak and bare, exposed to the burning sun and the wandering winds,
despoiled even of the vines and flowers with which nature has striven to
hide the ravages of man. We must go back to their excavation in the
early part of the sixteenth century if we would study the tell-tale
_mise-en-scene_.

It was Pirro Ligorio who in 1538 made for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este II.
the first systematic exploration and authoritative map of Had