Mommsen, following apparently
the conclusions arrived at by Flemmer in his work on
Hadrian's journeys, place it in 130 A.D. This would leave
an interval of only eight years between the deaths of
Antinous and Hadrian. It may here be observed that two
medals of Antinous, referred by Rasche with some
hesitation to the Egyptian series, bear the dates of the
eighth and ninth years of Hadrian's reign. If these coins
are genuine, and if we accept Flemmer's conclusions, they
must have been struck in the lifetime of Antinous. Neither
of them represents Antinous with the insignia of deity:
one gives the portrait of Hadrian upon the reverse.

Thus far I have told a simple story, as though the details of the
youth's last days were undisputed. Still we are as yet but on the
threshold of the subject. All that we have any right to take for
uncontested is that Antinous passed from this life near the city of
Besa, called thereafter Antinoopolis or Antinoe. Whether he was
drowned by accident, whether he drowned himself in order to save
Hadrian by vicarious suffering, or whether Hadrian sacrificed him in
order to extort the secrets of fate from blood-propitiated deities,
remains a question buried in the deepest gloom. With a view to
throwing such light as is possible upon the matter, we must proceed
to summon in their order the most trustworthy authorities among the
ancients.

Dion Cassius takes precedence. In compiling his life of Hadrian, he
had beneath his eyes the Emperor's own 'Commentaries,' published
under the name of the freedman Phlegon. We therefore learn from him
at least what the friend of Antinous wished the world to know about
his death; and though this does not go for much, since Hadrian is
himself an accused person in the suit before us, yet the whole Roman
Empire may be said to have accepted his account, and based on it a
pious cult that held its own through the next three centuries of
growing Christianity. Dion, in the abstract of his history compiled
by Xiphilinus, speaks then to this effect: 'In Egypt he also built
the city named after Antinous. Now Antinous was a native of
Bithynium, a city of Bithynia, which we also call Claudiopolis. He
was Hadrian's favourite, and he died in Egypt: whether by having
fallen into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or by having been
sacrificed, as the truth was. For Hadrian, as I have said, was in
general over-much given to superstitious subt