Floor of Triclinium - House of the Triumph of Neptune at Acholla
(Tunisia)
For the upper
class Roman, his entire house was a critical element in the lifelong and
all-encompassing work of self-advertisement. As a perpetual candidate
for one public office after another, whose home was also his office,
where clients, cronies and business associates came to exchange favors
and broker deals, he designed each room down to the last detail to make
precisely the statement he wished to make about himself.The code of
Roman social symbolism was elaborate and the levels of self-presentation straightly hierarchical: certain rooms were fully public and their message
meant for all. An example of this level is the
atrium, a kind of reception
room where tradesmen or casual visitors might be asked to wait.Still other rooms were reserved for the admission of more
intimate business associates or clients; such was the
tablinum or personal office.
Only close friends, peers, or those one really hoped to impress would be
invited to dinner, so the triclinium, or dining room, constitutes a third and more important
level of social coding. The visual language of social symbolism was as
commonly understood by the ruling class as their Latin speech, and could
be read at multiple levels simultaneously.
On the surface,
the decorations of a room might feature use-appropriate imagery simply
to identify it. This décor could take the form of wall or ceiling
paintings, for example, or pictorial floor mosaics. Since only rarely
have the painted walls or ceilings of Roman houses been preserved, one
of the most useful features for identifying room use is floor mosaics.
Thus we might expect the floor of a dining room to display images
associated with food or drink, eating and partying. In actuality this is
not as common as one might expect. What are far commoner are oblique
references to drinking in particular; often these take the form of
images of Bacchus, the god of wine, frequently in a mythological
setting; or images of grape vines and grapes. The advantage of such
subtle referencing is that it not only proclaims that this is a room
where wine will flow, but that the master of the house is a
well-educated fellow who knows his Greek mythology.
Far less common
are direct references to food or eating, although they do occur from one
end of the empire to the other, and from the earliest period at which we
find mosaics until the late days of the empire.
One of the
earliest examples of food on the floor (1st c. BCE), and one
with the greatest amount of context preserved, is the floor of the
triclinium in the House of
the Faun at Pompeii.
This enormous and luxurious house actually predates the Roman occupation
of Pompeii; the owners were a
wealthy family of Samnites, a highly civilized tribe of mercantile
Italians. As neighbors of the Greek settlements in Italy, the Samnites were heavily
influenced by Hellenistic Greek styles and tastes even before the Romans
embraced them. The dining room floor features a central
emblema, or discrete
pictorial image, of Bacchus riding a tiger, a reference to the god’s
triumphal procession to India, part of his mythology. As
such, it is an appropriate indication of the drinking that will take
place in the room. But at a deeper level the scene is a veiled reference
to Alexander the Great, who also conquered the East. The validity of
this reading is strengthened by the fact that the entire house is filled
with references to Alexander and especially to Alexandria, the Egyptian
city founded by Alexander. A second
emblema, seemingly with no
connection to the first, depicts an assortment of fish, biologically
correct in every detail, At the center of the scene are the unlikely
pair of a lobster and a squid locked in combat. To be sure, this image
evokes the promise of delicious bouillabaisse to come:
Pompeii
was a coastal town and seafood was an important element of any Italian
banquet. But the surprising combination precisely of a lobster and a
squid is an unmistakable reference to Aristotle’s On the Generation
of Animals, a treatise on what is essentially the food chain. Very
likely the entire scene, which occurs elsewhere in the Pompeii area as well, derives from a copybook version of a
famous painting, an illustration of Aristotle such as might have been
found in Alexandria’s famous library or in the attached
research center known as the
Mouseion. Thus to those in the know, the Samnite host identifies
himself with the Alexandrian lifestyle, learned and luxurious at once.
It is even possible that his family fortune was made through commerce in
the Eastern Mediterranean, centered on the
port
of Alexandria.
A similar
evocation of Hellenistic luxury is conjured up by versions of the
brilliant trompe l’oeil
called the Unswept Floor (Asarotos
Oikos), which occur in Pompeii, at
the emperor Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, and in various provincial locations. They are all linear descendants of the 2nd c.
original created for the royal palace of
Pergamum by the Greek artist Sosos,
according to Pliny. The unswept floor depicts the detritus of a banquet:
crab claws, grape pips, snail shells, even a marauding mouse, executed
in deceptively three-dimensional style. It bespeaks the conspicuous
consumption that has marked the recent banquet, and of course for the
Roman adaptors it also evokes palace life in the fabulous east. But
beyond that, the wittiness of this floor treatment is manifest: one is
almost afraid to step for fear of “smushing” something. Identifying the
various bits of garbage must have amused the diners then even as it does
viewers today. The host marks himself as a man of sophisticated humor,
and one who appreciates his Old Masters
From the 2nd
century CE we have three examples of food on the floor. One is from the
villa at Marbella (Malaga)
in Spain.
The mosaic scheme throughout the house consists of black and white
geometric patterns, with occasional
emblemata in color. Along the
edge of the covered walkway or peristyle that edges the courtyard which
forms the heart of a Roman house, a decorative band appears only across
the face of the walkway fronting the house’s two dining rooms. This
consists of a frieze of cooking implements, cups of drink, and cuts of
meat—rabbit, chicken and pork ribs. Most are executed in black
silhouette as if hanging against a white background; others in white
silhouette, laid upon black trays or tabletops. The chief purpose of
this decoration, unique in the house, seems to have been to identify the
dining rooms behind, or more precisely to mark the way to the rooms. The
interior courtyard of a house, where its familial dining rooms, bedrooms
and specialized reception rooms were located, was the most privileged
area of the establishment, where only one’s intimate friends and family
would be invited. Thus the coded secondary meaning may be seen as a
combination of plenty and hospitality—but also of intimacy, informality.
Offering the guest a glimpse of the preparatory stages of the meal as he
approaches is rather like the gesture of inviting a guest into the
kitchen nowadays: “consider yourself part of the family.”
Another example
from the 2nd century is found in the House of the Triumph of
Neptune at Acholla in modern Tunisia, ancient
Proconsular Africa. Here the smaller of the two triclinia is adorned with a
geometric grid of small emblemata
of foodstuffs: baskets of fruit, fish, birds and game animals. This is a
very common style of decoration in North Africa,
where scenes of daily life predominate over mythological subjects as
nowhere else. Such still life patterns are called by modern scholars
xenia, the Greek word for
hospitality, since according to one level of reading they evoke the
ostentatious plenty offered to guests in this wealthy province.
Elsewhere in Acholla, the contemporary House of the Lobster shows a
similar array of xenia panels
featuring the eponymous lobster, a gazelle, deer, peacock, guinea fowl,
goat and also artichokes and baskets of fruit.
At El Djem, the
House of the Months, dating to the following century, features a mixture of
xenia and emblemata of
the unswept floor based upon but not copying that of Sosos of Pergamum.
In the same city, the House of the Solertii, a very large mansion of
some 12,000 square feet, alternates
emblemata of fish and
animals. Elsewhere, at Oudhna, the House of the Laberii employs
emblemata of butter, wine and
bread, a bird and two unswept floors.
The House of Africa at El Djem, dating from the fifth century, contains
twenty
emblemata, including baskets
of fruit, clusters of grapes, dates; several kinds of popular table
fish, including sea perch and mullet; fowl, among them thrush, partridge
and pheasant, ducks and a flamingo trussed for roasting; rabbits, a
gazelle, deer and a goat; and finally a glass and a straw-insulated
flagon of the type used to serve ice cold water. Another house in the
same city contains 28 panels much the same in content but even more
varied. Among the foods included are squash, artichokes, figs, citrons
and plums, fish, game, game birds and peacock, and the ice water flagon.
A seemingly unrelated emblema
shows men playing dice. This may reference the popular post-prandial
pastime of gambling, or simply be a symbol of good luck. Four wild
animals seem to represent the seasons, which are more frequently
depicted anthropomorphically. Similar
xenia also occur atSousse.
Now, how do we
read this very common set of images? Simply symbols of
lavish hospitality, a kind of mosaic menu? A second layer of
meaning is revealed when we reflect that xenia subjects, like the unswept floor, are
Hellenistic Greek classics, based on the work of the painter
Periaikos - thus a subtle reference to the erudition of the
master of the house. But why are these arrangements so much
commoner in Proconsular Africa than elsewhere?
A clue may be found in those other images ubiquitous in
luxurious African houses: scenes of life on the villa. Africa was the site of many enormous agribusinesses, owned
in absentia by wealthy
landlords and worked by tenant farmers. Their payments to
the landlord would be rendered in precisely these forms:
game and flock animals, fish, fowl, and the fruits of the
earth. The act of the tenants’ rendering payment in kind to
the master of the plantation was frequently depicted on the
floors of African villas. The display of
xenia may be part of that
same self-promotion that proclaims “All this wealth comes to
me throughout the year (vide
symbols of the seasons). This is the class of which I am a
part.”
Occasionally we
see the more ungainly image of dismembered joints of meat. At Enfidaville in Proconsular Africa there appears what is clearly a thigh,
perhaps of sheep, as at Cherchel, also in Africa—but its context is
lost. Perhaps it is part of a grid of xenia. A very similar
emblema comes from the House
at Micklegate Bar in York,
England.
Possibly the secondary reference is to meat offered in sacrifice, or
even to the sparagmos, the
rending apart of live animals practiced by the ecstatic devotees of
Bacchus. This may identify the owner of the house as a votary of
Bacchus, or simply be yet another advertence to the divine madness of
drunkenness: how can one criticize guests who fall into such a state
when it is the gift of a god?
One of the most
open references to the menu itself is found at
Antioch in the province of Syria,
at the House of the Buffet Supper (e. 3rd c. CE). Here
emblemata of dishes of eggs and other appetizers begin the grid,
followed by fish, ham and fowl, typical entrees. Finally a cake
represents dessert. All three images are surrounded by breads, drinking
vessels, and the garlands that decorated tables and diners alike at a
Roman banquet. The owner wants to identify himself as a thorough and
impeccable host. The grid is centered by two large scenes: in one,
Ganymede, the cupbearer of the gods, gives drink to the eagle of
Jupiter; in another an overflowing wine bowl is surrounded by birds. Of
course this proclaims “here we shall eat and drink like gods,” but there
may be a political subtext as well. The eagle is also the imperial bird
of Rome.
Perhaps the owner of this Syrian house is implying that he enriches or
feeds the empire, either as a merchant or gentleman farmer or as a
bureaucrat, and that lesser beings find him a generous patron, even as
the birds drink from the great vessel while the proud peacock looks on.
There are also a
few examples of full-fledged banqueting scenes, but they constitute a
separate genre; and we have by-passed in the interests of time several
designs of food in other rooms than the
triclinium. So what can we
say in summary? Images of foodstuffs in the floor mosaics help us to
identify the use of a room designated for dining. They help set the
mood, “get the juices flowing”, and promise a bounteous dinner and
plenty to drink. But for those in the know, they also send a message
about the host: his erudition, his social status, his wealth. They are
in short part of the elaborately coded system of self-presentation with
which the Roman elite surrounded themselves at home and even at table.
Niki Holmes Kantzios
Niki Holmes Kantzios received her MA and PhD in
Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from
BrynMawrCollege,
and a BA in Classical Studies from the
University
of Texas at Arlington. She has done fieldwork in Greece and Israel, and as a professional artist
has also served as illustrator for many articles and excavation reports.
Her teaching experience has ranged from grade school to college age,
from the Latin language to anthropology to history. She is currently an
instructor at the
University of South Florida, teaching Classics courses
in the History and Humanities Departments.
there appears what is clearly a thigh,
perhaps of sheep, as at Cherchel, also in Africa—but its context is
lost. Perhaps it is part of a grid of
xenia. A very similar
emblema comes from the House
at Micklegate Bar in 