In Agatha Christie s Death on the Nile (1937) serves the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot put his legendary detective skills to work on a murder of passion - with some collateral damage – to unravel on a steamboat. Set for the murder mystery:Egypt, the land of pyramids and pharaohs. The sultry Egyptian climate can apparently heat up people's minds, because in ancient times a mysterious death also took place on the river, starring the Roman emperor Hadrianus and his gay lover Antinous .
Emperor on a journey
In 130 AD the Roman emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138) visited the Nile country with his entourage. Hadrian was a traveler through and through:he personally inspected the provinces of the empire, he decorated his villa in Tivoli (about 30 kilometers from Rome) with exotic motifs and he had coins minted depicting each area that he visited. Between 128 AD and 130 A.D. he was accompanied on those journeys by an attractive young man from Asia Minor, named Antinous. We hardly know anything about Antinous's personal life before he met Hadrian. He was probably born in the small town of Claudiopolis in Bithynia, in the lower middle class. During a visit by Hadrian to Claudiopolis in 123 AD. he must have attracted the emperor's attention, for shortly afterwards, in A.D. 125, he was sent to Rome for further training. Sometime in the following years, Hadrian began a relationship with Antinous. Hadrian was about forty, Antinous about thirteen years young.
Busts of Hadrian and Antinous from the British Museum
The Greek way
It must be remembered that Hadrian - perhaps most of all Roman emperors - was permeated by Greek culture, in which relations with minors (or at least what we consider minors) were not only permitted, but sometimes even encouraged. “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there “, to put it in the words of L.P. Harley to say. Homosexuality in general was also a widespread phenomenon in the Greco-Roman cultural world. And although Hadrian was married to a woman, the literary sources imply that it was by no means a happy marriage:the emperor was simply "for the men".
Man overboard
Part of the imperial visit to Egypt was a boat trip on the Nile. Previously, the emperor and his lover had organized a lion hunt in the Libyan desert, where Hadrian in the nick of time managed to save the life of young Antinous. However, disaster struck on the river. At Hermopolis, Antinous fell overboard and drowned. Hadrian was inconsolable:muliebriter flevit (“he cried like a woman”) notes the Historia Augusta on. That wasn't all he did. Antinous was deified:henceforth he was a heros , a hero who held a position between mere mortals and gods. In addition, Hadrian founded a new city opposite Hermopolis in honor of his deceased lover, called Antinoopolis. The young man's mummified body would eventually be buried in Hadrian's villa in Tivoli.
The Numismatic Legacy
Many cities in the east of the empire soon put Antinous on their coins, especially when the emperor came to visit. Often these are commemorative pieces that were not necessarily intended for large-scale monetary circulation. A good example of this is the coin below from Mantinea in Arcadia (in the Peloponnese). Mantinea would have been the mother city of the Bithynian Claudiopolis, and thus had a special bond with Antinous. The face is refined with the typical "sensual lips" often found in the masterpieces of classical Greek coinage. The bare torso radiates youthful strength, and immediately made it clear to the ancient viewer that he was a heros. went.
Bronze medal from Mantinea, struck ca. 131-132 AD
A dark side
However, the story doesn't end there. After all, even in antiquity, the explanation of Hadrian that Antinous's death was an accident was doubted, which has also made modern researchers speculate. Possible lines of thought are that Antinous was murdered by another lover of Hadrian's or – even more remarkable – that Antinous was the victim of a gruesome ceremony in which he had to guarantee the survival of the emperor, who was struggling with ill health, as a human sacrifice. Perhaps the young man even did it voluntarily. Whatever the case may be, it certainly reminds the author of the legendary song by Meat Loaf :“And I would do anything for love, but I won't do that “.