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ANTIQUE STATUES. IQS
must have aroused the wrath and contempt or the
mockery and derision of their age, had it only been knit
to the memory of an emperor’s darling.
The worship of Antinous rests on another basis : in
the bloom of his youth and the lap of the greatest out-
ward happiness, he had, or it was believed he had, vol-
untarily suffered death for one who loved him, and upon
whose life the welfare of the Roman realm seemed to rest.
It is satisfactio vicaria, in the taste of antiquity and in
its aesthetic form, that here presents itself to our eyes
—
a strange counterpart of the idea of Messiah, but only
one of the many representations, running parallel and
superficially like, that dying heathendom has to exhibit
with growing Christianity. When the last temple of
Antinous had been razed to the ground, and the last statue
of Antinous thrown down from its pedestal, doubtless
the Christian zealots who did this, little dreamed that
after a lapse of many centuries his statues, risen again to
the light of day, should be seen with a new admiration ;
and that his beauty, radiant with the glory of self sacri-
fice to death, should open to him the doors of a Chris-
tian temple. We shall by-and-by see how this hap-
pened.
The last years of his life, Hadrian spent in his villa
among the Sabine mountains. It was the wonder of its
time; a pile of magnificent buildings, of the various
styles that had become prevalent with the cultured peo-
ples in the Roman empire : palace, temple, library,
palaestra, race-course, theatres, baths and gardens, called
after renowned places in Hellas and Egypt: Akademia,
Lykeion, Stoa Poikile, Kanopus, and others. Art had
adorned the villa with admirable creations from its differ-
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