EROMENOS, the love/hate of Antinous for Hadrian told at last

EROMENOS
MELANIE J. MCDONALD
Seriously Good Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Eros and Thanatos converge in the story of a glorious youth, an untimely death, and an imperial love affair that gives rise to the last pagan god of antiquity. In this coming-of-age novel set in the second century AD, Antinous of Bithynia, a Greek youth from Asia Minor, recounts his seven-year affair with Hadrian, fourteenth emperor of Rome. In a partnership more intimate than Hadrian's sanctioned political marriage to Sabina, Antinous captivates the most powerful ruler on earth both in life and after death. This version of the affair between the emperor and his beloved ephebe vindicates the youth scorned by early Christian church fathers as a "shameless and scandalous boy" and "sordid and loathsome instrument of his master's lust." EROMENOS envisions the personal history of the young man who achieved apotheosis as a pagan god of antiquity, whose cult of worship lasted for hundreds of years far longer than the cult of the emperor Hadrian.

In EROMENOS, the young man Antinous, whose beautiful image still may be found in works of art in museums around the world, finds a voice of his own at last.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: There have been books aplenty about, and even in the voice of, Hadrian the Emperor of Rome, but so far as I know none in the voice of his beloved Antinous of Bithynia. Antinous is portrayed in this book as he reflects on his life at its end. How and why his life is ending, if one isn't familiar with the story, is a question still of some interest to scholars, who don't have a solid consensus about causes and motivations. Hey, it's almost 2,000 years ago! No one knows *any*thing for sure at that distance in time. But Melanie McDonald creates a composed, mature voice for this important and vital character in her novel, titled after the Greek word describing Antinous's relationship to Hadrian. The course of Antinous's life, the exciting events in it, and the reasons for his long tenure as Hadrian's eromenos, are presented in swift, sure prose; the inevitable, it would seem, conclusion is very nicely handled; and the narrative frame, the temple offering of a manuscript in Serapis's sacrificial fire, gives the book a very agreeable frisson of the supernatural.

This is a first novel for both author and publisher. The degree to which this surprises me is a testament to the very high design, production, and editorial standards the publisher adhered to. I think the book is very, very well-conceived, but I know that it owes a great deal to the vision of a small, new publishing venture that it came out at all, and that it looks and feels so good in its present form.

Experiencing the joy, pain, humiliation, love, lust, and hate that Antinous feels for his old-man lover is extraordinary. That the author is a married straight lady (among other things, she was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2008 to work on this very book) makes me think she's channeling a past life! (That was a joke, Ms. McD, should you chance to read this review...I think it is, anyway....)

The book posits a reason for the mysterious death of Antinous, an event that caused Hadrian such acute agony that his final eight years were spent in a kind of mourning haze for his lost love, that had not occurred to me...an explanation that accounts for some of the strangeness of the timing of his death, which has always made me think that the hints and rumors of murder were just off. It's a valid reason, or complex of reasons, and it rings true enough that I wish it were possible to research it. (Absent time travel to the past, an unlikely development, it isn't. Drat you, Albert Einstein! I bitterly resent being poked in the back by Time's Arrow!)

My quibbles are few, the largest being that I find references made by Antinous to Christianity to be extremely unlikely to be accurate; a minor Jewish cult would not have made the radar screens of a person at such a rareified remove from ancient Palestine's nasty, squabbling inhabitants; the Christians hadn't made it big enough yet for someone not Palestinian to know the things Antinous is portrayed as knowing.

It didn't ruin the book for me, though, and I certainly hope you'll all zip right out to Amazon or somewhere and get a copy of this beautiful, well-written, and very engrossing story.