[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
The city had perhaps twenty years of existence in Roman times, then was abandoned. Hadrian had built it in memoriam of Antinoos, his strapping catamite, who went swimming near the future site of the city and drowned, or was chomped by a hippo or something. The fairy king Hadrian also had a roadway built eastward across the waste to reach the Red Sea and give the city some chance of self-sustainability from an economic life. Recent-years research of the route suggested that the road was used by those who built it, and possibly no one else. Building the city and the roadway was not cheap, but Hadrian also squandered money on many statues of Antinoos, who he elevated to the status of a divinity, to be worshipped throughout the empire. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Verginius Rufus]

"The fairy king Hadrian"? Come on--he was an emperor, not a king.

Antinoopolis (as it is also spelled) had a longer existence than that--according to the entry in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Diolcletian made it the capital of the Thebaid, and according to this report it was still in use in Early Christian times which should mean later than Diocletian.

A. R. Birley's article on Hadrian in the Oxford Classical Dictionary says of Hadrian's tour of the eastern provinces, including Egypt, "Hadrian was accompanied not only by Sabina [his wife, a great-niece of Trajan] but by a young Bithynian, Antinous; his passion for the youth, embarrassing to many Romans, was a manifestation of his Hellenism."

Hadrian wasn't the first Roman emperor to prefer same-sex partners. Suetonius, writing during the reign of Hadrian, says of Galba (emperor 68-69), "His sexual preference inclined toward males, but only those who were especially tough and full grown."