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Trigger warning: discussion of suicide!

Antinoos was the 'favourite' (read: beloved, catamite or eromenos) of the Roman emperor Hadrian. He drowned in the river Nile while travelling with Hadrian in the year 130 AD at the age of about 20. His death could have been an accident, suicide, or perhaps even murder -- I'm of course following the opinion of Marguerite Yourcenar, whose 'Memoirs of Hadrian' I use as primary canon, that it was suicide. In any case, Hadrian went wild with grief after Antinoos' death and (being the most powerful man in the known world) had his dead beloved declared a god, founded a city in his honour in the place where he drowned, had a star named after him, put his image on coins, and scattered the empire with statues and busts of him. In short, he did what almost anybody would do if the person they loved dearest suddenly died, and they had that kind of power to express their grief with. Otherwise, Hadrian was one of the series four utterly sane and sensible Roman emperors, Traian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, collectively known as the 'adoptive emperors' because every one of them picked a sane and capable successor whom he adopted as a son and then made the heir of the empire. Marcus Aurelius broke that chain by letting his son Commodus inherit, and what became of that everybody knows, thanks to the movie 'Gladiator'. That, in any case, is the historical background in which Antinoos lived.

Apart from what little there is certain about him (and contained in his Wikipedia lemma), Antinoos stays oddly opaque to us, despite the fact that there are several dozen of sculpted portraits of him in all the better classical museums of the world, he is the unfathomable object of somebody's affection from long ago, and the one expression or action of his that we know about is his death, especially if it was suicide. So, speculation is ripe, and nothing certain is known.

Even in the canon I take him from, he is seen solely through Hadrian's eyes, so the reader never gets to form their own opinion about Antinoos as person. He's not a protagonist, he's an object, and after his death, he fully dwindles away to a beautiful idol in mere pale marble.

But he was a person, clever and interesting enough to hold the love of attention of a sane and educated Roman emperor for many years, young though he was. He was an educated Greek, most likely from a good family and not a slave, who learned to move with some sort of ease in the shark pool that was the imperial Roman court. There must have been a lot of personality there, it's just that hardly anybody who later wrote about him ever got to see much of it while he was alive, and Hadrian in Yourcenar's version took him too much for granted to really pay him the attention he deserved, and would have needed as not to consider death the better option, in the end.-


Antinoos is from 'Memoirs of Hadrian' by Marguerite Yourcenar, and is the property of her estate. He appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar plus some 'sandbox' type games, from which no profit whatsoever is being made. The mun behind the curtain is yakalskovich

The PB in the icons that have a living human face, not a statue or drawings of/variations on statues, is a young Welsh actor by name of Aneurin Barnard.