Antinous (pronounced
“anti-no-us”) was the boy lover of the Roman
Emperor Hadrian and hence is a real character, not a
mythological one, although the story reads like fiction.
Antinous was born c. AD 110 in the town of Bythinium, near present-day
Bolu in north-western Turkey. At that time this area was a
Roman province, which is how he came to meet the Emperor. While
on a trip up the Nile with Hadrian in AD 130, Antinous
drowned near the present-day town of Mallawi in Egypt.
Supposedly an oracle had predicted that the Emperor would be
saved from danger by the sacrifice of the object he most loved,
and Antinous realized that this description applied to him.
Whether the drowning was accident or
suicide, Hadrian was heartbroken by it. He founded a city
called Antinoöpolis near the site of the boy’s death
and commemorated him in the sky from stars south of Aquila, the
Eagle, that had not previously been considered part of any
constellation. The constellation Antinous was mentioned as a
sub-division of Aquila by Ptolemy in his Almagest (which was written
about 20 years after the famous drowning). Its first known
depiction was in 1536 on a star globe by the German
mathematician and cartographer Caspar Vopel (1511–61); it
was shown again in 1551 on a star globe by Gerardus Mercator. Tycho Brahe listed it as a separate constellation in
1602 and it remained widely accepted into the 19th century.
Antinous was depicted being carried in the claws of Aquila.
Hence he has sometimes been confused with Ganymede, another
celestial catamite, who was carried off by an eagle for Zeus.
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Antinous carried in the claws of Aquila the Eagle, seen in the Uranographia of Johann Bode (1801).
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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