In Heliopolis the worship of the god Ra was preserved, the centre of which was the holy animal Mnevis, a rival or comrade of Apis. Cambyses had partly destroyed the temple and even the obelisks which the Pharaohs had in the course of centuries erected to the sun-god; nowhere in Egypt existed so many of these monuments as here and in Thebes. Hadrian saw many of them lying half-burnt on the ground just as Strabo had done. On the site of Heliopolis, now green with wheat-fields, only a single obelisk has remained upright, which is considered as the oldest of all, and was erected in the twelfth dynasty by Usirtasen I.
The royal assemblage had arrived in the course of their journey at Besa, a place on the right bank of the river, opposite Hermopolis, when a strange event occurred. This was the death of Hadrian’s favourite, Antinous, a young Greek from Claudiopolis, who had been degraded to the position of Ganymede to the emperor on account of his beauty. It is not known where the emperor first came across the youth; possibly in his native land, Bithynia. Not till he came to Egypt did he become his inseparable companion, and this must have been a deep offence to his wife. The unfortunate queen was delivered in Besa from his hated presence, for Antinous was drowned there in the Nile.
His death was surrounded by mystery. Was it accident? Was he a victim? Hadrian’s humanity protects him from the suspicion that he sacrificed his victim in cold blood, as Tiberius had once sacrificed the beautiful Hypatus in Capri. Had the fantastic youth sacrificed himself of his own free will to the death divinities in order to save the emperor’s life? Had the Egyptian priests foreseen in the stars some danger threatening Hadrian, only to be averted by the death of his favourite? Such an idea commended itself to the superstition of the time, especially in this land and by the mysterious Nile. It corresponded, too, with the emperor’s astrological arts. Was Antinous certain when he plunged into the waves of the Nile that he would arise from them as a god? Hadrian asserts in his memoirs that it was an accident, but no one believed him. The divine honours which he paid to the dead youth lead us to suppose that they formed the reward of a self-sacrifice, which, according to the custom of those times, constituted a highly moral action, and was looked upon as heroic devotion. At any rate, we will assume that this sacrifice sank into the Nile without Hadrian’s will. Hadrian mourned for Antinous with unspeakable pain and “womanly tears.” Now he was Achilles by the corpse of Patroklus, or Alexander by the pyre of the dead Hephaistus. He had the youth splendidly buried in Besa. This most extraordinary intermezzo of all Nile journeys supplied dying heathendom with a new god, and art with its last ideal form. Probably, also, during the burial, far-sighted courtiers already saw the star of Antinous shining in Egypt’s midnight sky, and then Hadrian saw it himself.
In the mystical land of Egypt, life might still be poetical even in the clear daylight of Roman universal history in the reign of Hadrian. The death of the young Bithynian seems to have occurred in October, 130. The emperor continued his journey as soon as he had given orders for a splendid town to be erected on the site of Besa, in honour of his friend. In November, 130, the royal company is to be found amongst the ruins of Thebes.
Thebes, the oldest town in Egypt, had been first put in the shade by Memphis, and then destroyed by Cambyses. Since the time of the Ptolemies, it had been called Diospolis, and Ptolemais had taken its place as capital of the Thebaid. Already in Strabo’s time it was split up. It formed on either side of the Nile groups of gigantic temples and palaces, monuments, and royal graves similar to those scattered to-day amongst Luxor, Karnak, Medinet-Habu, Deir-el-Bahari, and Kurna.
In Hadrian’s time the Rameseum, the so-called grave of Osymandias, on the western bank of the Nile, the wonderful building of Ramses II., must still have been in good repair. These pylons, pillars, arcades, and courts, these splendid halls with their sculpture-covered walls, appear even to have influenced the Roman art in the time of the emperors. Their reflex influence has been even seen in Trajan’s forum, in which the chief thing was the emperor’s tomb.
