Antiquities Exhibits

In my travels I have photographed a number of sculptures of Hadrian's companion, Antinous.  Over 100 sculptures of the tragic young man have survived to modern times and classicist Caroline Vout has noted more images have been identified of Antinous than of any other figure in classical antiquity with the exceptions of Augustus and Hadrian himself.  This is probably attributable to Hadrian's deification of the young man after his death and the subsequent cult of Antinous that became widespread throughout much of the Roman Empire.  Although officially, Hadrian announced that Antinous fell into the Nile and drowned, there have been a number of hypotheses about the young man's death.  Hadrian's entourage at the time is thought to have included  Lucius Ceionius Commodus, a young aristocrat whom Antinous might have deemed a rival to Hadrian's affections. In fact, soon after Antinous died, gossip quickly spread that Antinous had been intentionally killed.  Despit...

Hadrian in bronze and Osiris-Antinous, 2nd century CE, from the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria at the Egypt's Lost Cities exhibit in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum through April 12, 2020. Antinous, Hadrian's youthful companion, was deified after meeting the same fate as Osiris: death in the waters of the Nile. The new god Osiris-Antinous had a humber of manifestations, including that of the Apis bull. It is known that Antinous was born to a Greek family in the city of Claudiopolis, which was located in the Roman province of Bithynia in what is now north-west Turkey. It is possible that he was named after the character of Antinous, who is one of Penelope's suitors in Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey. Another possibility is that he was given the male equivalent of Antinoë, a woman who was one of the founding figures of Mantineia, a city which probably had close relations with Bithynia. Although many historians from the Renaissance onward a...

State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich, Germany. This museum's collections include objects from all Egyptian periods from the prehistoric up to the Coptic Christian culture as well as archaeological finds from Nubia, Assyria and Babylon. Gold jewelry from the pyramid of Queen Amanishakheto as well as tomb models, Fayum mummy portraits, funerary masks, papyri, pottery, reliefs, sarcophagi and statuary, one of the most famous bei ng an Egyptianized statue of Antinous-Osiris, companion to the Roman emperor Hadrian, can be found in items displayed. Image: Antinous-Osiris, an Egyptianized portrait sculpture of the Roman emperor Hadrian's companion produced for the Villa Hadriana in 135 CE. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Rufus46.

Antinous: Boy Made God - September 25, 2018 - February 24, 2019 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. Antinous as Dionysos Roman 2nd century CE at the Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy. Antinous was a boy-favorite of the Emperor Hadrian. He drowned in the Nile in A.D. 130, and the emperor founded a city in middle Egypt in his honor called Antinoopolis or ‘Antinous City’. A striking portrait of the boy was created by a great court sculptor, and this image was widely reproduced around the empire. More than eighty busts and statues survive. This exhibition explores the spread of Antinous’ image and his empire-wide cult as a hero and god.