So we come to the essay of 1879, a serious work of scholarship in which he benefited enormously from the help of his disciple Horatio Brown, who evidently did all the research in Florence and sent the results back to Davos. It’s a learned essay, but an essay which once again opts for a particular point of view, and that point of view is illustrated pre-eminently, one might say almost solely, by the so-called Ildefonso Group, the image that he uses to preface Sketches and Studies – that is, the sculpture that we now know in the Nollekens version as a Castor and Pollux. The essay begins with quite a striking comparison nonetheless. It’s a comparison between the figure of Antinous and that of St. Sebastian. ‘Both were saints’: writes Symonds, ‘the one of decadent paganism, the other of mythologising Christianity’. But again, the crucial point, we know nothing worth knowing, or we can discover nothing worth knowing about St. Sebastian in historical terms. But Antinous is, Symonds says, ‘a true historic personage, no phantom of myth but a man as real as Hadrian, his master’. That is a kind of metonymy: if Hadrian is real, therefore Antinous is real. It carries conviction for Symonds, and having dismissed St. Sebastian for that reason – as being not capable of being treated in the same terms – he immediately then brings up the three possible hypotheses about the death of Antinous, as he sees it, and as the current German scholarship that he’s been reading portrays it. First of all, that Antinous died an accidental death by drowning, secondly that Antinous in some way or another gave his life willingly for Hadrian’s, and thirdly that Hadrian ordered his immolation in the performance of magic rites.
Now, of course, it’s alright to put those alternatives. But how are we to resolve the issue even though we have an absolute conviction that Antinous is a historical figure! Ultimately of course, Symonds has to find his solution in the representations of Antinous. There’s nowhere else to look, and in that particular context he can’t find anything but will satisfy him in (let’s say) the most authentic or so regarded representations. The Villa Albani bas-relief, for example, he discusses – but then he says he does not know ‘whether the restoration was wisely made’ – that ‘may be doubted’. So the conclusion must be the Ildefonso Group is ‘far the most interesting of all’. But it does not altogether resolve the question:

Yet could we but understand its meaning clearly, the mystery of Antinous would be solved. The key to the whole matter probably lies here but, alas, we know not how to use it.

Now, of course, as I said, he’s not by any means breaking entirely new ground here when he seizes upon the writings of the German art historian and critic, Bötticher, who had already spoken of the Ildefonso Group in these quite categorical terms. Bötticher wrote, only in 1871 and so quite recently for Symonds, that ‘[The Ildefonso Group] represents not a sacrifice of death, but a sacrifice of fidelity on the part of the two friends, Hadrian and Antinous, who have met together before Persephone to ratify a vow of love until death’. But Symonds can’t fully accept that. He’s accepted already that the key to the secret lies in this particular sculptural group, but he can’t see that this particular way of articulating the relationship between the two figures is satisfactory at all. He claims that: ‘It throws no light on the melancholy and solemnity of the two figures, which irresistibly suggests a funereal rather than a joyous rite.’ For him, as a result, it therefore ‘remains a mystery’.
I think it’s very interesting to read the last passage of this long essay, where – having presented initially the impression that we were going to resolve the mystery with the aid of German scholarship, but perhaps modifying it or reinterpreting it – Symonds seems in the end to be very willing to settle for the mystery remaining a mystery. I quote this last paragraph:

Over all these questions, over all that concerns Antinous, there rests a cloud of darkness, an impenetrable doubt. To pierce that cloud is now impossible. The utmost we can do is to indulge our fancy in dreams of greater or less probability, and to mark out clearly the limitations of the subject. It is indeed something to have shown that the stigma of slavery and disgrace attaching to his name has no solid historical justification, and something to have suggested plausible reasons for conjecturing that his worship had genuine spiritual basis. Yet the sincere critic, at the end of the whole enquiry, will confess that he is only cast a plummet into the unfathomable sea of ignorance. What remains immortal, indestructible, victorious is Antinous in art. Against the gloomy background of doubt, calumny, contention, terrible surmise, his statues are illuminated with the dying glory of the classic genius – even as the towers and domes of a marble city shine forth from the purple banks of a thunder-cloud in sunset light. Here and there only does reality emerge from the chaos of conflicting phantoms. Front to front with them, it is allowed us to get all else but the beauty of one who died young because the gods loved him. But when we question those wonderful mute features and beg them for their secret, they return no answer. There is not even a smile upon the parted lips. So profound is the mystery, so insoluble the enigma, that from its most importunate interrogation we derive nothing but an attitude of deeper reverence. This, in itself however, is worth the pains of study.

So that’s how he concludes the investigation of the essay, and you might well say that could be a reasonable conclusion to his investigation into Antinous, full stop. What he has done, in a way, is just what Gautier and Pater had done before him with the Mona Lisa. He’s turned a historical portrait into an unfathomable mystery. But obviously neither Pater nor Gautier were specially interested, or interested on any level, in the historical circumstances of the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Nor do they see it incumbent upon them to try and resolve the circumstances of the sitter’s death, whatever they may have been. Symonds, however, having written his poem, and having written his essay, still continues to seek for a way of integrating the historical Antinous. But it has to be in a totally different kind of discourse, and one which is selective in the extreme - not written for the tourist or the connoisseur, or whoever he wrote his poems for, but written very specifically for ‘medical psychologists and jurists’.
You may consult it under very select conditions in the British Library on the table reserved for people consulting obscene literature. It is indeed a historical discussion of same sex relationships in the Greco-Roman world. It’s something which has however had an influence despite its extreme rarity: on (for example) Marguerite Yourcenar, who sought it out and described it as ‘remarkable’. It returns parenthetically to the Villa Albani relief – and Symonds is particularly keen to dismiss Winckelmann’s hypothesis, when he writes – at least as Symonds interprets it – ‘that the boy himself presumably adopted this pose to attract his lover’s regard’.
In other words this notion of the submissive Antinous is represented in that particular relief, so that what Symonds is trying to do at this particular stage is look very precisely through the representations, and through what has been made of the representations, to approach the question of the motivation no longer just of Antinous but of Hadrian – and indeed of Hadrian’s predecessors going back to Alexander the Great. This is all he writes about Antinous in the final essay. First of all comes a sentence, which then leads him to insert a note. The sentence reads: ‘A kind of spiritual atavism moved the Macedonian conqueror to assume on the vast Bactrian plain the outward trappings of Achilles Agonistes.’
Now, of course, this is a theme that we were discussing this afternoon: the notion of mimetism or imitation: Alexander the Great imitating Achilles and all that Achilles had done, his loves as well as his military actions. Then the note comes in this form: ‘Hadrian in Rome, at a later period, revived the Greek tradition with ever more of caricature. His military ardour, patronage of art and love for Antinous seem to hang together’. What has happened here, therefore, is that Symonds has quite dramatically shifted the ‘mystery’ from a rather imponderable issue of existential motivation to one of the cultural tradition, and in that process, questions of free will and coercion seem to disappear, since cultural transmission is viewed as being essentially repetitive and imitative, conquerors and emperors imitating earlier conquerors and emperors in all respects.