[1][2][3] Following his premature death before his 20th birthday, Antinous was deified on Hadrian's orders, being worshipped in both the Greek East and Latin West, sometimes as a god (θεός, theós) and sometimes merely as a hero (ἥρως, hḗrōs).

[6] Antinous accompanied Hadrian during his attendance of the annual Eleusinian Mysteries in Athens, and was with him when he killed the Marousian lion in Libya, an event highly publicised by the Emperor.

[11][12] He was born in the territory to the east of the city called Mantineion, a rural locality: This was important later for the cult character expressed in his statues: he was a figure of the country, a woodland boy.

[53] Although welcomed with public praise and ceremony, some of Hadrian's appointments and actions angered the city's Hellenic social elite, who began to gossip about his sexual activities, including those with Antinous.

On this tondo it was clear that Antinous was no longer a youth, having become more muscular and hairier, perceptibly more able to resist his master; and thus, it is likely that his relationship with Hadrian was changing as a result.

In Royston Lambert's book Beloved and God, he writes "But as far as the central issues go – the history of Antinous, his relationship with Hadrian and the death – we have precious little more information than the earliest writers.

[63][65] In late September or early October 130, Hadrian and his entourage, among them Antinous, assembled at Heliopolis to set sail upstream as part of a flotilla along the River Nile.

[89][90] In keeping with Egyptian custom, Antinous's body was probably embalmed and mummified by priests,[91] a lengthy process which might explain why Hadrian remained in Egypt until spring 131.

[101] However, a surviving obelisk contains an inscription strongly suggesting that Antinous's body was interred at Hadrian's country estate, the Villa Adriana at Tibur in Italy.

[103] Hadrian also had political motives for the creation of Antinoöpolis, which was to be the first Hellenic city in the Middle Nile region, thus serving as a bastion of Greek culture within the Egyptian area.

[123] By the 18th century, the ruins of Antinoöpolis were still visible, being recorded by such European travellers as Jesuit missionary Claude Sicard in 1715 and Edme-François Jomard the surveyor c. 1800.

[124] However, in the 19th century, Antinoöpolis was almost completely destroyed by local industrial production, as the chalk and limestone were burned for powder while stone was used in the construction of a nearby dam and sugar factory.

[90] He focused on its spread within the Greek lands, and in Summer 131 travelled these areas promoting it by presenting Antinous in a syncretised form with the more familiar deity Hermes.

[129][130] The cult also spread through Egypt, and within a few years of its foundation, altars and temples to the god had been erected in Hermopolis, Alexandria, Oxyrhynchus, Tebytnis, Lykopolis, and Luxor.

[131] The cult was most popular in Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor, and the North African coast, but a large community of worshippers also existed in Italy, Spain, and northwestern Europe.

[136] It is also possible, however, that his cult borrowed power from parallels between Antinous and beautiful young male immortals in the Greco-Roman pantheon like Apollo, Dionysus, and Silvanus as well as mortal youths beloved by gods in classical mythology like Ganymede, Hylas, Hyacinth, and Narcissus,[137][138] and that images of the sensuous youth invited imaginary erotic bonding between him and his worshippers.

[141] It is likely, however, that those which Hadrian was directly involved in, such as at Antinoöpolis, Bithynion, and Mantineia, were often grander, while in the majority of cases, shrines or altars to Antinous would have been erected in or near the pre-existing temples of the imperial cult, or Dionysus or Hermes.

[142] Worshippers would have given votive offerings to the deity at these altars; there is evidence that he was given gifts of food and drink in Egypt, with libations and sacrifices probably being common in Greece.

[152] Rumours spread throughout the Empire that at Antinous's cultic centre in Antinoöpolis, there were "sacred nights" characterised by drunken revelries, perhaps including sexual orgies.

[135] The pagan philosopher Celsus also criticised it for what he perceived as the debauched nature of its Egyptian devotees, arguing that it led people into immoral behaviour, in this way comparing it to Christianity.

Viewing the religion as a blasphemous rival to Christianity, they insisted that Antinous had simply been a mortal human and condemned his sexual activities with Hadrian as immoral.

[169] It has been asserted that many of these sculptures "share distinctive features – a broad, swelling chest, a head of tousled curls, a downcast gaze – that allow them to be instantly recognized".

[170] About a hundred statues of Antinous have been preserved for modernity,[10] a remarkable fact considering that his cult was the target of intense hostility by Christian apologists, many of whom vandalized and destroyed artefacts and temples built in honour of the youth.

[171] Lambert believed that the sculptures of Antinous "remain without doubt one of the most elevated and ideal monuments to pederastic love of the whole ancient world",[172] also describing them as "the final great creation of classical art".

[72] Although many of the sculptures are instantly recognizable, some offer significant variation in terms of the suppleness and sensuality of the pose and features versus the rigidity and typical masculinity.

Antinous remained a figure of cultural significance for centuries to come; as Vout noted, he was "arguably the most notorious pretty boy from the annals of classical history.

"[179] Sculptures of Antinous began to be reproduced from the 16th century; it remains likely that some of these modern examples have subsequently been sold as Classical artefacts and are still viewed as such.

[180] Antinous has attracted attention from the homosexual subculture since the 18th century, the most illustrious examples for this being Prince Eugene of Savoy and Frederick the Great of Prussia.

[188] In 1915 Fernando Pessoa wrote a long poem entitled Antinous, but he only published it in 1918, close to the end of World War I, in a slim volume of English verse.

"[195] Antinous's biographer Royston Lambert echoed this view, commenting that information on him was "tainted always by distance, sometimes by prejudice and by the alarming and bizarre ways in which the principal sources have been transmitted to us.