The Heavenly Antinous

Ce qui fait la nuit en nous peut laisser en nous les étoiles.
What makes night in us may leave stars within us.

—Victor Hugo

In the Autumn of AD 130, the Emperor Hadrian and his retinue set out from Alexandria on a fateful voyage up the River Nile. In that year the usual annual issue of coins with an image of the god of the river, Nilus, bearing a cornucopia celebrating his abundance was not struck in the mint in Alexandria. Nor had it appeared in the preceding year (Emmett 2001, s.v. Hadrian). This indicates that the annual flood of the Nile needed to irrigate and fertilise the fields had failed and there was famine in Egypt.

When the imperial party reached Hermopolis in about the third week of October, Antinous (Figure 1), the παιδικὰ (lover-boy) of Hadrian, drowned in the Nile and Hadrian proceeded to mourn him spectacularly. Three Roman era accounts of the event survive. First, the Historia Augusta, Hadrian 14.5-7:

During a journey on the Nile [Hadrian] lost Antinous, his favourite, and for this youth he wept like a woman. Concerning this incident there are varying rumours; for some claim that he had devoted himself to death for Hadrian, and others what both his beauty and Hadrian’s excessive passions imply. But anyway, the Greeks deified him at Hadrian’s request, and asserted that oracles were given through his agency, though it is put about that these were composed by Hadrian himself.

Secondly, Cassius Dio 69.11.2–4:

…also in Egypt [Hadrian] rebuilt the city named henceforth for Antinous. Antinous was from Bithynium, a city of Bithynia, which we also call Claudiopolis; he had been a lover-boy (παιδικὰ) of the emperor and had died in Egypt, either by dropping into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or, as the truth is, by being offered in sacrifice. For Hadrian, as I have stated, was always very curious and employed divinations and incantations of all kinds. Accordingly, he honoured Antinous, either because of his love for him or because the youth had voluntarily undertaken to die (it being necessary that a life should be surrendered freely for the accomplishment of the ends Hadrian had in view), by building a city on the spot where he had suffered this fate and naming it after him; and he also set up statues, or rather sacred images, of him, practically all over the world. Finally, he declared that he had seen a star which he took to be that of Antinous, and gladly lent an ear to the fictitious tales woven by his associates to the effect that the star had really come into being from the spirit of Antinous and had then appeared for the first time. On this account, then, he became the object of some ridicule…

Finally, Sextus Aurelius Victor, Hadrian XIV:

Others see [Hadrian’s] motives as pious and religious: for when he was desiring to prolong his life by any means, the magicians proposed that someone should die voluntarily on his behalf; everyone refused except that Antinous alone offered himself: from that all the homage rendered to his memory.

All three accounts concur in explaining that the drowning was a human sacrifice for which Antinous had volunteered. Victor elaborates that “magicians”, who were probably Egyptian priests, advocated a voluntary sacrifice to remedy some kind of health threat to Hadrian’s longevity (Lambert 1984, pp. 71-72, 135).

However, there was a tradition of sacrificing a youth to the Nile in times of famine (Lambert 1984, pp. 135, 138), so it is likely that a group of priests recommended a ritual drowning to Hadrian simultaneously to prolong the emperor’s life and to end the famine.

In fact, the famine was ended, because there was a copious issue of Nilus coins in AD 131 and they are marked to indicate an ideal Nile flood depth of 16-cubits (ca. 7m). This was vital for the entire Roman Empire, because Egypt was the main source of grain supplies for Rome itself.

There is also broad agreement that Hadrian deified Antinous on account of his having volunteered to be sacrificed and not so much because of their sexual relationship. Shrines, statues and commemorative medallions (Figure 2) were created in his name throughout the AD 130s. The honours also included the erection of a city named after Antinous at the spot where he had been drowned on the eastern bank of the Nile opposite Hermopolis.

Antinous appears among the stars

It is uniquely noted by Cassius Dio that a star was said to have appeared in the aftermath of the drowning, which Hadrian, himself an astronomer/astrologer (Historia Augusta, Hadrian 16.7), recognised as the spirit of Antinous having ascended into the heavens. In another astronomical tribute, Hadrian later aligned a Temple of Antinous in the grounds of his Villa at Tibur with the rising of the sun on the Summer Solstice (Frischer et al. 2016).

Weeks after the drowning, Hadrian returned to Alexandria, where he probably met with Claudius Ptolemy, the leading astronomer of the age. Although the meeting is nowhere recorded, it can be inferred from the fact that Ptolemy defined a new constellation named Antinous comprising six stars in the star catalogue in his Syntaxis Mathematica (“Principles of Astronomy”) later nicknamed the Almagest (“The Greatest [Treatise]”).

The 48 other constellations in the Almagest were defined before the era of Ptolemy: 43 had been described in the Phaenomena of Aratus, four others had Mesopotamian origins and Equuleus was defined by Hipparchus according to Geminus. Ptolemy’s star catalogue is the oldest surviving, although there is a disputed claim that some fragments of the earlier star catalogue of Hipparchus have been discovered in a palimpsest.

Ptolemy set up the Canobic Inscription in AD 147 or 148, which only survives in flawed medieval copies. The models used appear to be earlier than those presented in the Almagest, so it has been supposed that the Almagest was published around 150 (Hamilton 1987). However, Zodiac coins were struck in Alexandria in 144-145, which are based on the astrological houses of the planets defined in Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos 1.17 and Ptolemy states in the Tetrabiblos 1.1 that the Almagest had been published a few years earlier.

Furthermore, there are dated astronomical observations in the Almagest that end suddenly in the fourth regnal year of Emperor Antoninus Pius (AD 140-141), apart from one outlier in year 14 of Antoninus Pius, which is likely to be a textual error as one of the annotators of the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 180 manuscript actually indicated year 4 (Heiberg 1903, p. 297 notes). If Ptolemy had no later observations to draw on than 141 when he wrote the Almagest then it was probably published in 141-142.

The reason for the inconsistencies in the Canobic Inscription may be that Hypatia of Alexandria edited and improved the version of the Almagest that has come down to us in about AD 370. Her father, Theon, stated in the title of his Commentary on Book 3 of the Almagest that Hypatia had prepared the text that he used. It is certain that the received text of the Almagest had major improvements inserted by a later editor, such as a long division method present in some of its books but not others. Alternatively, our received text may have been a second edition revised by Ptolemy himself ca. 150.

An Arabic manuscript tradition of the Almagest, in which the name of Antinous was omitted, was the source for the version of the work that circulated in medieval Europe in a Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona ca. 1175 (Dekker 2010, n. 16 to p. 163). However, a small number of manuscripts of the Almagest in the original Greek were discovered in the Renaissance and these preserved the constellation of Antinous.

A leaf from the star catalogue in a Greek manuscript of the Almagest, which lists the coordinates and magnitudes of the six stars in the constellation of Antinous, is shown in Figure 3 (Claudius Ptolemaeus, Syntaxis Mathematica; Standort München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, BSB Codex Graecus 212 dating to 1340-1345). The modern Teubner edition of the Syntaxis Mathematica (Heiberg 1898 & 1903) was created using nine other Greek manuscripts ranging in date from the ninth to the fifteenth century.

Ptolemy divided his star catalogue into groups of stars of two kinds: constellations and formless sets. Each group has a title, normally highlighted in red as in the manuscript in Figure 3. Each constellation had a title in the format [NAME] ἀστερισμός. For example, the top title in the manuscript in Figure 3 reads Ἀετοῦ ἀστερισμός, which translates as “Eagle constellation” (or Aquila in Latin).

However, there were some stars in Ptolemy’s catalogue which shone in the spaces between the forms of the constellations, so Ptolemy listed these in a second type of group immediately after a constellation which they adjoined. The title for these groups is in the format Οἱ περὶ [NAME] ἀμόρφωτοι meaning “Those [stars] around [NAME] that are formless”. For example, Οἱ περὶ Ταῦρον ἀμόρφωτοι is the title of a group of eleven stars clustered near and listed immediately after the constellation of Taurus, the bull, but not forming part of the shape of the bull.

The title given at the head of the list of six stars forming the constellation of Antinous is, however, Οἱ περὶ τὸν Ἀετόν ἐφ’ ὧν ὁ Ἀντίνοος, which translates, “Those [stars] around Aquila in which is Antinous”. This is the exact text authorised by the Teubner edition (Heiberg 1903, p. 74) and it can also be seen to match the text in a manuscript not used by the Teubner in Figure 3 (middle red line of text in Late Byzantine Minuscule characters). All except one of the Greek manuscripts gives this title, the exception being Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1594, which instead reads: Οἱ περὶ τὸν Ἀἰετόν ἀμόρφωτοι ἐφ’ ὧν Ἀντίνοος (“Those [stars] around Aquila that are formless in which is Antinous”).

So the question is whether Antinous is a constellation in its own right or just a name for a group of formless stars adjoining Aquila? Ptolemy begins the title for Antinous with the formula “Those stars around Aquila…” as though he is introducing a formless list. But then in the version of the text authorised by the Teubner edition and given in all but one manuscript, Ptolemy assigns the form of Antinous to this group of stars, turning it into a constellation, because form rather than formlessness is the characteristic that defines a constellation.

It might be objected that Ptolemy meant only that one of the stars in the ensuing list of six was that named after Antinous. Yet Ptolemy does cite names of stars in a few cases in his catalogue, but he always does so in the star’s description preceding its coordinates and not in the title of the list: for example, Antares is named in the 8th star description in Scorpio and Spica (Stachys) is named in the fourth star description in Virgo.

It is therefore clear that Ptolemy considered himself to be newly proposing the form of Antinous for the group of six stars just to the south of Aquila that in some earlier star catalogue had been designated as formless. It appears that the scribe for the single manuscript that designates these stars as formless, whilst nevertheless assigning the form of Antinous to them, was confused by Ptolemy’s anomalous use of the start of his formula for formless groups and accidentally included ἀμόρφωτοι (formless) in the constellation’s title. That it is this manuscript that is in error is clear from the inherent contradiction of assigning the group a form whilst still calling them formless stars.

The conclusion is that Antinous was the sole new constellation proposed by Ptolemy in the Almagest and he wished it to be transparent that he was proposing the form of Antinous for a previously formless group of stars.

The Renaissance of Antinous

A Greek manuscript of the Almagest was translated into Latin by Trapezuntius (George of Trebizond) at the behest of Pope Nicholas V in about 1451. This text was the basis for the first edition of the Greek Almagest in printed form in Venice in 1528 (Trapezuntius 1528), the version derived from Arabic manuscripts having already been printed in 1515. The page with the constellations of Aquila, Antinous and Delphinus is depicted in Figure 4. The use of informatae in the title of the Antinous star-list shows that Trapezuntius used the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1594 manuscript, since it is a Latin translation of ἀμόρφωτοι (formless) used only in that manuscript.

The Trapezuntius edition of the Almagest seems to have come to the attention of Caspar Vopel, a young mathematics tutor at the University of Cologne with side-lines in cartography and instrument-making. In 1532, he was inspired to create a hand-drawn celestial globe, which still survives in the keeping of the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum. On this Vopel included just the handwritten name of Antinous in the vicinity of his six stars. Perhaps Trapezuntius’s incorrect designation of these stars as informatae (formless [stars]) inhibited Vopel from associating the form or figure of a constellation with them or perhaps he was simply uncertain at this point as to how correctly to represent Antinous.

However, Vopel went on to produce a printed globe on which he included Antinous as a fully-fledged constellation in the first known figurative representation of this star group just four years later in 1536 (Figure 5). It depicts Antinous as a naked youth kneeling on a coffin-shaped box and reaching out into the cosmos to grasp one of his stars. Elly Dekker has commented (2010, p. 174):

Vopel’s image does not allude to Antinous as an ephebe but shows him just before the dramatic act of drowning himself, an image that was without precedent and that may have been invented by Vopel himself.

Dekker supposes that Antinous is naked because he is about to drown himself rather than in order to display his physique. However, a chapter on Antinous in a recent book has noted some other strands of evidence concerning the sacrifice of Antinous, which have a remarkable connection with Vopel’s image (Chugg 2022).

Firstly, the Pincio Obelisk in Rome has a hieroglyphic inscription, which states that it originally marked the tomb of Antinous. Its text was probably drafted by Hadrian himself and it further suggests that the manner of Antinous’s death was identical to that of the Egyptian god Osiris. We know that Osiris died by being drowned in the river Nile in a coffin-shaped box, into which he had been lured by his brother Seth.

Secondly, Montfaucon (1724, Plate XXVII, nos. 3 & 4) published engravings of two ancient gemstones – named after their then owners, Masson and Fauvel, but since lost – with engraved scenes of Hadrian and Antinous participating in a ceremony associated with the latter’s drowning (Figure 6). It is notable that the garlanded box on which Antinous is seated in these scenes appears to have the shape of a coffin (Chugg 2022), so could have been the drowning vessel in imitation of that used to drown Osiris.

Thirdly, bronze medallions issued in Tion in Antinous’s homeland of Bithynia a few years after his death also have an image of the youth similarly reclining upon a corresponding coffin-like box on their reverses. Therefore, there is reason to suppose that Antinous actually was drowned in a coffin-shaped box exactly like that on which he kneels in the Vopel image.

In that case, the Vopel globe does not depict Antinous about to drown himself, but rather having uprisen from a ritual drowning in the coffin-box and in the act of reaching up into the skies as a new deity. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Vopel invented this scene. It would have been difficult for him to have made the connection with the drowning of Osiris without the guidance of the text from the Pincio obelisk, but that was indecipherable until Champollion cracked the problem of how to read hieroglyphics in 1822.

The alternative is that Vopel had access directly or indirectly to some ancient material evidence on the drowning that is lost to us today. The form of such evidence that would make most sense would be a manuscript of the Almagest with an illustrated star catalogue that has since perished. This would also explain how Vopel justified overriding the manuscript mistake in Trapezuntius of labelling the Antinous star-sextet as “formless” by featuring it as a proper constellation in 1536.

Vopel’s celestial globe proved influential. Three early copies have been identified (Dekker 2010, pp. 180-181 under Appendix 1, G2 to G4), two engraved on copper plus another woodcut version. Astronomical luminaries treated Antinous as a legitimate, independent constellation throughout the sixteenth century. For example, Mercator in 1551 (Figure 7) and Demongenet in the 1560s (Figure 8), whilst not precisely copying Vopel, were clearly influenced by him and Ptolemy in including Antinous in their star maps.

But Mercator evidently did not understand the macabre significance of the box, rendering it too short to be a coffin, and Demongenet chose to portray the youth reclining rather than kneeling upon the container. This posture of Antinous may have been influenced by the seated form of the youth on the Antinous medallions issued by Tion in Bithynia in the AD 130s or on the ancient Masson or Fauvel gems (Figure 6). It is interesting that Demongenet garlanded Antinous’s box echoing its decoration on the gems.

Tycho Brahe recognised Antinous as a distinct constellation in his star catalogues prepared from fresh observations (Brahe 1598 & 1602). Long after Brahe’s death in 1601, his former assistant, Johannes Kepler, listed the constellation of Antinous using Brahe’s data in his Rudolphine Tables (Kepler 1627). Three stars – the modern Theta, Iota & Kappa Aquilae – are listed under Antinous in the abridged catalogue in Brahe’s 1602 posthumous publication (Figure 9). He states that they correspond to the left hand, right side and knee of the figure of Antinous respectively, which is similar to the arrangement of the figure of Antinous on Vopel’s globe.

The omission of Eta Aquilae, the first and most important star in Ptolemy’s constellation of Antinous, is curious. However, it is a Cepheid Variable, so it might have been in its dim phase on the night that Brahe made his detailed observations in that sector of the sky.

The Ganymede imposture

At the end of the sixteenth century, it was the established basis of astronomy that Claudius Ptolemy had bequeathed the world forty-nine constellations, among which not the least was the group of six stars that he had assigned the form of Antinous.

However, shortly afterwards in 1603 Johannes Bayer altered the status quo by putting forward an alluring but nevertheless false syllogism concerning the constellation of Antinous. In Chart Sixteen of his magnificent sky atlas, the Uranometria (Bayer, 1603), he observed that Zeus had been the lover of Ganymede just as Hadrian had been the lover of Antinous, but Zeus had abducted Ganymede, either taking the form of an eagle himself or employing an eagle as his agent.

Some writers in Antiquity alluded to Ganymede having appeared among the constellations. Therefore, Antinous should be recognised as originally having been Ganymede as he appeared next to the eagle, Aquila, which should therefore be depicted in the act of abducting the youth. Hadrian, Bayer alleged, had simply taken over the classical constellation of Ganymede and re-named it as Antinous to glorify his Zeus-like passion for that youth.

Bayer therefore duly merged Aquila with the six stars of Antinous, supposedly restoring the classical constellation of Ganymedis Raptrix (Ganymede-abducted) as stated in his Table Sixteen text reproduced as Figure 10. He represented the conjoined constellation in a novel configuration (Figure 11), in which the rapacious eagle snatches the youth, whose arms flail around in an ineffectual attempt to elude his fate. Bayer affords Antinous little more than footnote status in the face of his grand purpose of undoing Hadrian’s meddling and restoring Zeus to his purported Classical pre-eminence in the Heavens.

Despite the verve of this imaginative revision of astronomical history, there are factual objections, which nobody seems to have had the rudeness to mention at the time. Firstly, there is no evidence that the six stars of Antinous were ever part of any other constellation than Antinous prior to Bayer. Secondly, Hyginus in De Astronomica (Astronomicon Poeticon) twice stated clearly whilst writing before the birth of Christ that it was the zodiacal constellation of Aquarius that was identified with Ganymede in Antiquity and no other ancient evidence contradicts Hyginus on this point:

§ 2.29.1 AQUARIUS OR WATER BEARER: Many have said he is Ganymede, whom Jupiter is said to have made cupbearer of the gods, snatching him up from his parents because of his beauty. So he is shown as if pouring water from an urn…

§ 2.16.1 EAGLE (Aquila): This is the eagle which is said to have snatched Ganymede up and given him to his lover, Jove. This bird, too, Jupiter is thought first to have singled out from the tribe of birds, because it alone, men say, strives to fly straight into the rays of the rising sun. And so it seems to fly above Aquarius, who, as many imagine, is Ganymede.

The only ancient writings in which Hadrian and Antinous are compared to Zeus and Ganymede are early Christian texts (e.g. Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks IV [p.111-112 in the Loeb edition of 1919] and Tertullian, Ad Nationes 2.10) in the context of attacking the rival cult of Antinous, which thrived in the second to fourth centuries AD. The form of this attack was to claim that Hadrian had deified Antinous due to their sexual relationship and to deny the voluntary sacrifice of Antinous to save the Emperor and the Empire, because this was uncomfortably similar to the self-sacrifice of Christ to save the world.

The Farnese Atlas

The Farnese Atlas (Figure 12) is a first- or second century AD Roman copy of a late Hellenistic celestial globe borne upon the shoulders of Atlas. Whether it precisely reflects the constellations of Hipparchus or not, according to an online paper (Schaefer, accessed 12/10/2025) it appears to be of his epoch ca. 129 BC by virtue of its locations for the equinoxes (points at which the path of the Sun across the background of the stars intersects the celestial equator). It is the best extant model of the pre-Ptolemaic constellations.

A projection of the constellations shown on the sphere onto flat charts of its front and rear hemispheres is given in an engraving (Figure 13), in which the eagle Aquila can be seen at the extreme left between ~5° and ~20° north of the celestial equator with its head towards the south and viewed from its underside rather than from above its back. Its orientation on the Farnese celestial sphere agrees with the description of the locations of the stars of Aquila with respect to the form of the eagle in the Almagest. It is shown swooping down towards Aquarius in accordance with the assertion of Hyginus that Aquarius was recognised as Ganymede in Antiquity.

All of the six stars of the constellation of Antinous are located in the empty space on the Farnese celestial sphere to the south of Aquila and north of the constellation of Capricorn, whose head and horns are just visible above the cloaked left shoulder of Atlas. The sphere confirms that Ptolemy did not borrow stars from Aquila to create Antinous, but instead formed Antinous from stars that had never previously been part of any constellation.

It also confirms that the talons of Aquila were on the opposite (northern) side relative to Antinous in Antiquity. Ptolemy could not have had any intention of positioning Antinous so that he could be snatched by Aquila, but star charts from the medieval period onwards tended to twist Aquila and Bayer in 1603 ultimately completely inverted the eagle relative to its orientation in Antiquity as depicted on the Farnese sphere.

Aquila et Antinous

The reaction of astronomers in the succeeding centuries to Bayer’s attempt to re-label Antinous as Ganymede was curiously ambivalent. They retained his merging of Aquila with Antinous and they found it irresistible to depict Antinous as a Ganymede in the talons of Aquila, but they persisted in labelling him as Antinous rather than Ganymede.

Therefore, almost all published astronomical charts recorded the constellation of Antinous combined with Aquila between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, including: Hevelius (1687), notable for equipping the youth with a bow; Corbinianus (1730); Bevis (1750) and Bode (1801). However, in Britain, John Flamsteed (1729) in his Atlas Coelestis sounded a slightly divergent note by omitting Antinous from his chart of Aquila. Nevertheless, in his star catalogue he listed their stars together under the title “Aquilæ cum Antinoo”.

Friedrich Argelander (1843), a Prussian astronomer, published a Uranometria Nova (Neue Uranometrie) refining and updating the work of Bayer. He produced a chart with Aquila and Antinous-cum-Ganymede copied exactly from Bayer in red outline, but he labelled the entire group as just “Aquila”. Conversely, Eduard Heis (1872) in his similar work entitled Atlas Coelestis Novus, re-drew the constellation, though again in red outline, and labelled it “AQUILA ET ANTINOUS” (Figure 14) and gave the same title to his list of its stars in his catalogue.

Abbreviation to Aquila without explanation

In the mid-nineteenth century, the British Association for the Advancement of Science published an influential Catalogue of Stars, a posthumous work by Francis Baily (1845), a previous President of the Royal Astronomical Society. It suppresses both the name and image of Antinous from its pages without explanation: Aquila et Antinous is rendered simply as “Aquila”. This catalogue was used as an authoritative reference work for just a few years, but it proved influential in respect of its successors in the English-speaking world.

The story culminates a century ago in 1922, at the make-or-break event for constellations. Formed in 1919, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) held its First General Assembly in Rome in May 1922 and its Astronomical Notations Committee (sub-committee 3) had been allotted the task of designating a standard list of the constellations and determining their interlocking boundaries.

In the preceding few centuries, the basic list from Claudius Ptolemy had been augmented in some catalogues but not others with a few entirely modern constellations, usually interposed among the list of constellations from the Almagest. Furthermore, areas of the southern celestial hemisphere that are never visible from Europe had been charted with a novel mix of constellations by explorers of the Southern Seas.

However, this process proved decisive in eradicating Ptolemy’s constellation of Antinous, although all the other Ptolemaic constellations were preserved in the list published in Transactions of the International Astronomical Union, Volume I (Fowler 1923, p. 158). These Transactions are, however, silent on the question of the reasoning behind the inclusion or exclusion of candidate constellations from its list. Instead, they focus upon the formulation of a 3-letter abbreviation for each included constellation (Figure 15).

The American astronomer Henry Norris Russell in an article entitled “The New International Symbols for the Constellations” in the magazine Popular Astronomy (October 1922) explained how the IAU list in Figure 15 came about (Russell 1922, p. 469):

An experimental list prepared by the writer was discussed with other astronomers on the voyage to Europe and at informal after-dinner meetings in Rome. The list, improved by various people, was then tried out on sundry others of different nationality, and appeared to be interpretable almost at first reading. It was then presented, along with Professor Hertzsprung’s [list with two-letter abbreviations], at a meeting of the committee on Units and Notations. A large majority favoured the use of three letters [for the abbreviations], and a set of such symbols was recommended by the Committee and adopted at a plenary session of the International Astronomical Union.

Hertzsprung had originated the concept of a list of the constellations using abbreviations, but he had advocated 2-letter acronyms, but the 3-letter contractions put forward by Russell were considered more intelligible and adopted by the IAU.

Ian Ridpath comments in his “Star Tales” that Russell did not explain how he settled on the 89 constellations named in Figure 15 from among various alternatives in use at the time. However, he notes (Ridpath 2018, p. 25) that the names are the same as those to be found in the Revised Harvard Photometry star catalogue published by Harvard College Observatory in 1908 (Pickering, 1908), so it seems that Russell simply adopted those. The Harvard catalogue was the standard reference of its day.

As explained in the introduction to the Revised Harvard Photometry (Pickering 1908, p. 8), “For stars north of the Equator in 1900, the constellation is taken from the Harvard Photometry, in which the boundaries of the constellations are based on Argelander’s Uranometria Nova, as modified by Heis in his Atlas Coelestis Novus…”

Therefore, this catalogue was based on Heis’s Atlas Coelestis Novus, which had in fact preserved the name of Antinous coupled to Aquila in its star lists and diagrams (Figure 14). It appears, however, that the Harvard Photometry’s author followed the practice of Baily in suppressing the name of Antinous from its Tables: a silent omission from its scrupulously declared source for the northern constellations.

The variable brightness star in Antinous

There remains the interesting question of whether the constellation of Antinous incorporated the Star of Antinous or it had appeared elsewhere in a location now forgotten? It would seem inconsistent that Hadrian and Ptolemy did not include the Star of Antinous in his eponymous constellation, given that they probably collaborated with one another on the matter of raising Antinous into the heavens.

Could any of the stars in the constellation of Antinous have exhibited the special property of growing in brightness in the aftermath of the death of Antinous in October AD 130?

Remarkably, the first of the six stars listed by Ptolemy in the constellation of Antinous (therefore Alpha Antinoi according to Ptolemy), which is currently called Eta Aquilae and lies 1400 light years distant from Earth, has exactly this behaviour. It is the star located in the head of Antinous on Vopel’s celestial globe (Figure 5) and it is a Cepheid Variable triple star with a weekly cycle of brightening and dimming.

It oscillates between a visual magnitude of 4.25 and 3.5, which is noticeable to the naked eye. Hence, it might well have been dimmed on the exact evening of the drowning of Antinous and then come to prominence a few days later.

But the third companion star in the group is usually distant from the other two with an approximate 1000-year orbital period. Therefore, there is also a possibility of especially marked surges in brightness when this third companion draws closest to the other two in its elliptical orbit.

The IAU Working Group on Star Names officially approved the name Antinous for the star Theta Aquilae in 2024 to commemorate the banished constellation of Antinous. But this star is the second in Ptolemy’s list for the constellation of Antinous (Beta Antinoi) and is stable in brightness, so it is unlikely to be the original Star of Antinous. Despite the good intentions of the IAU Working Group, this designation is likely to sow further confusion into the historical heritage.

Restoration of Antinous by dividing Aquila

The incorporation of Antinous into Aquila is excused by suggesting that Antinous was only ever an asterism and “a sub-division of Aquila” (Ridpath, 2018: 138) rather than a proper constellation, but we have seen that Ptolemy presented it as a constellation, and this was understood by Renaissance astronomers who read his Greek manuscripts in the 16th century. Similarly, it has been suggested that Antinous has been re-incorporated into Aquila, because it was part of an Aquila and Ganymede group in Antiquity, but we have seen that the evidence from Hyginus, the Farnese Atlas and the Greek Almagest refutes this and it is based on a mistake by Bayer in 1603, perhaps partly inspired by early Christian propaganda against Antinous as a rival deity.

The truth is that Bayer’s fallacy caused the previously separate constellations of Aquila and Antinous to be merged and this facilitated a series of silent and unjustified omissions of the name of Antinous from the combined constellation culminating in the omission of Antinous from the list of constellations adopted by the IAU in 1922. The effect has been to suppress the memory of one of the most dramatic series of events in the history of astronomy.

Antinous is now the only constellation from the Almagest, the oldest surviving star catalogue, to have been banished from our skies. This was not effectuated by a democratic debate of the IAU in 1922 as has sometimes been portrayed, but through covert editing of their sources by a handful of 19th century astronomers. The time is ripe to undo this injustice and restore the heavenly Antinous to our skies as a symbolic commemoration of his altruistic act of voluntary sacrifice for the sake of the Emperor Hadrian and the entire Roman Empire.

Constellations are now defined by the IAU as interlocking patches of sky and that corresponding to Aquila is marked in Figure 16 (Delporte 1930). The six stars with the modern designations Eta, Theta, Delta, Iota, Kappa, and Lambda Aquilae are Ptolemy’s constellation of Antinous. A single parallel of celestial latitude at a declination 2-degrees north of the celestial equator (red-dashed horizontal line in Figure 16) would neatly re-establish the historically correct division between Ptolemy’s stars of Aquila all appearing to its north and the currently misappropriated stars of Antinous in the southern sector.

Such a restitution of the historical division would be an enlightened future policy for the IAU and the whole field of astronomy, so that misrepresentations and distortions of astronomical history and heritage for dubious reasons may in future be seen to have failed, despite their current triumph.