Agathos Daimon and Antinous

We come to another sculpture now with Antinous’ head but a body that was not originally meant for it. This is the Antinous-Agathos Daimon now in Berlin in the Pergamum Museum.

The statue’s existence only goes back definitively to the eighteenth century, when Frederick II (a.k.a. Frederick the Great) acquired it from a Roman workshop. The body and the head are not even a clear match for one another–look closely, and you’ll notice that the head is a bit too small for the body. It is also interesting because on one of the arms, there is a carved graffito that reads LASCIVI, which is either a genitive singular (“of the lascivious one”) or a nominative plural (“lascivious ones”). As Latin never went out of usage from ancient times to modern ones, it’s impossible to know when this was added to the sculpture; likewise, it is unknown when the sculpture itself was assembled. It is not unlikely that a separate Antinous head was simply added to the body in more recent centuries. The head itself used to have eyes that were possibly of some precious metal, which have been stolen from it (not unlike several others, e.g. the Mondragone Head in the Louvre). It’s possible that maybe this head came from Rome or the surrounds, was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, came into the hands of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, and from him went to Frederick the Great. The latter himself was homoerotically inclined, and seems to have been very inspired by the statue, which he kept in a palace in Potsdam for many years, until taken by Napoleon and sent to the Louvre in the early 1800s, and then returned to Germany a decade or so later.

Some places on the internet describe this statue as Asklepios, due to the serpent; others suggest it is Dionysos, simply because of the grapes. Serpents are both associated with those deities–but they are also associated with Apollon, Hermes, Zeus, Hekate, and any number of other deities, so these individual attributes cannot be taken as necessarily diagnostic. However, the identification as Agathos Daimon is an interesting one, because the Agathos Daimon did originally appear–in its most noticeable divine epiphany–to Alexander the Great at the foundation of Alexandria in Egypt as a serpent, and was honored as such thereafter for many centuries. The serpentine depiction of the Agathos Daimon was typical, and sometimes it is even portrayed syncretized to other deities, with a serpent’s body and the head of Serapis, for example. Thus, a syncretism to Antinous is not impossible.

Serpents certainly play their role in a great deal of mythology in Greece particularly, as well as Egypt and more widely. I’ve mentioned the cult that grew up in Asia Minor right about the time Antinous’ cult began, that of Glykon. Alexander the Great not only had a brush with the Agathos Daimon when he was founding Alexandria, but he also was said to have been conceived by Zeus (or Zeus-Ammon) in the form of a serpent. Antinoe, the foundress of Mantineia (the Arcadian city-state where Pan was born and from which Antinous’ birthplace of Bithynion-Claudiopolis was founded), followed a serpent (or perhaps a dragon) from the old site of Mantineia to the site where it was located subsequently. Perhaps the least mythological, and yet the most suggestive, connection is that for the opening of the Olympeion, the grand temple to Zeus Olympeios in Athens (part of which still stands) which Hadrian completed after Antinous’ death, the Emperor had ordered a very large Indian snake to be exhibited at the temple for the opening ceremonies. Thus, the serpentine element of wider Antinoan associations is not unheard of, and not outside the realm of possibility to consider.

And, there may be some evidence for moves in the direction of syncretism of Antinous to the Agathos Daimon in antiquity as well. In coins from Hadrianoutherai in Asia Minor (a city which was founded right around the time that Hadrian may have met Antinous, with a name that means “Hadrian’s Hunts,” where he hunted the bear that was later offered at the shrine in Thespiae), Antinous is honored as Heros Agathos, “the good hero.” The iconography of hero cultus in the second century CE is also heavily associated with serpents, so it is not impossible that in that location, Heros Agathos and Agathos Daimon were that far apart in people’s reckonings. Antinous is elsewhere considered a Hero, and also in one instance, a daimon–and we shall be turning to these occurrences next in our examinations in this series.

There is a dimension of the agathos daimon that also needs attention here: the idea that there was a deity/spirit called Agathos Daimon, but also that each person had their own agathos daimon or agathos tyche to look after them, not unlike a guardian angel. Socrates is famous for having discussed how he had a conversation with his own daimon after he had done something to which it objected. Perhaps what was going on in some places was that the individual agathos daimon of someone was taking the form of, or they desired it to take the form of, the beautiful and youthful Antinous. Indeed, in T. Thorn Coyle’s mention of Antinous in Kissing the Limitless, it is in the context of what other traditions of ceremonial magic and the like have termed “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel,” and that Antinous might be one form of this for certain people. An interesting idea, and one that could potentially be supported by this particular syncretistic identification.

May the Agathos Daimon be present for our health, protection, and prosperity, and inspire each of our own individual agathoi daimones for our highest excellence and perfection, and may Antinous also be with us and inspire us!