ABSTRACT
Francesco Camia has offered an up-to-date and authoritative account of the worship of Hadrian in Achaea, focusing especially on Athens, and relating the imperial cult persuasively to Hadrian’s extensive building activity there. Hadrian’s favorite was the citharode Mesomedes, from Crete, some of whose short songs survive in a direct manuscript tradition with musical notation. A hymn to Antinous inscribed at the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion in Cyprus is very probably by him. The province of Achaea in the 2nd century undoubtedly displayed many symptoms of collective historical nostalgia, whether or not one of its facets was Hellenic idealism. The thought-worlds of Spartan or Athenian ephebes, of Herodes’ or Theodotus’ pupils, of established declamatory sophists (often from provinces east of the Aegean) were firmly anchored in the 5th and 4th century past of Pausanias’ Hellas.
