Hadrian’s happiness was short-lived. In A.D. 128 he set out again on his travels, accompanied by Antinous. They wintered at Athens, which Hadrian enriched with monuments, passed over into Asia Minor, and down through Syria into Egypt. Here, in 130, Antinous died, probably a suicide, to please his master or to avoid his passion. Hadrian’s grief was more baroque than any of his buildings. From this point his life becomes one long death-wish. The most massive symbol of this is his mausoleum, whose great concrete drum, approached by Hadrian’s bridge, the _Pons Aelius_ (nowadays the Ponte Sant’ Angelo) still dominates the right bank of the Tiber near St. Peter’s. The latest Hadrianic bricks in it are dated A.D. 134; it must have become an important part of the Emperor’s plans when he returned to Rome, mourning Antinous, in 132 or 133. Its plan goes back to Etruscan _tumuli_, via the Mausoleum of Augustus--creative imitation again. The square block on which the drum rests has almost exactly the dimensions of the Augustan monument’s diameter. A spiral ramp leads up to the tomb chamber in the very center of the drum. The top was spread with earth and planted with cypresses, the trees of death (Fig. 11.14), and the whole surmounted by a colossal group in bronze, perhaps of Hadrian in a four-horse chariot, now replaced by the archangel Michael, who gives the mausoleum its present name, Castel Sant’ Angelo. When the death he longed for agonizingly came, from dropsy, in A.D. 138, Hadrian’s ashes were laid beside those of the wife he had never loved, in the core of the monument which symbolized his despair at the death of the only creature to whom this strange man had ever given his affection. The great pile has been successively fortress, prison (immuring, among others, the great Renaissance scientist Giordano Bruno), and, since 1934, military museum. [Illustration: FIG. 11.13 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Piazza d’Oro, reconstruction. (H. Kähler, _Hadrian_, Pl. 16)] [Illustration: FIG. 11.14 Rome, Hadrian’s Mausoleum, reconstruction. (S. R. Pierce, _Journ. Rom. Stud._ 15 [1925])] [Illustration: FIG. 11.15 Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Canopus, plan. (MPI)]