Two Day Magazine

Hadrian awoke one morning in the riverside city of Hermopolis to reports that Antinous had drowned. Rumors of every sort flew wildly: that the boy had been assassinated by the jealous empress; that the boy had offered himself up as a human sacrifice to some obscure and blood-thirsty animal-headed Egyptian river god to save his master from some dreadful fate; that the boy had merely drowned by accident. Whatever the cause, the effect was felt by the entire empire. Hadrian was devastated. The copious outpouring of public and private grief seem to suggest that there was at least some doubt in his mind that the drowning might have been intentional, and, as such, a gesture of leaving Hadrian himself as well as the world Hadrian dominated.

Hadrian deified Antinous; a gesture which drew some criticism in the court. Emperors and empresses were made gods posthumously, not Bithynian stable boys. The gesture smacked of the time crazy Caesar Caligula made his favorite horse, Incitatus, a senator.  Egyptian astrologers pointed out to Hadrian a super-nova flaring up just then below the constellation of Aquila the Eagle, as though the raptor, a symbol of Roman imperial power, were snatching the youth up to Heaven. Hadrian declared the new constellation as the immortalized Antinous. Not even Caligula’s horse was so honored in death.

Hadrian’s heart was poisoned with grief, and he died soon after, descending into a bitter paranoia which stained the final years of an otherwise just and peaceful reign, as the noble xenophile turned xenophobe. A Jewish rebel also saw a star blaze in the sky (perhaps even the same star), and took this as a sign from God that the time was ripe to rise up against the Roman occupation of Judea, calling himself Shimon bar Khokba, or “son of the Star”, and the Messiah. A deteriorating Hadrian responded with a genocide that massacred 580,000 Jews. The grueling conflict was extremely costly to Rome as it dragged on.4 In response to Gibbon’s description of this period of Roman history being “the most happy and the most prosperous”, we might add the stipulation “...for Rome, not Rome’s enemies.”

Where Antinous died, Hadrian also founded the city of Antinoopolis, now known as Sheikh Ibada. Were Antinous to come down from the stars today, he could expect a different reception from the country that once worshiped him. In Hadrian’s time, Egypt accepted as real many bizarre mythological monsters; the miraculous resurrection of the phoenix from its own ashes was taken as a sign that Hadrian’s ascendance to power would inaugurate a new world order. Homer, with his hydras and Cyclopses, was taken by many Romans as scientific fact. In the 20th century, another myth was asserted as national policy.