By Jena Woodhouse.
“Antinous” and “The Charioteer”
Delphi Archaeological Museum
At Delphi, in clear winter light,
the season of Dionysos, the halls echo
with cries and whispers blurring into word-
lessness, limestone being sound’s ideal conductor
for the dramatists, the solid marble structure
paying lip service to this, trapping swarms
of voices in their transit through millennia,
channelling the hippodrome’s commotion into sound-
sculptures— accolades for skill and daring
as the noble charioteer claims another laurel
wreath to ramify his patron’s fame.
Now he stands, bereft of steeds and frenzy
of revolving wheels, frozen in the grace
of youth, rapt in private contemplation,
broken bronze reins in his hand,
disconnected from the chase, in perpetual
appeal to atavistic memory. His light-
reflecting eyes can’t close, the silver lashes
never blink. He stares into eternity,
beyond what mortal eyes can glimpse,
even as the atmosphere remixes
time’s diapason, improvising on
the lyre of history for sleepless ears.
Antinous, a Hellenistic beauty from Bithynia,
adored beyond all reason by the emperor
Hadrian, wears that inward-looking gaze
of pensive melancholy, nuanced to suggest
he knew he was the all-time favourite.
His is not the proud, athletic bearing
of the charioteer. Antinous is naked, pale,
perfection’s object of desire. He cannot out-
stare basilisks with honey-coloured irises;
his eyes are marble-white, opaque,
as if shielded by cataracts. He hears
more intimate inflections, distant voices
from the field, the sound a barge makes
on the Nile— its rush of water in his ears—