The Cult of Antinous
Sean Gabb, Centre for Ancient Studies, 2023

Why did Mr Bickley give me this book to review? Bryan Mercadente and Sebastian Wang are both Dr Gabb’s students, both forbiddingly learned in the ancient languages and the ancient world. Except for my B in O-Level Latin (1968), I know bugger all about the matters covered—well, not quite bugger all, but not so far short of it. I suppose the intent is to get a fair review. Here is my best effort.

Sean Gabb’s The Cult of Antinous is not a hagiography. It is something better: a quiet, erudite demolition of pious lies from both the ancient and modern world. The lecture-turned-book is a brisk, sardonic tour through the most decadent cult of the Roman world, and one of its most effective. The boy died, yes—but what followed was a miracle of political opportunism and spiritual success. Gabb does not flinch from the disturbing parts. Nor does he genuflect before the fashionably uncritical idolatry now surrounding Antinous as gay icon. This is not a work of celebration. It is a work of historical thought, dressed as a lecture and sharpened with scepticism.

It begins, as it must, with a photograph of Hadrian and Antinous—stone fragments now housed in the British Museum, staring out from beneath museum glass and centuries of self-serving speculation. “Hadrian is on the left,” Gabb says, “Antinous on the right.” But from then on, it is the boy—not the emperor—who takes centre stage. The story is simple enough. Antinous was a Bithynian youth, met Hadrian at around age twelve, became his lover, travelled with him, and died in the Nile under suspicious circumstances. Hadrian made him a god. Cities were built. Statues were raised. Coins were minted. Shrines were erected. And the worship spread quickly and widely—and in ways that make some modern historians uncomfortable.

Gabb’s treatment of all this is not exactly kind, but it is always fair. He reminds us that, when it comes to Antinous, we know almost nothing. The written sources are sparse: Dio Cassius gives a few lines; the Historia Augusta offers rumour. Most of what we “know” is based on “could have,” “may have,” “might have.” And yet on this we have built dissertations, operas, novels, and now neopagan blogs filled with inverted pentagrams and airbrushed torsos. Gabb is not impressed. His repeated refrain is “castle of supposition.” And rightly so. Royston Lambert, he notes, was especially fond of these castles.

But for all that, there is a real story here. Gabb walks us through the ancient views of sex, pausing only to make the necessary disclaimer for his mixed audience of Chinese undergraduates and English middle class language students:

Please be aware that other civilisations frequently have or had views of sexual propriety different from our own. This lecture will discuss, and sometimes show depictions of, sexual relationships between adults and persons somewhat below the present age of consent. Some of these relationships involve disparities of legal status. Though not recommended for imitation in modern England, such relationships are nowhere explicitly condemned. The lecture will also not avoid language that many may consider indelicate or obscene.

What follows is a lesson in ancient sexual economics. Among Greeks, boy-love was structured: older men pursued beautiful adolescent boys, usually between 12 and 17, who were supposed to receive but not enjoy. The Romans were less sentimental: they cared only who did the penetrating. “To use was fine. To be used was shameful.” Gabb’s phrasing here is withering, but accurate. There is no anachronistic moralising—just the dry, clinical reconstruction of a culture with different priorities.

Was Antinous raped? Probably not, according to the ancient standards. Was Hadrian a predator? Only if you impose modern law onto ancient power structures. Gabb does neither. What he does do is ask why a Roman emperor would turn his lover into a god—and what kind of god he became. He treats Hadrian not as a lover, but as a statesman with a project.

And here is the deeper point of the book. Antinous was not merely a pretty face or a sexual obsession. He was a response to the imperial crisis of legitimacy. The empire, as Gabb explains, had no principle of unity. It had no nation, no language, no common religion. “Its only principle of unity was that all these territories had at one time been conquered by Roman arms and were now held by a combination of Roman arms and inertia.” Hadrian understood this. And he tried to build something new.

Enter Antinous. A god, yes—but a new kind of god: not an Olympian rapist, not a provincial river-spirit, but a god who had walked the Earth recently, who had suffered, who had sacrificed himself, who had risen to heaven, and who now answered prayers and performed miracles. Gabb notes the parallels with Christianity—not to mock but to draw the intellectual line. The Antinous cult was a manufactured salvation faith, pitched against the growing threat of Christ. Hadrian, for all his Greek tastes and Roman authority, was not blind to what was coming. If Christianity promised comfort in the next life, so would his fabricated cult of Antinous—but without the subversive edge.

This is not conspiracy theory. It is grounded inference. Gabb reminds us of Dio Cassius, who said that Antinous had “voluntarily undertaken to die—it being necessary that a life should be surrendered freely for the accomplishment of the ends Hadrian had in view.” We may not know what those ends were, but the structure is clear. Antinous the boy may have drowned. Antinous the god was useful. And the worship of Antinous—far from collapsing with Hadrian’s death—persisted and even flourished into the Christian centuries. Coins were minted as late as 384 AD. Love spells were cast in his name. His images were preserved.

Gabb offers no sentimental farewell. He ends with a callous—but fair—reflection. “Regardless of its beauty, that body carried an immortal soul,” he writes. And its early death, however convenient to Hadrian, was still a sadness. Gabb does not sanctify the boy. He does not excuse the emperor. But he gives both their due. And he forces the reader to consider what modern religions owe to ancient theatre.

The book is clear and brilliant. Its greatest virtue is its refusal to lie. There is no agenda here beyond accuracy. The gay activists who turn Antinous into a rainbow saint will not be pleased. Nor will the Christians who think all Paganism was morally bankrupt. Gabb steps between both delusions. He tells you what happened, or what might have. He shows you the statues. He translates the obelisk. He quotes the sources. He leaves the reader—not the lecturer—to judge.

It is, in this sense, a libertarian history. You are not commanded to feel. You are invited to think.