This life-sized marble bust of Antinous is located in the British Museum which does not charge an admission fee...and does allow non-flash photography. It is set directly behind a bust of Hadrian. The Museum's website (
visit link) informs us:
"Bust of Antinous
From Rome, Italy
AD 130-140
The emperor Hadrian’s young lover
Antinous was Greek and born in Mantineum, a small place near the city of Bithynion-Claudiopolis (now northern Turkey). This bust originally belonged to a full-length statue, which was found in the eighteenth century, built into a wall on the Janiculum Hill in Rome.
It is known that the Roman emperor Hadrian passed through the area where Antinous was born in AD 123 and many scholars believe this was when they met. Later sources make it very clear that Hadrian and Antinous formed a homosexual relationship. Although we know little of their personal relationship, it is understood they shared a passion for hunting.
In AD 130 Hadrian visited Egypt with the imperial entourage, including his wife Sabina and Antinous. After an extended stay in Alexandria, they embarked on a voyage up the River Nile. On 24 October Antinous drowned in the river, on the same day the locals were commemorating the death, by drowning in the Nile, of the Egyptian god Osiris. Although Hadrian maintained Antinous’ death was an accident, malicious rumours soon spread. Some thought he had committed suicide or that he had been sacrificed. Others claimed Antinous sacrificed himself to prolong the life of the emperor.
For the Romans homosexual relationships were not unusual, but the intensity with which Hadrian mourned Antinous’ premature death and encouraged his cult in the eastern empire was without precedent.
The presence of an ivy wreath in this portrait links Antinous to the god Dionysus, the closest Greek equivalent to the Egyptian god Osiris. Roman aristocrats frequently incorporated fragments of classical statuary into the walls of their estates, but the rest of this statue has not been found."
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
" 'Hardly anything is known of Antinous' life, and the fact that our sources get more detailed the later they are does not inspire confidence.' At an irreducible minimum he was born to a Greek family in Bithynion-Claudiopolis, in the Roman province of Bithynia in what is now north-west Turkey, and joined the entourage of the emperor Hadrian at a young age, although nothing certain is known of how, when, or where he and Hadrian met. He is constantly described and depicted as a beautiful boy and youth. The relationship is believed to have been sexual.
Antinous drowned in the Nile in October 130. The death was presented as an accident, "but it was believed at the time that Antinous had been sacrificed or had sacrificed himself," and Hadrian "wept for him like a woman." Hadrian went through the process of deifying him soon afterwards, a process previously exclusively reserved for imperial family members rather than friends or lovers of non-Roman origin."
As for the asteroid, Wikipedia informs us:
"1863 Antinous is an Apollo and Mars crosser asteroid, discovered in 1948 by Carl A. Wirtanen. It was named after Antinous of Greek mythology.
In the 20th century Antinous passed within 30 Gm of the Earth five times; it will do so only once in the 21st. The nearest distance increases each time, from 26 to 29 Gm."