Divine Boy Causes No Offence In Oxford

Antinous went from country boy to the firm favourite of the Emperor Hadrian (AD 11738) to cult figure in just a few years and, since his death in AD 130 (he drowned in the River Nile), he has been commemorated in busts and statues and on coins and medals. Now, he is celebrated at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

- Theresa Thompson

Born in the Roman province of Bithynia (in modern-day Turkey), Antinous was part of the travelling imperial court on tours in the Greek East. He held no official position, but the tragedy of his untimely death and the emperor’s grief reverberated across the Roman Empire.

Hadrian founded a city in Middle Egypt in his memory and named it Antinopolis, and authorised a portrait bust from a master court sculptor, an image that has been widely reproduced. Over 30 cities in the Greek East minted coins representing Antinous in a range of heroic and divine forms, and cults, venerating the youth as a hero and a god, sprang up in many other cities across the Roman Empire.

‘This is a remarkable set of honours for a person who held no public position whatsoever, neither in his city or in the empire,’ the exhibition’s curator, Bert Smith, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology at Oxford, tells me. ‘The veneration of Antinous is represented today by more than 85 surviving marble statues and busts, for the most part produced in a remarkably short time, between AD 130 and 138.’

One of the most important surviving portraits of Antinous – an inscribed marble bust dated AD 130–38, discovered in Syria in 1879, was recently restored by the Ashmolean’s conservators and now forms the exquisite centrepiece of this small exhibition.