Antinous - Boy Made God

Antinous: Boy Made God is the catalogue of an exhibition that center's around one of the most important surviving portraits of Antinous, an inscribed bust from Syria found in 1879 and currently in a private collection.

The piece is basically unpublished and will be presented for the first time to the wider public in this volume. Other key portraits, as well as coins of Antinous, medals and bronze figurines, feature here, and help contextualise the image of this country boy who was greatly loved by the emperor Hadrian and became a hero and a god within the Empire. The exhibition and the book's narrative highlight the range and variety of Antinous' reception and shows how the fascination and reach of his image went well beyond antiquity into the modern world. It reconstructs a visual biography of an extraordinarily fascinating figure, representing an ideal of perfect beauty for many centuries after his tragic death.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Ashmolean running from 25 September 2018 to 24 February 2019.

Prof. R.R.R. Smith is the Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Curator of the Cast Gallery. He is a world expert on ancient sculpture. Dr Milena Melfi is the Assistant Curator of Cast Gallery and Lecturer/Researcher in Classical Archaeology. Both have studied and published on Greek culture under the Roman Empire within which the story of Antinous is placed.