But before his death Hadrian dedicated one more section of the villa to mourning his loss. This is the Canopus (Figs. 11.1 and 11.15), named for the suburb of Alexandria where Antinous met his untimely and unhappy end. The original plan may have antedated Antinous’ death--the latest stamps reported by Bloch are dated A.D. 126--but after the disaster Hadrian, deliberately turning the knife in the wound, must have made this complex a memorial of the place where it happened. For the approach is along a pool (excavated and restored 1954–1957) intended to be reminiscent of the canal which gave access to the Canopus at Alexandria. The latest finds make it possible to restore the pool with its south end fitted with dining couches. The north end is apsidal, edged with a curious colonnade whose architrave is flat over one pair of columns and arched over the next pair. Along the sides were found perfect (and entirely unimaginative) copies of the Caryatids, the maidens who upheld the south porch of the Erechtheum; these would be memories of past happiness in Athens. Flanking the maidens were Sileni. Other marbles, adorning the apsidal north end of the colonnade, included, in order, an Amazon, a Hermes, a river god representing the Tiber, another representing the Nile, an Ares, and another Amazon. All this uninspired archaism is depressing; in the ageing, heartbroken Hadrian taste and inspiration alike are dead. The colonnade led to the terminal half-dome (another “pumpkin,” it will be recalled) and secondary structures, the whole long known as the Serapeum (there was such a temple in the Alexandrian Canopus). It is complex in plan, at once _nymphaeum_ and temple, with its hemicycle deepened at the back into a long narrow apsidal gallery in which some commentators have seen a deep sexual significance. Here Hadrian has turned, to catalyze his flagging inspiration, to older civilizations, dead or dying like himself. Once again, for the last time, and feebly, he has made of what they have to offer something uniquely his own. In the Canopus, as in the Teatro Marittimo and the Piazza d’Oro, there is no single satisfactory viewpoint: the result is an effect of motion, in curved space, in varied light and shade, involved with water, the whole a polyphonic counterpart to Hadrian’s own restlessness.