FTN_list

CONFITEOR

110. An Ancient Couple

     And . . . there are no universal rules to hide behind.
Because fortune favors the brave; the prepared mind
robs fate of half its terrors. And because each judgment,
each decision we make, if made well, is part of the broader, essential human quest: the endless struggle
against randomness.

THOSE two, like others blessed in ancient time,
found love surpassing dull and cheap exchange:
erastês Hadrian, emperor, prime,
and erômenos Antinous, strange,
athletic, beauty’s face and talent’s mind
unreined, then wasted swimming the staining Nile.
The statued grief of Hadrian would find
the youth a god, with cities named in style.
     Their story we still tell; not history
but heart’s divinity can stretch and last.
The years’ cleared mists submit their mystery
and match, for Now comes spurting from the Past.
     Forth! you and me: The friends and gods we lose
     may, in this quirky world, help us to choose.

The EPIGRAPH is the concluding paragraph of Chances Are: Adventures in Probability by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, 2006. The great Roman Emperor Hadrian (76-138) ruled 117-138. His love of Hellenism showed in his pederastic practice with the handsome youth, Antinous. The older male was erastês, and his young beloved was erômenos, the Greek terms for such erotic relationships >«Ninteen». (In the Introduction, xiv, to his 1989 translation of Plato’s Symposium, Princeton scholar Alexander Nehamas wrote that it is “a remarkable fact that the Symposium, the first explicit discussion of love in Western literature and philosophy, begins as a discussion of homosexual love.”) After the death of Antinous, Hadrian made him a god and constructed many temples to him. Statues and busts of both are common, including in a gallery of ancient art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO. Statued: “A white Greek god, / Confident, with curled / Hair above the groin / And his eyes upon the world.” —Louis MacNeice, “Stylite,” Poetry, May, 1940, p68. Match: “Only he who himself turns to the other human being and opens himself to him receives the world in him. Only the being whose otherness, accepted by my being, lives and faces me in the whole compression of existence, brings the radiance of eternity to me. Only when two say to one another with all that they are, “It is Thou”, is the indwelling of the Present Being between them.” —Martin Buber, 1947/1965 Between Man and Man, p30. Choose: >«Relaxed + Sacred Play». C S Lewis refuses to believe that the Shakespearean sonnets he praises are in the παιδικα, paidika tradition. Rufus Wainwright’s opera Hadrian premiered in 2018.