a beautiful Bithynian youth, celebrated as the favourite of the Emperor Hadrian, who paid the most extravagant honours to his memory. Antinous was drowned in the Nile, and near the spot where he perished, on the site of the ancient Besa, the emperor founded a city which he named Antinoopolis. At Mantinea in Arcadia a temple was erected to Antinous, in which he was worshipped as a deity, and there, and at Bithynium, his birthplace, Hadrian instituted annual sacrifices and quinquennial games, called Antinoeia. A constellation into which his soul was supposed to have passed still bears his name.

The death of Antinous (about the year 122) constitutes an era in the history of art, from the stimulus given to sculpture by the demand for busts and statues commemorative of his extraordinary beauty. Many of these are extant. They are supposed to be of Grecian execution, though wrought in Italian marble. (Levezow, Ueber den Antinous, &c.; Berlin, 1801.)