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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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