Human Sacrifice and the Death of Antinous

​In Ancient World Magazine, British researcher Andrew Michael Chugg has a new piece about the death of Hadrian’s lover Antinous and his subsequent promotion to a constellation in Ptolemy’s Almagest. Most of the article concerns the early modern history of the now-forgotten constellation of Antinous, which is beyond my interest or scope. But Chugg promoted his piece on social media as the “unexpurgated” story of Antinous, so it is worth giving a bit of consideration to the evidence for Antinous’s life and death.

Bust of Antinous

​Regular readers will remember Chugg as the independent researcher who made the dubious claim that Alexander the Great’s corpse was secretly entombed in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Here, too, as with the Alexander claim, the devil seems to be in the details.
 
Chugg argues that, under the advice of Egyptian priests, a sick Hadrian had Antinous killed as a human sacrifice in order to restore his health and then covered up the death by (a) pretending Antinous had drowned by accident and (b) erecting a giant obelisk all but announcing the crime. He then fell victim to astrologers who convinced him that Antinous had become divine and appeared in the night sky as a new star, creating the constellation Antinous next to Aquila.
 
The sources for Antinous’s death are few and there is very little direct information about it. Most of the sources are very late and not terribly reliable. The oldest and presumably the most reliable—though by no means objectively correct—is the account in the epitome of Cassius Dio:

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In Egypt also he [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 favourite of the emperor and had died in Egypt, either by falling 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, and also because at the death of his sister Paulina he had not immediately paid her any honour . . . (Cassius Dio 69.11, trans. Earnest Cary)

The two most important subsequent accounts have much less information. The Historia Augusta (“Hadrian” 14.5-7) and the epitome of Aurelius Victor (“Hadrian” 14) summarize the story into a few words, with the former adding that Hadrian “wept like a woman” after Antinous died and the latter including the detail that “magicians” told Hadrian to sacrifice someone. Scholarly have recently proposed that the fourth-century Historia Augusta is textually dependent on the lost original of Aurelius Victor. At any rate, Aurelius Victor wrote 200 years after Cassius Dio, and his account is most likely not entirely independent, despite Chugg’s assertion that the three versions are wholly separate. (Some scholars even believe all three derive from a single lost original.)
 
As a result, the whole of any argument falls on a few sentences from Cassius Dio, and a great deal of scholarly speculation has been erected on that flimsy foundation. Various scholars have proposed that Antinous drowned accidentally (following Cassius Dio’s quotation from Hadrian’s lost memoir), that he was murdered, that he committed suicide, or that he was voluntarily or involuntarily sacrificed to rejuvenate Hadrian. (Chugg’s argument, stated more confidently than other scholars’ versions is nevertheless closely modeled on previous scholarly speculation, particularly that of Royston Lambert, whose 1984 book on Hadrian and Antinous he follows at times almost point-for-point.) Other than the sentences quoted above, there is no indisputable evidence for any of these, and we can say little for certain beyond his death.
 
Here, of course, is where I must part ways with Chugg, who takes the ancient sources as much more definitive than they can reasonably be assumed to be. They certainly must reflect a tradition that Hadrian sacrificed Antinous for magical purposes, but—like so many stories of the Roman emperors—it is a bit of a leap to move from rumor to fact. And, as a technical matter, we do not actually possess Cassius Dio’s book 69, where this story is found. Instead, we have an epitome made by John Xiphilinus in the eleventh century, which means that there is a possibility that the version known to us was contaminated by the later rumors and stories. Indeed, scholars have faulted John Xiphilinus for both using an imperfect copy of Cassius Dio and for making changes emendations to the presumed original, though the most recent scholarship by Dimitrios Nikou in 2024 suggests John was a faithful copyist.
 
At any rate, the question of whether Antinous was a human sacrifice cannot be settled solely from these texts. That leaves Chugg to use iconographic and mythological references to try to strengthen the case.
 
It’s clear that Antinous was identified with Osiris. Not only is he explicitly identified as Osiris on an obelisk erected by Hadrian (the Obelisk of Monte Pincio) at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. On it, “Osiris-Antinous” is hailed as having the powers and dignity of Osiris, and the “hours of Osiris” (the ritual of his mysteries) are said to have been enacted for Antinous. Beyond this, in gems, Antinous is shown sitting on a coffin-shaped box, recalling the chest in which Seth sank Osiris’s body into the Nile. (In other works, Chugg has identified these gems as scenes from the “hours of Osiris,” though there is no cultural connection to Egypt in the Roman gems.)
 
Chugg notes that this box survived into the early modern period, where it shows up in depictions of the constellation Antinous, beginning with Caspar Vopel’s celestial globe of 1532. (The more common version shows the constellation as a young man holding a bow and arrow.) He speculates that Vopel had access to a lost ancient source in order to explain the depiction of the box—which is reasonable—but then concludes from it that Antinous was purposely drowned in just such a box, a claim that cannot be substantiated from any evidence. It would be the equivalent of suggesting that because gems depicted him with a wine cup and lyre that he must have died from poisoned wine at a concert.
 
Does any of this mean that calling Antinous “Osiris” indicates that he was a human sacrifice? Chugg says that it is a virtual certainty, but I am less certain.
 
One complicating factor in Chugg’s simple equation of Antinous with Osiris is that the ancient evidence shows that Hadrian had Antinous equated with many gods, not just Osiris, so it’s difficult to assume that Osiris was the primary identification, or the most important. On gemstones and in statues, Antinous is shown with the attributes of the Greek Dionysus, including crown of grapevines, the lyre, and the winecup, the last being a symbol of resurrection in his mysteries. (But note that Dionysus was identified as the Greek form of Osiris since at least the fifth century BCE [Herodotus 2.42ff].) He is also identified with the Celtic god of healing, Belenus (“Gaulish Apollo”) in a votive inscription from a Quintus Siculus, as well as the Roman gods Vertumnus and Sylvanus in other depictions. In statuary with an Egyptian theme, Antinous is depicted in the regalia and with the attributes of Horus, not Osiris, and is never shown in the resurrected Osiris’s mummiform aspect.
 
The overall theme seems to be that Antinous assumed the attributes of a particular local god depending on where a statue of him went up.
 
Second, Osiris wasn’t necessarily drowned. While Plutarch (Isis and Osiris 12) tells us that Seth sealed Osiris in a chest and threw him into the Nile, Diodorus Siculus (1.21) tells us that Typhon (Seth) murdered Osiris, dismembered him, and scattered his body across Egypt, with only his penis consigned to the Nile. Both versions were known in ancient Egypt, with the latter being the preferred account from the New Kingdom onward, though both remained current until the end of the Egyptian religion. At any rate, by the Roman era, the Egyptian rituals used for the commemoration of Osiris’s death and resurrection had frequently been adapted as funerary texts for deceased mortals, equating the mortal with Osiris—whether he was drowned or not. The Egyptians, too, believed that those who drowned in the Nile achieved sanctity.
 
Consequently, Hadrian’s promotion of Antinous as Osiris would not necessarily have to imply that he was a human sacrifice but rather that he had drowned in the sacred Nile. If it is true that the astrologers claimed he was reborn as a new star, that would be enough to justify identifying the drowned Antinous with Osiris.
 
Beyond this, there is sparse evidence for any tradition of human sacrifice in Egypt, let alone the specific tradition Chugg claims that the Egyptians drowned youths in the Nile to ensure a bountiful flood. As evidence, he cites Royston Lambert’s popular 1984 book on Hadrian and Antinous, but Lambert’s evidence was thin (and his book compiled from a great deal of speculation and “must have been” layered atop Cassius Dio’s brief account), and more recent scholarship has challenged the claim of any tradition of Nile sacrifice. Taking Cassius Dio and the Historia Augusta at their word, Lambert imagined that the priests of Egypt (the “magicians” of Aurelius Victor) drawing on Greek and Egyptian precedents and a long tradition of river sacrifices to recommend the youth’s death to restore Hadrian’s health. However, Herman Te Velde reexamined the evidence in 2007 and could find no clear cases; indeed, human sacrifice appears to have been incredibly rare in Egypt. Only one source, the Papyrus Vandier, offered a similar story—a pharaoh ordering a courtier to die in the river to restore him to health—but that story, like many fantastical tales in the papyri, is believed to be a fairy tale, like the similarly fantastical stories told in the Westcar Papyrus. Te Velde noted that while we have many ancient Egyptian spells and rituals preserved, there is none that would transfer a sacrifice’s lifeforce to another person.
 
What we do know, however, is that the story of Osiris could be transferred to other figures without the need for a human sacrifice. Tertullian, in Ad nationes 2.8 (197 CE), writing probably just before Cassius Dio, said that the Jews considered Serapis (a Greek form of Osiris) to be the same as the patriarch Joseph, and we know from later sources that this entailed taking over the myth of the drowned coffin and claiming that Joseph’s coffin was subsumed beneath the Nile. That story persisted in Christian and Muslim sources into the Middle Ages in the strange version where the coffin was sunk to the bottom of the Nile where Joseph’s holiness caused the banks of the Nile to become fertile (Akhbar al zaman 2.10). The adaptation of the Osiris story is obvious, and while Joseph was a real person like Antinous, it shows how easily the Osiris story could be adapted to circumstances in the second century CE.
 
And for what it’s worth, an echo of the divinity or sanctity connected to those who died on the Nile continued late into the Middle Ages. If you squint, you might even see hints of the kind of human sacrifice Chugg attributes to Antinous.
 
Al-Maqrizi, writing the late 1400s, tells a somewhat garbled story that nevertheless retains many telling details. He writes (Al-Khitat 1.41) of the death of Atrib, one of the founding heroes of Egypt in Islamic legend. He was buried on an island in the Nile in secret, but the people thought his brother Ashmun had murdered him and would not be satisfied until they saw the body. But the devil had secretly removed the body and reanimated it to demand worship. They killed Ashmun and buried him beside the river, but when the Nile waters refused to flood his tomb, they raised the Sphinx over it and worshiped it as a god, there now being competing cults.
 
It's a strange and clearly corrupt story, but it seems to reflect many of the same themes and may well derive from Late Antique Egyptian ideas about Osiris and death and resurrection on the Nile.
 
But for all the suggestiveness of this very late tale, the overall portrait remains muddled, so there remains nothing specific we can say about Antinous’s death beyond the fact that he died and Hadrian promoted him to a god. Beyond that, we have only the ancient rumors and a handful of ambiguous inscriptions. Chugg’s method seems to be to take serious scholarship and to push the evidence far beyond what can be convincingly proved, and the question of Antinous’s death must remain inconclusive unless more evidence some day comes to light.