And swifter than the horse of Adrastus Which once saved the king as he fled...in battle-throng. Such was the steed whereon Antinous sat in wait for the deadly lion, Holding in his left hand the bridle-rein And in his right a spear shod with adamant. First Hadrian his brass fitted spear wounded the beast But slew him not, for of purpose he missed the mark, Wishing to test to the full the sureness of aim Of his beauteous Antinous, son of the Argus-slayer. Stricken, the beast was yet more aroused, And tore up in his wrath the rough ground with his paws, And dust rising in a cloud dimmed the light of the sun. He raged even as the wave of the surging sea When Zephyrus is stirred forth after the wind of Strumon. Straight he rushed upon them both, Scourging with his tail, his haunches and sides While his eyes, beneath his brows, flashed dreadful fire; And from his ravening jaws the foam showered to the earth As his teeth gnashed within. On his mighty head and shaggy neck the hair stood bristling. On his limbs it was bushy as trees, And on his back...it was like whetted spear points. In such wise he came against the glorious god, upon Antinous Like Typhoeus of old against Zeus, slayer of giants...
One of the events that turns up in many papyrus texts from late antiquity in relation to Antinous is the famed lion hunt he engaged in with Hadrian, to the west of Alexandria, in the year before his death. The lion was Mauretanian in origin (so it was said), and was known to be particularly fierce and man-eating. The symbolism of hunting a lion was particularly potent symbolically, and so Hadrian most likely couldn’t resist doing so upon hearing of it. Antinous attacked the lion, but was a bit too overconfident in doing so, and was able to wound but not kill it, and he was counter-attacked afterwards. Hadrian then swooped in and finished it off. It was then said that the blood of the lion became the Red Nile Lotus named for Antinous. The Ekklesía Antínoou’s festivals of the Lion Hunt and the Red Lotus in August both celebrate these actions. They are commemorated in a poem that Pancrates wrote about the event, as well as an account given of it in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, a short account in the prose miscellany from the Tebtynis Papyrus, and a further P. Oxy. 63 text from the 280s CE commemorating the event in a much different manner. The hunt is also commemorated on one of the tondi from the now lost Hadrianic hunting monument which was re-used on the Arch of Constantine.
The lion hunt, quite simply, was the hunt to conquer death.
Lions were often used as symbols of the all-devouring maw of death, and statues of lions were put on tombs quite often. Leontocephalic figures also played a prominent role in Egyptian religion, like Sekhmet and Maahes, and in late Graeco-Egyptian syncretistic and magical traditions, Chnoubis was also frequently featured. The Mithraic figure Aion was also depicted as leontocephalic, and with a serpent wrapped around its body, further linking it to Chnoubis. While we will deal with serpentine imagery eventually in this series, I’d meanwhile recommend Atilio Mastrocinque’s From Jewish Magic to Gnosticism for much good exposition of how late antique religion and magic often displayed a close interrelationship between leonine and serpentine imagery.
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