Abstract
This article offers a new reading of Pankrates’ poem on Hadrian’s and Antinoos’ hunt of a lion in 130 AD, examining both its intertextual dialogue with Homer and its evocation of Egyptian imagery. I first show how the raging lion, which emerges directly out of a Homeric simile (Il. 20.163–164), has been transformed from comparatum to comparandum: he no longer serves to illustrate a warrior’s force, but has himself become part of the main narrative and the subject of analogy. Contemplating the aition in which the text culminated I argue that the Antinoeian lotus, which grew out of the lion’s blood, ought to be read against the backdrop of Egyptian mythology and iconography as an emblem of rebirth. Both Pankrates’ allusions to Homer, which subtly evoke Achilles’ loss of Patroklos, and the symbolic function of the lotus strongly suggest that the poem was composed in the aftermath of Antinoos’ death and conceived as a celebration of the youth’s apotheosis.
Acknowledgements
This paper would not exist without Katherine Blouin, who first inspired me to think about Pankrates for a conference on Imperial Landscapes: Empires, Societies and Environments in the Ancient to Modern Nile Delta (Toronto, 23–24 May 2017). I presented the paper once more at a workshop at the University of Virginia (October 2017), and am very grateful to both audiences for their feedback. For their valuable comments I am, moreover, indebted to Peter Bing, Jonathan Burgess, Niklas Holzberg, Emelen Leonard as well as the two anonymous referees. Research on this paper has been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada.
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