Me and Rufus Wainwright, as I googled about the opera cahn has linked us to, and according to his notes on the opera, he apparantly thinks every gay person of his generation has read Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. :)
....Okay, point taken, and in that case, I'm going with the guess that the scriptwriters had no idea, either, and thus didn't want to signal lack of knowledge of Getty's part.
Mind you, that still makes me wonder whether JP Getty in his fervent belief that he's the reincarnation of Hadrian would have cracked a book, so to speak, and learned about Antinous. (Because even if he'd gotten a homophobic and/or Victorian biography, I would still say it is literally impossible to write about Hadrian and leave Antinous out.) Not to mention the lack of mistresses. I mean, Hadrian had his share of enemies and detractors, some well earned - read: anyone talking about his attempted cultural genocide of the Jews - , some not, and ascribing a dissolute sex life to an Emperor you want to trash is a tried and true tactic through the millennia, but as far as I know even the deeply hostile Hadrian depictions whose theories on Antinous' death is that it's all Hadrian's fault for either clinging to him beyond the time an erastes/eromenes relationship was viable, thus driving A. into suicide, or for intending to ditch him for the next boy or what not do not ascribe mistresses to him. (For a comparison: Emperors like Nero or Commodus who are meant to be the worst - and in the case of Commodus at least have some claim to being the Worst Ever - are described as shagging everything that moves, basically.) (See also Henry IV the Salian being described as celebrating Black masses over his second wife's naked body and having palace orgies for a Christian example.) I mean, as far as I know none of the other Emperors had his boyfriend declared a God and founded a successful new cult to worship him after his death, so I can only conclude Hadrian's gay reputation at least in ancient times must have been so solid that even if you wanted to bash him, you couldn't do so in the "and also, he had sex with everyone!!!" way.
(Sidenote: Yes, Caligula had his favourite sister Drusilla declared a goddess after her death, and whether or not he had sex with her, people certainly assumed he did, but the Drusilla worship never caught on the way the Antinous worship did, and quickly died with Caligula.)
While we're talking about assumed pop culture knowledge or lack of same, I still think that when Manteuffel tells Seckendorff the Nephew that Junior is like Hadrian in 1735 or thereabouts, he's not alluding to Fritz' interest in architecture, current Rheinsberg building not withstanding. He could>/i> have meant Fritzian interest in philosophy, I guess, and/or already spotted the Fritzian potential to be a workoholic micromanaging control freak (which certainly Hadrian, Fritz and JP Getty were), but I don't think the later was deductable in the mid 1730s when Fritz is just about finally get the time for his hobbies, and as a signal for "likes philosophy", Marcus Aurelius would have been a more common comparison. (I could be wrong, but I think Trajan and Marcus Aurelius are the meant-as-flattering comparisons Algarotti chooses in some of the writings quoted in the essay collection about Algarotti, to compliment Fritz both as a warrior - Trajan - and a philosopher - Marcus Aurelius.) So at least among the educated nobility of the 18th century, Hadrian's inclinations must have been known.
Hadrian had monuments and statues all over Turkey. (I didn't know this one, but I did know assorted other facts about his reign.)
Hadrian: I had monuments and statues - especially of Antinous - in every corner of the Roman Empire, not only Turkey! :)
Re: Iconography
....Okay, point taken, and in that case, I'm going with the guess that the scriptwriters had no idea, either, and thus didn't want to signal lack of knowledge of Getty's part.
Mind you, that still makes me wonder whether JP Getty in his fervent belief that he's the reincarnation of Hadrian would have cracked a book, so to speak, and learned about Antinous. (Because even if he'd gotten a homophobic and/or Victorian biography, I would still say it is literally impossible to write about Hadrian and leave Antinous out.) Not to mention the lack of mistresses. I mean, Hadrian had his share of enemies and detractors, some well earned - read: anyone talking about his attempted cultural genocide of the Jews - , some not, and ascribing a dissolute sex life to an Emperor you want to trash is a tried and true tactic through the millennia, but as far as I know even the deeply hostile Hadrian depictions whose theories on Antinous' death is that it's all Hadrian's fault for either clinging to him beyond the time an erastes/eromenes relationship was viable, thus driving A. into suicide, or for intending to ditch him for the next boy or what not do not ascribe mistresses to him. (For a comparison: Emperors like Nero or Commodus who are meant to be the worst - and in the case of Commodus at least have some claim to being the Worst Ever - are described as shagging everything that moves, basically.) (See also Henry IV the Salian being described as celebrating Black masses over his second wife's naked body and having palace orgies for a Christian example.) I mean, as far as I know none of the other Emperors had his boyfriend declared a God and founded a successful new cult to worship him after his death, so I can only conclude Hadrian's gay reputation at least in ancient times must have been so solid that even if you wanted to bash him, you couldn't do so in the "and also, he had sex with everyone!!!" way.
(Sidenote: Yes, Caligula had his favourite sister Drusilla declared a goddess after her death, and whether or not he had sex with her, people certainly assumed he did, but the Drusilla worship never caught on the way the Antinous worship did, and quickly died with Caligula.)
While we're talking about assumed pop culture knowledge or lack of same, I still think that when Manteuffel tells Seckendorff the Nephew that Junior is like Hadrian in 1735 or thereabouts, he's not alluding to Fritz' interest in architecture, current Rheinsberg building not withstanding. He could>/i> have meant Fritzian interest in philosophy, I guess, and/or already spotted the Fritzian potential to be a workoholic micromanaging control freak (which certainly Hadrian, Fritz and JP Getty were), but I don't think the later was deductable in the mid 1730s when Fritz is just about finally get the time for his hobbies, and as a signal for "likes philosophy", Marcus Aurelius would have been a more common comparison. (I could be wrong, but I think Trajan and Marcus Aurelius are the meant-as-flattering comparisons Algarotti chooses in some of the writings quoted in the essay collection about Algarotti, to compliment Fritz both as a warrior - Trajan - and a philosopher - Marcus Aurelius.) So at least among the educated nobility of the 18th century, Hadrian's inclinations must have been known.
Hadrian had monuments and statues all over Turkey. (I didn't know this one, but I did know assorted other facts about his reign.)
Hadrian: I had monuments and statues - especially of Antinous - in every corner of the Roman Empire, not only Turkey! :)