It corresponded, too, with the emperor’s astrological arts.  Was Antinous certain when he plunged into the waves of the Nile that he would arise from them as a god?  Hadrian asserts in his memoirs that it was an accident, but no one believed him.  The divine honours which he paid to the dead youth lead us to suppose that they formed the reward of a self-sacrifice, which, according to the custom of those times, constituted a highly moral action, and was looked upon as heroic devotion.  At any rate, we will assume that this sacrifice sank into the Nile without Hadrian’s will.  Hadrian mourned for Antinous with unspeakable pain and “womanly tears.”  Now he was Achilles by the corpse of Patroklus, or Alexander by the pyre of the dead Hephaistus.  He had the youth splendidly buried in Besa.  This most extraordinary intermezzo of all Nile journeys supplied dying heathendom with a new god, and art with its last ideal form.  Probably, also, during the burial, far-sighted courtiers already saw the star of Antinous shining in Egypt’s midnight sky, and then Hadrian saw it himself.

In the mystical land of Egypt, life might still be poetical even in the clear daylight of Roman universal history in the reign of Hadrian.  The death of the young Bithynian seems to have occurred in October, 130.  The emperor continued his journey as soon as he had given orders for a splendid town to be erected on the site of Besa, in honour of his friend.  In November, 130, the royal company is to be found amongst the ruins of Thebes.

Thebes, the oldest town in Egypt, had been first put in the shade by Memphis, and then destroyed by Cambyses.  Since the time of the Ptolemies, it had been called Diospolis, and Ptolemais had taken its place as capital of the Thebaid.  Already in Strabo’s time it was split up.  It formed on either side of the Nile groups of gigantic temples and palaces, monuments, and royal graves similar to those scattered to-day amongst Luxor, Karnak, Medinet-Habu, Deir-el-Bahari, and Kurna.

[Illustration:  095.jpg COMMEMORATIVE COIN OF ANTINOUS]

In Hadrian’s time the Rameseum, the so-called grave of Osymandias, on the western bank of the Nile, the wonderful building of Ramses II., must still have been in good repair.  These pylons, pillars, arcades, and courts, these splendid halls with their sculpture-covered walls, appear even to have influenced the Roman art in the time of the emperors.  Their reflex influence has been even seen in Trajan’s forum, in which the chief thing was the emperor’s tomb.

In Alexandria the emperor mixed freely with the professors of the museum, asking them questions and answering theirs in return; and he dropped his tear of pity on the tomb of the great Pompey, in the form of a Greek epigram, though with very little point.  He laid out large sums of money in building and ornamenting the city, and the Alexandrians were much pleased with his behaviour.  Among other honours that they paid