Hadrian had lost Antinous, but he wasn’t about to let the younger man’s face be forgotten.
In the last week of October, 130 A.D. a man died and a god was born. But this man was no king. In fact, not much is known about his lineage at all. Still, he was by no means ordinary. He was the lover of the most powerful man in the world at the time, Emperor Hadrian, and his name can be found scrawled beneath countless statues and busts scattered throughout museums the world over: Antinous.
If Antinous had not drowned when he did, if he had not been Hadrian’s great love, and, perhaps, if he had not been one of the most beautiful creatures of the ancient world, his death might have been swiftly forgotten within history’s march. But all of these factors combined turned this teenage boy from Bithynia (today’s Turkey) into a demi-god with a cult following so powerful that it nearly beat out Christianity as the new state religion of Rome.
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