‘The truth’, Dio wrote, was that Antinous had ‘offered himself in sacrifice’ to achieve some mystical purpose on Hadrian’s behalf. The historian Cassius Dio claimed that Hadrian wrote of Antinous’ death in his Memoirs: he had drowned it was an accident. It was here by the Nile in October 130 that Hadrian last saw Antinous. Egypt had an entire city named after him, Antinoupolis, complete with a circus, a theatre, a racetrack, and streets lined with long colonnades that were still solidly perpendicular in the time of the Description de l’Egypte (1809), but recycled not long afterwards to build the walls of a sugar factory. Less public was the Antinoeion, a shrine built by Hadrian at Tivoli. It had a gymnasium full of Antinouses in marble and paint. After Antinous’ early death, a temple to him was established at Mantineia, whose citizens remembered that they were supposed to have been the founders of the imperial beloved’s hometown. Later writers have assumed they were lovers. As a youth he joined Hadrian’s retinue and travelled with him to Egypt. All over the Roman Empire contemporaries would have been able to echo the words of Pausanias the Periegete: ‘I never saw him when he was among humans but I have seen him in statues and paintings.’ Little is known about Antinous beyond his birthplace of Bithynium in Bithynia. On earth, images of his favourite abounded. Hadrian would have improved the odds of encountering Antinous considerably if he had lowered his gaze.

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