Aitia (Jun 2016)
The Breast of Antinous. The Male Body as Erotic Object in Hellenistic Image and Text
Abstract
The subject of this article is the brief period of young male beauty prior to becoming a fully mature man. For this state to endure beyond the brief time allotted by Nature, something must happen (usually death) that preserves the adolescent beauty at one particular moment. Here Hadrian’s beloved Antinous serves as an emblematic case, his early death, by drowning, insures that his memory (and subsequent wide-spread cult) remains that of an idealized adolescent. Shorter poetry, I posit, and shorter poetic passages are the ideal artistic medium for such portrayals: as the moment of perfection is a brief one, so too the poetry that encapsulates it is more often shorter, self-contained descriptive frame.
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