Take a moment to ingest the various components of this Late Roman artistic scene, because they’re really weird. This is just one small part of an enormous (36’x23′) floor mosaic discovered just last year during the COVID lockdowns on an English farm in Rutland.
The discovery is quite the find: first, the enormous room was only part of an aristocratic villa complex that included many other structures, like barns and maybe a bath house (excavations are continuing) — it shows what the fancy tastes of the ultra-rich were like.
But unusually, the mosaic’s subject material is unique for Roman England, because it tells the story of the Illiad and the Trojan War — historians hadn’t known just how popular this subject, originating in the Greek world, had been. But whoever commissioned the artwork would definitely have been showcasing their identity as aficionados of the tale.
And one of the scenes isn’t even from Homer. Here, you see a man carrying on his back a sort of macabre scale — the corpse of a dead man on one side, and a large lump of gold on the other. It illustrates how King Priam of Troy exchanged an amount of gold equal to the weight of Hector, his dead son. The episode was known to come from a play by the fifth-century BCE playwright Aeschylus which is now lost.
What does all this show us? Well, Hector was killed in revenge for having killed the boyfriend of Achilles during the Trojan War — and some very rich Ancient Roman thought his guests should know that. Common for Late Roman Britain was a militarized aristocracy, who maybe cared about scenes of warfare in art. The Late Roman aristocratic villas also typified how the elite wished to spend their money: on enormous rural estates that could be economically functional farms, places of military defense, and autonomous households of lavish ostentation that would impress visiting guests.
Until the archaeological site has been more intensively investigated, the mosaic has been reburied to prevent looters from destroying the area.
