Michael Boyd Hone

Hadrian and Antinous - Their Lives and Times Michael Boyd Hone

The moving story of Hadrian and Antinous has spanned the ages not only as the bond of two men?s love, but equally as an eternal mystery as to why a youth forfeited his life to perpetuate that of his lover. The book is an historical work, as historically correct as I could make it. Naturally most of the book concerns Hadrian because we known far more about his life than we do about the Bithynian Greek youth. There is also a heavy emphasis on the times in which they lived and the times that preceded them, as they played indelible roles in the two men?s lives: indeed, they molded them. Hadrian wanted to live forever and felt he possessed the intellectual and financial means to achieve that goal?perhaps he even sacrificed the boy he loved to attain that goal. In Hadrian and Antinous we?ll investigate the difference between man-to-man relations in Rome and pederasty in Athens, and we?ll learn why Antinous drowned and why he become, for the first time in history, the first boyfriend ever to be deified. Women are essential to our story but the ancient world was a man?s world, as is ours, and Hadrian and Antinous is, at its base, the story of men and boys who prefer the world of other men and boys.