Now the narrative of ‘The Lotus Garland of Antinous’ proceeds to develop over about three or four hundred lines. It proceeds in a chronological sequence, starting off in the morning, then going on to ‘noon day’ – ‘noon day’ when obviously in Egypt all people do is to have a siesta, so both Antinous and Hadrian are flat out during that period. Then you come to the evening, and at that point again, not surprisingly, Antinous is acting as cup-bearer to Hadrian. There’s a further passage there which I think is particularly delightful, and which I will read out. What one should note here is the significance of the passage that I read earlier about Symonds choosing to emphasise – as he says for artistic reasons – the point that Antinous should elect to take his own life. You can see the point. If, as it were, he is simply put to death by Hadrian – if he is immolated for the sake of the emperor as in one possibility raised by antique authors – it would produce a much flatter poem – probably a poem not worth writing. So, as a result, Antinous has to elect to die, and obviously he has to speak out, to no one in particular but to us, his reasons for doing so.

Thus spoke Antinous: ‘My hour is nigh!
Night cometh, and the guardians of the sky
Illume their cressets! So he rose and spread
The panther skin and thyrsus and the red
Wreath of dead lotos laid upon the ground:
Next in his hand the bowl of beryl, crowned
With roses, from a gleaming golden jar
He filled; and gazing at the level star,
Thrice made libation, crying: ‘Father Nile,
And Isis and Osiris! ye who smile
On mortal births and burials! Lo, I give
My life for Adrian’s! Wherefore should I live?
Hasve I not learned to trail my manhood’s pride
In the world’s golden gutters? – Like a bride,
Sumptuous with sacrifice and pomp and choir,
Forth from the doors I issued; and the fire
Of Flamens shone to light me: now, alone,
With saffron veil unbound and broken zone,
My blossom withered, lo, a wanton’s doom
Awaits me, or the purifying tomb!

And that is the decisive moment. I will omit quite a lot of elaboration of that particular decision, but emphasise specifically what I described as the moment of metamorphosis at the end. It’s interesting because, in the course of the poem, Antinous has been Bacchus but he’s also been Ganymede, the cup-bearer. So he is given first of all, as it were, a hypothetical ending as a Ganymede arranged by Jupiter in his aquiline guise, and then something which one can take as being a wholly Ovidian ending, a kind of metamorphosis by assimilation into a beautiful flower:

Speechless from the bark
He dropped, she onward glided o’er the dark
Breast of the glimmering Nile with lamp and light:
He through the mirrors of the cool black night
Unruffled, dying drifted; and his death
Was seen by no man. Nay, there lingereth
Old legend in the town Antinoë,
Called by his name, a fair town and a free,
How that a flight of eagles from the sky,
Down swooping, bore him, rosy breast and thigh
Lustrous like lightening on their sable plumes,
Up to the zenith, where, a star, he blooms
In that bright garden of the grace of Jove,
The martyr and the miracle of love. –
Of this, the truth we know not; but we know
That in the town of Besa, where the flow
Of Nile is stayed upon the eastern bank
With wattles and with osiers, for a tank
That draws therefrom through sluices deep and wide
The living waters of the sacred tide,
There in the morn was found as though asleep,
The perfect body of the boy; and deep
Around him, known not till that day, there grew
Great store of lotos flowers, red, white and blue,
But mostly rose-red, flaming in his hair,
And o’er his breast and shoulders floating fair,
And with his arms enwoven pure and cool,
Screening his flesh from sunrise. Thus the pool
Burned with a miracle of flowers, but he
Raised on their petals, pillowed tenderly,
And curtained with fresh leaves innumerous,
Smiled like a god whom errands amorous
Lure from Olympus and coy Naiads find
Sleeping and in their rosy love-wreaths bind.

It’s interesting again that he dies by water, and that Symonds, with his cult of Shelley, had in the same book of essays, incidentally described his own extraordinary dash from the Alps to celebrate and to commemorate the death of Shelley on the shores of the Mediterranean. Well, the poem ends, in a way, syncretising all of these different embodiments of Antinous, and when he writes here: ‘Of this the truth we know not; but we know…’, and then ends on that note, one can see it’s not surprising that Symonds should have later tried to find out what we can know about Antinous quite apart from the accretions and the myths: of a clearer way that we might think of him, in relation to all his diverse representations.