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 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. 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
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). 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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