89, Lot: 17. Estimate $1000. Sold for $600. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

PHOCIS, Delphi. Antinoüs, favorite of Hadrian. Died 130 AD. Æ 26mm (12.62 gm). Aristotimos, priest of the cult of Antinoüs. Bare head right / IE[RW]C APICTOTI-MOC [ANEQHKE], tripod on base. Blum pg. 34, 8; BMC Central Greece -; SNG Copenhagen -. Nice Fine, dark brown patina, worn at high points, scrapes on reverse. Very rare.

One of the most remarkable cults of the ancient world was that which grew up around the youth Antinoüs, a boy from Claudiopolis in Bithynia who attracted the attention of the emperor Hadrian. Hadrian had little love for his wife Sabina, and chose instead to shower favors on the handsome youth, whom he apparently chanced upon during a visit to Bithynia. During the emperor's tour of Egypt in 130 AD, Antinous fell into the Nile and drowned, an event surrounded by dark suspicions whispering of suicide or ritual murder. The distraught Hadrian had his companion immediately deified, and the worship of Antinous became an important facet of the imperial cult. A initial cult center was established at the new city of Antinöopolis in Egypt; other temples were founded in elsewhere in the east, including a shrine at Delphi. Commemorative coinage was struck in his name, marked by unique combinations of legends, portraiture and reverse types. His divinity was equated to a multiplicity of gods as well as heroes. His coins, invariably found heavily worn, may not have circulated as such, but were preserved as a form of "touch piece" by those who sought his intervention, and may have been struck into the third century. Contorniates were certainly struck in his name in the fourth century. Textual evidence suggests that, at least in Egypt, his cult survived into the fourth century and was noted by the early Church fathers. The grief of the most powerful man in the empire was transformed into a cult for those seeking a interlocutor in their dealings with the gods."...and such is the new god Antinous, that was the emperor Hadrian's minion and slave of his unlawful pleasure; a wraith, worshipped in obedience to the emperor's command and for fear of his vengence; known and confessed to be a man, and not a good or deserving man neither, but a sordid and loathsome instrument of his master's lust. This shameless and scandalous boy died in Egypt when the court was there; and forthwith his Imperial Majesty issued out an edict strictly requiring and commanding his loving subjects to acknowledge his departed page a deity and to pay him his quota of divine reverences and honors..." St. Athanasius of Alexandria († 373 AD).