Hadrian took Antinous’s left hand and pressed the slender band onto his index finger.
Antinous held the delicate treasure before his eyes to inspect its beautiful color and its strange markings. It was certainly an object of distinction to his perception, but it was also a token of extraordinary significance.
‘How does the cockerel provide these boons, my lord?’ he asked. ‘What is the magic?’
Hadrian again took the young man’s hand and raised the ring to their eye level.
‘This cockerel is the symbol of the god Abrasax from the East. His origin lies in ancient Babylon,’ Hadrian explained. ‘The cockerel is a creature which hails the advent of the day, at sunrise. He represents Phoebus, The Radiant One, just as Apollo too is described as Phoebus, shining like the sun. He is the deity of light set in a world of darkness. Beneath the cockerel’s head is a man’s body encased in a sturdy breastplate as protection against evil, while in one hand he clasps a whip to protect wisdom against ignorance, and in the other a shield to project his omnipotent power.
His legs of snakes tell us of Eternity, the faculty to shed their skins to renew their being.
In the Greek science of geometria, the method of calculating the numerical value of the letters of the alphabet making up a word, his name Abrasax achieves the number 365. This indicates his enclosure in the annual solar cycle. You can see the inscription AEON indicating his 365 eons emanating from his function as First Cause, one for each day of the year.
I am told this makes Abrasax the Pantheus, the total god of all manifestations, the One God. Other secret signs are carved on the reverse to enhance its power. The full complement of its mystical characters are said to provide protection and eternal life to the wearer.
It is this unique treasure I give to you, Antinous of Bithynia, to wear as a gesture from your erastes in place of an edible cockerel. I give you eternal life.’
Antinous was immediately swept deeper into his abyss of intense longing. He beheld the compact blue ring upon his finger and marveled at its provenance and purported wonders. This was truly a divine science, he thought.
‘Who was, or were, the previous owners of this marvel, my lord?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, Ant, but I am told that Alexander the Great, our mutual hero, once wore this magical gem,’ Caesar replied.
‘But Alexander is dead, my lord. And at a very early age too. It didn’t work for him, did it?’
‘Ah, but yes it did, Ant. Death he brought upon himself, either by drink or disease, though some claim he was poisoned. Yet you must concede how Alexander became divine in our eyes and his fame lives eternally,’ the emperor rationalized with a grin. ‘The ring’s magic may work in ways which are a mystery and an enigma to we mortals. Who knows? Egypt and Babylon possess secrets we are yet to understand. I hope you will acknowledge the nature of the gift, son of Apollo, and my good intentions in bestowing it. It is my special mark upon you.’
‘I am humbled, my lord, by your gesture,’ Antinous offered quite sincerely.
‘Yes, we must discuss that too. In truth, Ant, you need not be so humble in my presence. You are not my slave, servant, or staff member, Antinous. You possess no military rank to submit to.
You are a freeborn independent entity with your own mind, body, and virtue. You are Greek, Ant. I do not own you, despite appearances. Independent thinking is one of your race’s attractions. So you and I must now find a less formal way to respond to each other or else our time together will be wasted in interminable deference to my eminence.
So you need not call me ‘Caesar’ or ‘My Lord, all the time,’ Hadrian instructed with brisk clarity. ‘And nor need you bow and scrape at every exchange. The entire world says ‘Caesar’-this and ‘Caesar’-that to me, which is proper and correct before me as Imperator or Princeps. But when you and I are alone together, or we are with our very closest intimates, we must relate less formally. I need to relax sometimes, too.
You are entitled to use the name ‘Hadrian’ to me, and desist from too much kowtowing. Respect, yes, always Ant, I am a man. But excessive etiquette, no. Our time is too precious.
The nomen Hadrian is acceptable between us. It’s less distancing than unending honorifics. My days are made up of interminable accolades and fawning petitions. I tire of it sometimes. So I expect my closest intimates to have a more relaxed manner in my presence. That is, unless I command otherwise.’
Antinous attempted an understanding, but with some uncertainty.
‘We must get to know each other, Ant. I am no ogre. I am not a tyrant. I am Princeps to the world, yes, but I am also a fellow man. I am not dead, burned, and deified among my predecessors quite yet, though my day will come.
Nevertheless, there still remain definite rules between us,’ Hadrian elaborated. ‘Put simply, in our personal space we are entitled to relate in a personal, familiar way. I am a man like any other, even as your erastes. Yet in my official capacity as Caesar we must conform to due protocol. It boils down to being personal when in our own company but suitably formal in public. In one I am your personal friend ‘Hadrian’, in the other I am ‘Lord’,” he said. “These are the consequences of my station. Understand?’
‘Yes sir,’ Antinous responded cautiously. ‘I think I do.’
‘No, it’s Hadrian, Ant. The titles of sir, sire, My Lord, Caesar, or other terms of honor are to be reserved for your duty role. I tire of everyone bobbing up and down, kissing my hem, saluting, or falling to their knee at every opportunity.’
‘Duty role? I beg your meaning … Hadrian?’
‘You and your friend Lysias will be entered into my Household as Companions of the Hunt. You will be attached to the schedule of the Master of the Hunt, Salvius Julianus. You know him from Nicomedia. He will act as your supervisor of duty assignments and so on, especially for my recreation. It gives you proper duties in my retinue which you will enjoy, and attaches you both to the Chamberlain’s schedule of finances.
You and your young friend will be awarded an endowment suited to your needs. The stipend assigns funds, services, protection, and accommodations in my travels for you and your attendants to a suitable standard. This includes your Latin tutor from Cyrenaica and stewards. Meanwhile, as a Companion of the Hunt, you’ll find the Hunt Master Julianus will teach you a great deal about hunting, including of larger beasts, as I will myself. This is your duty role.’
‘I see, Hadrian.’
‘Your primary duty is to enjoy the supervision of the hunt under Julianus. This will keep you both out of mischief. You’ll find your duties give you access to good horses, horsemanship training, weapons and security training, and the company of selected sons of notables from around the Empire.
You and your staff will join me when I tour to visit the Legions. You will accompany me when I attend public audiences and Court celebrations. You will sleep with me when occasions permit, though you will be assigned your own apartments as well. My Household, my contubernium, are a lively crowd, if given to too much gossip, frivolity, love affairs, and wine, but you will probably enjoy their company. Any other questions?’
‘Not that I can think of at this time, Hadrian.’
‘Fine. Then pour some wine for us both and take your clothes off. I want to see your shape again after all these months. Your physical line pleases me. Then you can undress me too.’
Antinous hesitated before responding. His brain raced. After several moments’ pause he made his advance.
‘The wine is already poured, Hadrian. The servant filled the cups before he left. Help yourself. But I wish to view you unclothed too, and all of you this time. If I’m not to mimic a servant or even a slave, why don’t we undress each other? I’ll undress you; you undress me. Then we’ll both witness the other’s physical shape.’
Hadrian was taken aback for an instant, but smiled at the ploy.
Antinous gamely reached for his erastes’ hand and drew it to the swelling package rising at his crutch. Caesar’s un
resisting hand was obliging, even willing.
The meirakion’s audacity immobilized him momentarily. That is, until he was tugged firmly at his shoulder to press his bearded jaw down towards Antinous’s groin. There was only an amused resistance by the master of the Empire.
‘I said I am yours, Hadrian. All this is yours too, with more to follow,’ Antinous whispered breathily close to his ear.
He felt the clothbound flesh of the young man’s firming member press provocatively against his face and jaw. He too sensed his blood race to his genitals despite Antinous’s challenge to his Roman machismo.
By inciting irrumene, where the mouth engages in a supposedly impure act which impugns the masculinity of a vir by its receptive nature, Antinous was being incendiary. Hadrian amusedly declined this invitation to fellate his partner, but possibly as a secondary afterthought.
Then a rush to strip tunics and undercloths away from bared flesh, limbs, and organs was unleashed. Revealed entirely in their bare humanity, the pair now stood eyeing each other’s sinewy condition beneath the flickering lamplight.
One was of a sleek, rangy muscularity, the other of powerful weathered toughness. One possessed the finely-honed contours of a practiced athlete; the other showed the well-knit tissues of a seasoned fighter, hunter, and working soldier. Erections announced their mutual admiration.
Antinous took a fresh initiative. Impulse drove his heart. He moved close to Hadrian’s side where hip touched hip and flesh touched flesh. He drew the emperor’s arm around his waist, and tilted back to invite a face-to-face response. Hadrian took the invitation and grasped his jaw in one hardened palm to hungrily devour the Bithynian’s mouth, lips, tongue, and saliva. Antinous happily assented to the aggressive urgency.
He felt himself yielding to the grasping hands and arms, the tightly pressing torso, the intimately provocative pelvic thrust, and the fierce probing by a searching tongue. He then responded to these gestures equally fervently.
In a flurry of discarded clothes, linens, leathers, buckles, and boots the two collapsed in an intertwined coupling to the stony tesserae of the mosaic floor. Their limbs interlocked in alternating strategies of domination, submission, and rude intimacy above the floor’s mosaic design of Greek hoplites at battle with scantily-clad Amazons.
Antinous was now enveloped in an increasing wildness. His bodily resistance to his grappling combatant was waning. This was no concession of defeat; it was his recognition of the exhilaration of close proximity to someone thrilling. He vividly imagined he was melting inexorably into the other’s flesh as they bound tightly together. He was besieged by the rough caresses and wet urgency of Hadrian’s mouth, felt the brush of trim bristles graze his jaw, and inhaled the salty aroma of a day’s sweat. Yet he gave as well as he received.
While wrapped together in abject intimacy he discerned the rigid shaft at his partner’s groin searching the nooks-and-crannies of his limbs to locate a susceptible portal into his interior being. Its determination in sliding ever closer to its intended target was tenacious. He felt his pursuer’s lust press relentlessly forward towards its goal.
The driven urgency was so unashamedly flattering, his resistance willfully relaxed to open his defenses to the incursion. It was a gift to his companion’s previous generosities with a dash of prurient curiousity.
Hadrian’s resolve pressed his arms and limbs apart to hold him firm to the mosaic tiles. The militant strategist maneuvered a forward assault at the intended target. The younger man threw caution to the winds as he opened his heart and body to the incursion. What the heck, he thought.
A myriad mixed feelings, thoughts, needs, fears, and bodily sensations swept Antinous as he realized his body was happily succumbing to a very intimate corporeal invasion. His partner held him firm by a feigned wrestler’s hold whose determined power maneuvered him to utter vulnerability. Yet it was a consensual vulnerability which happily savored its own helplessness.
Hadrian spat several times onto his palm and applied the lubricious balm to his member. Antinous emitted a surprised gasp as the penetrating organ found its target and eased into its intended berth. Yet the zealous invasion was a careful, benevolent assault.
Antinous was overcome with contradictory feelings of victory and submission, joy and discomfort, honor and shame, as Hadrian engulfed him in a carnal embrace. He also realized he had succumbed to the driven power of another man’s lust, while equally recognizing he was strangely untroubled by it.
After tense moments of wary expectation the Bithynian gradually perceived a spreading sensation of elation coupled with inner serenity suffusing his organism. An entirely unfamiliar feeling of bodily wholeness was aroused and acknowledged by his perception. He had to concede he felt pretty good.
Antinous hadn’t experienced such a novel sensation since the time several years earlier when he first stumbled upon the cascading sensuality of self-induced orgasm. But no brief, excited spasms at the hand of his more lurid fantasies bore comparison with this new experience. Its glow pervaded his entire being, head to foot, as he subsided into a mysterious rapture emanating from the dark inner world at his body’s center. It thrilled his mind, it enlivened his muscles, and it pleasured his organs. It induced whimpering, toe-curling contentment.
The feeling automatically cemented a convergence with his all-engulfing companion. Their face-to-face, eye-to-eye proximity invoked an enclosing cocoon of radical intimacy. While Hadrian’s rhythmic bodily action undulated above him, Antinous’s natural inner solitude acknowledged how he was now accompanied in his sense-of-exile by a like-minded fellow explorer.
Hadrian’s searching eyes hovered above him to monitor the minutiae of his sensory responses. The younger man’s entire organism radiated waves of exquisite delight from his inner core. Hadrian sported patiently, teasingly, adventurously, with these sensations to fine-tune their playfulness.
He manipulated himself this way and that, slowly entering and withdrawing in leisurely alternation, slowly pressing ever deeper or holding still in steadfast confirmation. He toyed deliberately with the febrile responses of tissue, muscles, nerve end, interior node, and the conscious psyche too, to exact maximized gratification. Both parties smiled knowingly to each other’s responses.
Hadrian lifted the young man’s frame high for greater penetrative power, or doubled him over to bring himself into closer eye-to-eye intimacy, all the while playing his physicality with inventive pleasurings. Antinous was consumed by an animal relish which compelled him to emit plaintive squeaks of sublime delight. His habitual, protective, impassive guard was being demolished as a newfound openness to personal connection was rebuilt on its foundations.
In the process he began to appreciate facets of his father’s revelations of a few months earlier. This intense closeness to a person for whom he held such high regard created an unanticipated concord within him. Hadrian was engaged upon an active, radical intimacy far more deeply personal than anything Antinous had ever practiced upon himself. Now two decades of emotional curbing, restraint, discretion, and conscious personal distance were being crumbled away in a rush of acute physical sensation. Antinous felt Hadrian and he had melded into a single human organism.
Is this, he wondered, what Achilles and Patrocles, or Alexander and Hephaestion, had experienced? Is this what they call love?
His friendly tormentor’s rhythmic pacing increased in tempo and ferocity. The pulsing rise and fall of the interlocked bodies grew in ardor and heat. Beady sweats on glistening surfaces shone wetly beneath the chamber’s flickering lamps. Muscles distended, limbs became malleable, bodies entwined aggressively. Antinous heard himself sigh his companion’s name again and again. His companion reciprocated.
Eventually and inevitably, the torrid fervor burst in a shower of exclamations, gasps, shudders, and cries of delighted anguish. The two collapsed across the mosaic tiles in a pile of exhausted energies and spent body moistures.
Antinous felt becalmed in a manner unlike any previ
ous occasion of his life. His abyss of solitude had dissolved into memory.
Minutes passed in silence before one retrieved a wine cup to share between them. They sipped alternating draughts.
‘You learn quickly, Ant,’ Hadrian rasped breathily.
Antinous raised himself on one elbow to eye his sweaty, naked companion lying outstretched beside him. He smiled his most ingratiating, calculating, charmer’s smile. It was loaded with intent.
‘Yes, I do Hadrian. But it’s your turn now,’ he murmured softly.
The maturer man baulked. He looked to his companion questioningly.
‘A ride there for a ride back,’ was the immediate response.
‘Are you sure you have a sufficient lion-heart to do it? And so soon, Ant?’
‘Yes I do, Hadrian. Turn over.’
Hadrian’s lazy smile widened into a knowing, if faintly insecure grin.
‘You do learn quickly,’ he said.
Antinous good-humouredly grasped his companion’s pelvis at the hips and mock-pressed him to roll over onto his belly. It was time for the assailant’s driven fury to be turned back onto itself.”
Geta fell silent once more to sip his wine. His eyes returned to Surisca more often than seemed necessary, Suetonius sensed, as he conveyed his testimony to the group of listeners in the morning sunlight. He began his account again.
“You may wonder how I know all these intimate details, gentlemen – and Lady Surisca. I learned most of them from Herodes’ steward who kept watch outside the shuttered andron so Caesar’s needs would be immediately provided if demanded. He kept an eye on things through a join in the shutter leaves, but has kept his tongue to himself ever since, except with me. I learned of the others from Antinous himself over wine in later conversations.
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