Roman government had destined it to be one of her strong military stations, for here a legion was quartered.  The emperor could walk through the time-worn avenues of sphinxes which led to the wonderful vaults where the long succession of divine animals was buried, each like a Pharaoh, in a magnificent granite sarcophagus.  Hadrian could admire the beautifully sculptured tomb of Di, an Egyptian officer of the fifth dynasty, with less trouble than we must experience now; for now the palaces, the pictures of the gods, and almost all the pyramids are swallowed up in sand.  Miserable Arab villages, such as Saqqara, have fixed themselves in the ruins of Memphis, and from a thick palm grove one can look with astonishment upon the torso of the powerful Ramses II. lying solitary there, the last witness to the glory of the temple of Phtah, before which this colossus once had its stand.  In the neighbourhood of Memphis lay Heliopolis, the town of the sun-god, with its ancient temple, and a school of Egyptian wisdom, in which Plato is supposed to have studied.

In Heliopolis the worship of the god Ra was preserved, the centre of which was the holy animal Mnevis, a rival or comrade of Apis.  Cambyses had partly destroyed the temple and even the obelisks which the Pharaohs had in the course of centuries erected to the sun-god; nowhere in Egypt existed so many of these monuments as here and in Thebes.  Hadrian saw many of them lying half-burnt on the ground just as Strabo had done.  On the site of Heliopolis, now green with wheat-fields, only a single obelisk has remained upright, which is considered as the oldest of all, and was erected in the twelfth dynasty by Usirtasen I.

The royal assemblage had arrived in the course of their journey at Besa, a place on the right bank of the river, opposite Hermopolis, when a strange event occurred.  This was the death of Hadrian’s favourite, Antinous, a young Greek from Claudiopolis, who had been degraded to the position of Ganymede to the emperor on account of his beauty.  It is not known where the emperor first came across the youth; possibly in his native land, Bithynia.  Not till he came to Egypt did he become his inseparable companion, and this must have been a deep offence to his wife.  The unfortunate queen was delivered in Besa from his hated presence, for Antinous was drowned there in the Nile.

His death was surrounded by mystery.  Was it accident?  Was he a victim?  Hadrian’s humanity protects him from the suspicion that he sacrificed his victim in cold blood, as Tiberius had once sacrificed the beautiful Hypatus in Capri.  Had the fantastic youth sacrificed himself of his own free will to the death divinities in order to save the emperor’s life?  Had the Egyptian priests foreseen in the stars some danger threatening Hadrian, only to be averted by the death of his favourite?  Such an idea commended itself to the superstition of the time, especially in this land and by the mysterious Nile.