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, suicide or even ritual sacrifice, 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 subsequently mentioned as a sub-division of
Aquila by Ptolemy in his Almagest, but it is not included among the canonical 48 Greek constellations. Ptolemy
worked at Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile and he compiled the Almagest about 20 years after the famous drowning so he would have known the story;
indeed, he might have had a hand in creating the constellation. According to
Ptolemy, Antinous consisted of six stars, which we now know as Eta, Theta,
Delta, Iota, Kappa and Lambda Aquilae.
The constellation’s 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 his star catalogue of 1602 and it remained widely accepted into the 19th century, when it was eventually
remerged with Aquila.
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). Here, the eagle is shown in a rather awkward perspective, from above; however, Ptolemy’s description in the Almagest makes it clear that the eagle should be imagined as though seen from below.
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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