The Boy From Bithynia

During the first half of the second century CE, Hadrian, the 47-year-old Emperor of Rome met a beautiful young Greek named Antinous, in Bithynia, which is now northern Turkey. What followed shook the inflexible morality of Roman society and still creates discomfort among many western scholars nearly two thousand years later. This tragic tale follows the Emperor and Antinous from their initial meeting, the placement of the youth into a “finishing school for pages” in Rome and eventually at t...