Ferocious Elegance

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In Sicily’s Villa Romana del Casale, the fourth-century A.D. Roman mansion decorated with the most extensive collection of mosaics to have survived the destruction of the empire, the Cyclops depicted on the floor of the Vestibule of Polyphemus has three eyes. Two regular eyes, normally set, and another, smack in the middle of his forehead, give a wistful, puzzled look to the traditionally one-eyed monster who sits amid his flock of sheep, preparing to devour the slaughtered, half-eviscerated ram that lies across his lap. Beside him stand Odysseus and his men, offering the Cyclops the chalice of wine that will, they hope, get him drunk enough to allow their 030escape from his lair. Behind the Cyclops is the mouth of his cave, and behind that, the cone of Mount Etna.

Perhaps the mosaicists—believed to have been brought in from north Africa—simply got that part of the Homeric story wrong, the detail about the number of eyes. (In which case, it’s daunting to imagine the wrath of their supervisor, appearing at the end of the day to check on the progress of the work and noticing …) Or perhaps the third eye was intentional. Perhaps one eye just didn’t seem enough amid all that decorative splendor, that show of wealth and skill and state-of-the-art architectural design employed in the construction of the villa thought to have belonged to the Emperor Maximian, who ruled the empire along with Diocletian (284–305 A.D.), and who used the estate as his summer pleasure palace.

Like the Teatro Greco, in Syracuse, the Villa Romana del Casale, near the city of Piazza Armerina, is the product of a culture that was blissfully unable to see the writing on the wall. Unlike the Norman palaces scattered throughout most of Sicily—thickly walled structures that reflect the concerns of a society based on insecurity, on semiconstant warfare and on a continual awareness of the need for protection and fortification—the Roman villa gives no indication that its inhabitants believed they would be called upon to do much more than take hot and cold baths, rub themselves with perfumed oils (or have themselves rubbed, by servants), exercise, play games, listen to music, have love affairs, hunt and fish.

And the floors on which they walked were meant to portray the lives they lived and wished to continue living, and which they believed would 031continue uninterrupted, despite the fact that the empire was already showing fault lines, suffering from internal and external pressures—the strains and tensions that would soon pull it apart. Meanwhile, the Romans continued to exploit the country around them, to make use of latifundia (estates owned largely by absentee landlords who extracted every bit of wealth from their holdings without much caring about the fates of the people who lived and worked there), a practice that would continue, in one form or another, throughout so much of Sicily’s history and accelerate the economic decline that would affect the island for centuries afterward.

But judging by the mosaics, people at the Villa Romana were too busy celebrating the delights of the present and the glories of a mythological past to think much about the future. In one room, the charming so-called bikini girls—dressed appropriately for exercise, in their underwear—toss a ball around, work out with weights and a discus and crown each other for their skill in gymnastics. In a nearby antechamber, the emperor’s wife and children are surrounded by servants bearing bolts of cloth and boxes of perfumed oils. There’s a scene of seafaring cherubs sporting with dolphins, another of two lovers embracing. In the Sala della Danza, a young woman dances while twirling a veil above her head, and in the Sala del Circo, riders compete in a chariot race held in honor of Demeter, probably much like the races staged in the arena at Syracuse.

But by far the liveliest and most sophisticated scenarios—the ones that most clearly engaged the energy and expertise of the artists and artisans—portray blood sports and struggles to the death, the hostile 033and combative relationships between the fiercest and most helpless members of the animal kingdom. Perhaps in honor of the fact that Maximian took the surname Herculius and adopted the Greek hero as the equivalent of a household god, the mosaics in the triclinium illustrate the labors of Hercules. In one area the mythic hero has shot his poisoned arrows into the prodigiously overdeveloped chests of the Titans, who writhe in pain, their legs turning into the tails of serpents. Elsewhere he defeats a sea monster threatening a maiden and carries off the sacred oxen of the three-bodied monster Geryon.

Still, all of Hercules’s most brutal and strenuous labors seem controlled and highly civilized compared to the scenes that illuminate the Room of the Small Hunt—the largest and most famous room in the villa. Everywhere you look, someone or something is killing or being killed. Leopards pounce and sink their teeth into the backs of harts. Hunters stick wild boars with spears and chase terrified deer into huge nets. No species is exempt from pain and suffering. One man beats another with a stick; another is being viciously attacked by an enraged lioness. In one of the most disturbing and enigmatic scenes, a griffin carries in its claws a box with slats, through which we can see the head of a boy.

What’s on view in the monumental Corridor of the Great Hunt is not an amusing hunting party depicting our gracious host and a few friends riding out for a day of sport in the neighborhood around the villa. It’s a big-game hunt, in Africa, and across the bottom of the mosaic is an unmistakable representation of the quarry that’s being stalked. Men are loading an elephant, an antelope and an exotic bird (an ostrich, perhaps) into a boat that will take them back to Europe to be exhibited in zoos and killed at the hunting games held for public entertainment in the arenas. Meanwhile, a merchant coolly discusses the transport and the price he will receive for the captured beasts. And what are we supposed to make of the fact that this portrayal of the plunder of Africa was most likely done by artists who had themselves been imported from Africa to decorate the mansion of the Emperor Maximian?

These scenes keep reminding me of another palace belonging to another aristocrat: Konopiste, the former home (in what is now the Czech Republic) of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, another 034near-maniacal hunting enthusiast, who filled his sporting lodge with thousands of trophies, from bear skins to fans made from the feathers of small birds he’d blown to smithereens. Like Maximian, who was killed in 310 A.D. in his struggle to regain power, Francis Ferdinand would himself die violently, assassinated at Sarajevo, his death marking the beginning of World War I.

The other thing I can’t seem to get out of my mind is something I saw just this morning, as we drove across the fertile and mostly unpopulated plain of Catania, which the Greeks believed was inhabited by the race of cannibals called Laestrygonians. For the first 20 miles or so outside of Catania, at each juncture where a country lane or dirt road met the main highway, a young African woman, nicely dressed and wearing heavy makeup, sat, dispiritedly, on a chair or crate, awaiting customers. The women were prostitutes, brought there largely to service the truck drivers plying the long-distance routes across the island.

I keep recalling their sad, haunted faces as I see the mosaic depiction of an obviously venerable tradition: the importation and exploitation of Africa for the enjoyment and entertainment of Europe.

From the forthcoming book Sicilian Odyssey by Francine Prose. Copyright © 2003 Francine Prose. Published by National Geographic Books.

In Sicily’s Villa Romana del Casale, the fourth-century A.D. Roman mansion decorated with the most extensive collection of mosaics to have survived the destruction of the empire, the Cyclops depicted on the floor of the Vestibule of Polyphemus has three eyes. Two regular eyes, normally set, and another, smack in the middle of his forehead, give a wistful, puzzled look to the traditionally one-eyed monster who sits amid his flock of sheep, preparing to devour the slaughtered, half-eviscerated ram that lies across his lap. Beside him stand Odysseus and his men, offering the Cyclops the chalice of wine that […]