Death of Antinous and founding of Antinoöpolis

Antinous was a Greek youth from Claudiopolis (Bithynion) in Bithynia, born probably between 110 and 112, who by 128 had joined Hadrian’s retinue. In October 130, around the time of the festival of Osiris, the imperial flotilla was sailing up the Nile when he fell into the river and died, probably by drowning. Hadrian, in his now-lost memoirs, called it an accident; Cassius Dio, writing some eighty years later, reports that the youth had been offered as a sacrifice, and suicide and murder have also been suggested. The exact day is uncertain: 24 and 30 October are both given, the latter also as the day on which the city was founded.

Antinoöpolis was laid out on the east bank of the Nile on the grid plan of a Greek city, and Hadrian offered incentives to Greek settlers; a road named after him, the Via Hadriana, linked it with Berenice on the Red Sea. According to Dio, Hadrian claimed to have seen a new star, which he took to be that of Antinous. Traces of the cult of the new god have been found in at least 70 cities; some 2,000 statues and busts of him are thought to have been made, of which more than a hundred survive.