culiar red colour, which
the people of Lower Egypt used to wear in wreaths upon his festival.
It received the name Antinoeian; and the Alexandrian sophist,
Pancrates, seeking to pay a double compliment to Hadrian and his
favourite, wrote a poem in which he pretended that this lily was
stained with the blood of a Libyan lion slain by the Emperor. As
Arrian compared his master to Achilles, so Pancrates flattered him
with allusions to Herakles. The lotos, it is well known, was a
sacred flower in Egypt. Both as a symbol of the all-nourishing
moisture of the earth and of the mystic marriage of Isis and Osiris,
and also as an emblem of immortality, it appeared on all the sacred
places of the Egyptians, especially on tombs and funeral utensils.
To dignify Antinous with the lotos emblem was to consecrate him; to
find a new species of the revered blossom and to wear it in his
honour, calling it by his name, was to exalt him to the company of
gods. Nothing, as it seems, had been omitted that could secure for
him the patent of divinity.

He met his death near the city Besa, an ancient Egyptian town upon
the eastern bank of the Nile, almost opposite to Hermopolis. Besa
was the name of a local god, who gave oracles and predicted future
events. But of this Besa we know next to nothing. Hadrian determined
to rebuild the city, change its name, and let his favourite take the
place of the old deity. Accordingly, he raised a splendid new town
in the Greek style; furnished it with temples, agora, hippodrome,
gymnasium, and baths; filled it with Greek citizens; gave it a Greek
constitution, and named it Antinoe. This new town, whether called
Antinoe, Antinoopolis, Antinous, Antinoeia, or even Besantinous (for
its titles varied), continued long to flourish, and was mentioned by
Ammianus Marcellinus, together with Copton and Hermopolis, as one of
the three most distinguished cities of the Thebaid. In the age of
Julian these three cities were perhaps the only still thriving towns
of Upper Egypt. It has even been maintained on Ptolemy's authority
that Antinoe was the metropolis of a nome, called Antinoeitis; but
this is doubtful, since inscriptions discovered among the ruins of
the town record no name of nomarch or strategus, while they prove
the government to have consisted of a Boule and a Prytaneus, who was
also the Eponymous Magistrate. Strabo reckons it, together with
Ptolemais and Alexandria, as governed after the Greek municipal
system