aporeticelenchus:

“Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous.”



If you’ve seen any amount of Roman art, it’s likely you’ve come across this handsome fellow before:

Antinous is one of the best known faces (…and other parts) of the ancient world because there were so many statues of him made.

Antinous was the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian, in the 2nd century CE. Hadrian was very public about his relationship with Antinous, and treated him as more like a spouse than a lover. However, what makes Antinous most famous is probably his early death and Hadrian’s public and intense mourning. Antinous drowned in the Nile river (under unknown circumstances) at the age of 19 when he and Hadrian were in Egypt together. Hadrian took it…badly. Very badly. He had Antinous deified - something that was practically unheard of for someone outside of the royal family and more than a little scandalous - and there was a fairly successful cult of Antinous for the next few decades. He also had a ridiculous number of statues made - I remember hearing once that there were dozens of statues of Antinous found just at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli. Because of the sheer number of statues many of them of been preserved, meaning we actually have a decent idea what he looked like!

So what the name “Antinous” would have meant to Hugo is beautiful young man who died very young, emperor’s male lover, and minor religious figure. I don’t think it’s hard to see why he’d like the comparison for Enjolras. Antinous has also functioned as an icon of male homosexuality, although I’m not 100% sure whether that would have been the case in the 1830s. I suspect it would have; it’s certainly a thing among the Victorians a few decades later.

A few more pictures under the cut! (including the obligatory butt photo)

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