One of the most striking things about the constellations is their resistance to change. In the past, most people knew the stars; as a result, the brightest stars and figures were culturally ‘sticky’. Once astronomers / astrologers started mapping the sky, hundreds of lesser stars were named and known through star alignments, and local asterisms. By Ptolemy’s day, the visible sky was fully mapped, and tables of stellar longitudes and latitudes like that included in the Mathematical Treatises were widely circulated (for a value of ‘wide’ fitted to the second to sixteenth centuries CE).
In the days of Rome, however, attempts were made to redefine the sky. There’s evidence, for instance, that the Romans sought on more than one occasion to put Hercules in the stars, finally settling on the unhappy stars of the kneeler for their favorite hero. [LINK to a page ‘under construction’]
Here we relate an arcane bit of constellation history.
In the third decade of the second century, the Roman emperor Hadrian became infatuated with a youth named Antinous (Antinoös). In the year 130 of the current era, the boy died of an accident, shy of his twentieth year. The emperor entered a public period of melodramatic mourning, in which he decreed Antinous divine, and ordered astronomers to place this new god among the stars.
Imagine a panel of court astrologers rapidly assembled to cobble together
a celestial memorial in honor of the emperor’s late infatuation.
All would have recognized the folly of it, for the stars had long been
mapped and named, an international standard.
But they also understood the danger of disappointing the emperor,
and settled on giving figure to some of Ptolemy’s unfigured stars.
The constellation of Aquila, the Eagle, is comprised of 9 stars,
with an additional 6 ‘unfigured’ stars of comparable magnitude nearby.
To please Hadrian, these six were figured as Antinoös.
(If you can see a god-like youth in these stars, you’ve better eyes than us.)
We presume that there were festivities and solemnities surrounding this event,
which soothed the mourning emperor,
entertained the public,
and annoyed the royal astrologers no end.
Ptolemy’s work dates to roughly 130 – 170 CE;
he would certainly have known of Hadrian’s decree.
In his Catalogue, Ptolemy (per GJT) describes these as
‘the unfigured stars near the Eagle, called by some Antinoös’ —
a scholarly ‘harrumph’ at the Emperor’s audacity.
These stars are illustrated in Chapter 23 of the Stellarion.