“Here I stretch out this my right hand-hear me, ye Immortals!  Every city in the Empire shall raise an altar to Antinous, and the friend of whom you have robbed me I will make your equal and companion.  Receive him tenderly, oh, ye undying rulers of the world!  Which among you can boast of beauty greater than his? and which of you ever displayed so much goodness and faithfulness as your new associate?”

This vow seemed to have given Hadrian some comfort.  For above half an hour he paced his tent with a firmer tread, then he desired that Heliodorus his secretary might be called.

The Greek wrote what his sovereign dictated.  This was nothing less than that henceforth the world should worship a new divinity in the person of Antinous.

At noonday a messenger in breathless haste came to say that the body of the Bithynian had been found.  Thousands flocked to see the corpse, and among them Balbilla, who had behaved like a distracted creature when she heard to what an end her idol had come.  She had rushed up and down the river-bank, among the citizens and fishermen, dressed in black mourning robes and with her hair flying about her.  The Egyptians had compared her to the mourning Isis seeking the body of her beloved husband, Osiris.  She was beside herself with grief, and her companion implored her in vain to calm herself and remember her rank and her dignity as a woman.  But Balbilla pushed her vehemently aside, and when the news was brought that Nile had yielded up his prey she rushed on foot to see the body, with the rest of the crowd.

Her name was in every mouth, everyone knew that she was the Empress’ friend, and so she was willingly and promptly obeyed when she commanded the bearers who carried the bier on which the recovered body lay to set it down and to lift up the sheet which shrouded it.  Pale and trembling, she went up to it and gazed down at the drowned man; but only for a moment could she endure the sight.  She turned away with a shudder, and desired the bearers to go on.  When the funeral procession had disappeared and she could no longer hear the shrill wailing of the Egyptian women, and no longer see them streaking their breast, head, and hair with damp earth and flinging up their arms wildly in the air, she turned to her companion and said calmly:  “Now, Claudia, let us go home.”

In the evening at supper she appeared dressed in black, like Sabina and all the rest of the suite, but she was calm and ready with an answer to every observation.

Pontius had travelled with them from Thebes to Besa, and she had spared him nothing that could punish him for his long absence, and had mercilessly compelled him to listen to all her verses on Antinous.

He meanwhile had been perfectly cool about it, and had criticised her poems exactly as if they had referred not to a man of flesh and blood but to some statue or god.  This epigram he would praise, the next he would disparage, a third condemn.  Her confession that she had been in the habit of complimenting Antinous with flowers and fruit he heard with a shrug of the shoulders, saying pleasantly:  “Give him as many presents as you will; I know that you expect no gifts from your divinity in return for your sacrifices.”