Antinous Hero

The image on the front page of this website is based on a photograph of a bronze devotional medallion minted roughtly in in the year AD 135. It depicts a young man in profile with the Greek inscription "ΑΝΤΙΝΟΟϹ ΗΡΩϹ" —  "Ἀντίνοος ἥρως" — "Antinous hero." 

It seems to me that the medallion is a specimen of the type represented by item 1975 of the Roman Provincial Coinage project. But I may be mistaken in this identification. 

According to Cassius Dio, 

"On coming to Greece he [Emperor Hadrian] was admitted to the highest grade at the Mysteries [The Eleusinian Mysteries]. After this he passed through Judaea into Egypt and offered sacrifice to Pompey, concerning whom he is said to have uttered this verse:

'Strange lack of tomb for one with shrines o'erwhelmed!'

"And he restored his monument, which had fallen in ruin. In Egypt also he rebuilt the city named henceforth [Antinoöpolis] for Antinous. Antinous was from Bithynium, a city of Bithynia, which we also call Claudiopolis; he had been a favourite of the emperor and had died in Egypt, either by falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or, as the truth is, by being offered in sacrifice. For Hadrian, as I have stated, was always very curious and employed divinations and incantations of all kinds. Accordingly, he honoured Antinous, either because of his [pederastic] love for him or because the youth had voluntarily undertaken to die (it being necessary that a life should be surrendered freely for the accomplishment of the ends Hadrian had in view), by building a city on the spot where he had suffered this fate and naming it after him; and he also set up statues, or rather sacred images, of him, practically all over the world. Finally, he declared that he had seen a star which he took to be that of Antinous, and gladly lent an ear to the fictitious tales woven by his associates to the effect that the star had really come into being from the spirit of Antinous and had then appeared for the first time."

Since he died during the autumnal Festival of Osiris in AD 130, Antinous naturally became synchretized with Osiris when he was deified by Hadrian. And that dying and rising god, whose dismembered body parts were floated down the Nile to be reassembled for his ressurection, was associated in the Hellenistic mind with Dionysus, whose fetal body was torn and crushed to a bloody pulp by the Titans and then sewen up in the thigh of Zeus for a second gestation and birth. So, on the religious medallions worn and treasured by the devotees of his cult and mysteries — like the one depicted on the front page of this website — Antinous is very often portrayed as Dionysus, which we recognize from the distinctive ivy leaf crowning his head. 

The Greeks identified Osiris and Dionysus as early as the fifth century BC when Herodotus explained, 

"For no gods are worshipped by all Egyptians in common except Isis and Osiris, who they say is Dionysus; these are worshipped by all alike" (The histories, Book 2, Chapter 42).

The Iliad (6.130-140, 14.325), Homeric Hymns, and Euripedes' Bacchae are ancient sources that provide many details of the mythology and iconography of Dionysus. 

For a brief but scholarly biography of Antinous see Mirjana Uzelac, "Antinous: The Tragic Life of Emperor Hadrian’s Lover."