Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion

Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of MotionAuthor(s): Rebecca MolholtSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 93, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 287-303Published by: CAAStable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23046578Accessed: 30-01-2020 17:54 UTC

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Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion

Rebecca Molholt

Only he who walks the road on foot learns the power that it commands. . . .—Walter Benjamin, "Chinese Curios," One-Way Street, 1925-26

In a letter written in 1917, Walter Benjamin speculated on the essential difference between painting and the other arts: "From the human point of view, the level of drawing is horizontal, that of painting, vertical. ... A picture wants to be held vertically before the viewer."1 Benjamin had recently been reading the art historian Alois Riegl, specifically his Late Roman Arts Industry, from which he adopted the notion that works of art expressed their own sense of volition. As Benja min later developed the idea, the viewing needs of the paint ing implied vertical placement, in emulation of a window, while other cultural forms—the architecture of the Paris

arcades, graphics and drawings, written texts—are better seen as horizontal in nature, since they demand to be under stood as a "cut" through the "world substance," a transverse section in which some kind of line is envisioned to move

through and over the ground presupposed by the work. For Benjamin, such horizontal experience entails a radically dif ferent set of perceptions, for, instead of being taken in all at once, as a whole, the horizontal form is perceived in parts whose import must be reconstructed imaginatively by the viewer or reader. Fragments and discontinuity characterize the horizontal, whereas integration and transparency distin guish the vertical. Benjamin recognized the way such vertical orientation marked the modern epoch, from its art to the way it conceived the study of history, but he wished to propose other modes as alternatives to a modernism that had, by the 1920s, exhausted itself.

The study of Roman floor mosaics has traditionally been encumbered by the kind of myopia Benjamin describes in his distinction between vertical and horizontal forms of viewing: modern scholars have tended to regard mosaics as if they were paintings or were created in emulation of painting.2 The rise of easel painting in modern culture has installed an unconscious privileging of this visual medium above all oth ers, with the result that the conditions of viewing attending a

painting hung on a wall have become normative for the arts as a whole. The vertical bias has had several effects on our

understanding of floor mosaics. First, it has been assumed that the aim of ancient mosaic designers was generally to imitate painting, that mosaics are (or attempt to be) essen tially paintings in stone laid out on a floor. From this follows the almost universal practice of installing mosaics on mu seum walls, in conformity with the presentation of paintings. Conventions of Western perspective since the time of Leon Battista Alberti understood that a painting was made by an artist standing at a fixed point before it, and that a single, immobile point near the center of the work is the implicit location a viewer is supposed to reclaim in order to experi

ence its spatial effects. This monocular perspective is repli cated in the kind of still photography that most often pre sents such works in textbooks and other published studies. Scholars have complained that "[m]osaics are difficult to photograph even under good conditions: because of their size and situation, often only an oblique view is possible."3

Measured by the standards of wall painting, the Roman floor mosaic remains a fragment. Seen en face, from a fixed position, or judged by the standards of realism established for another medium, the mosaic is misread, and the proper experience of its viewing unduly constrained. As Benjamin might have put it, the floor mosaic wants to be regarded horizontally, not vertically.

The meaning of the Roman floor mosaic was inseparable from its experience as a tangible surface, one typically appre ciated by an ambulatory viewer situated in and aware of a specific architectural setting. We need to rethink such mosa ics as forms and materials underfoot and to examine them

kinesthetically, as experiences that are by no means purely visual. Footsteps can define a place—even an imaginary place.4 The way that the labyrinth mosaics interact with the architecture and activities of the baths of North Africa from

the late second to the early fourth century CE and with the viewer's ambulatory occupation of these spaces accounts for the popularity of the theme in such settings. The traversal of labyrinth mosaics in a bath context takes on a broader, metaphoric meaning, since the pavements were deliberately designed to blur the boundaries between life and myth.5 Myth offers a common realm available and accessible to all, and the labyrinth's iconography and mythography are partic ularly apposite in a bath context. As a floor decoration, the labyrinth can reinterpret the space it defines, and walking across these spaces helps to construct the bather as a heroic athlete.

Roman North Africa was one of the wealthiest regions of the empire in the second and third centuries CE, not least thanks to its major exports of grain and olive oil; as a result, these provinces are among the richest in surviving monu ments. The first emperor from North Africa, Septimius Severus of Leptis Magna (in modern Libya), came to the throne in 193, and his dynasty held power until 235. In the provinces of North Africa, the great agonistic, Greek-style athletic contests were extremely popular, especially during the second, third, and fourth centuries,6 when the mosaics

and bath buildings discussed here were made. Games and sporting events were staged on both the imperial and the local levels, celebrating such municipal events as the dedica tion of bath buildings that still dot the landscape today.

Fifty-six known Roman floor mosaics represent the convo lutions of the labyrinth.7 While the majority come from houses, fourteen labyrinth mosaics come from baths, and seven of these from baths in North Africa.8 Stories involving


288 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 3

1 Labyrinth mosaic, seen from the eastern corner of the room, early 4th century CE, frigidarium, Baths of Theseus and the Minotaur, Belalis Maior, Tunisia (artwork in the public domain; photograph from Mahjoubi, Recherch.es, fig. 87)

the labyrinth appear in sources ranging from Herodotus to Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, and Apollodorus.9 Many narratives intersect at this motif: the pride of Minos, the lust of Pasi phae, the love of Ariadne, the cleverness of Daedalus, the tragedy of Icarus, the horror of the Minotaur, and the hero ism of Theseus. But the bath mosaics highlight the athletic prowess of the hero Theseus.

The popularity of labyrinth mosaics has been ascribed variously to their gamelike aspect,1 their apotropaic na ture,11 their near-abstract design that allows for infinite ex tension across a room of any size,12 their ability to reflect an elite Roman cultural status on viewers having the education to recognize the image and its multiple ramifications,13 their ability to represent to the Roman viewer the triumph of civilization over barbarism, and their image as a representa tion of the city itself.14 Yet, though it has been noted several times,15 no one has explained why the labyrinth mosaics were such a common theme in the baths of North Africa. Of the

sixteen labyrinth mosaics in North Africa, seven adorned baths, but these images and their contexts have never been studied together."'

Walking on the Labyrinth: Surface and Traversal Floor mosaics require the beholder to think on his or her feet. Any pavement will probably be touched (even felt by unshod feet) at the same time that it is seen. This matters because the Greeks and Romans believed that vision itself was

both haptic and optic. By a process of extromission, the eyes released rays that traveled out to touch the object in question and then came back to the eyes.17 Visuality was thus not anchored in the retina alone. Floor mosaics that imitate

painting are not necessarily playing to the strengths of the mosaic medium; any illusion of deep perspective will always be mitigated by the pavement's tangible flatness and texture underfoot. Images presented on a surface with which the viewer has physical contact prompt the spectator at all times to acknowledge personal involvement with the creation of meaning. Especially effective in this light are mosaic com positions that endeavor to take into account the simulta

neity—of horizontality and of verticality—built into any experience of a floor mosaic, where the image and any accom panying narradve are deployed at right angles to the standing viewer.

The schema and scale of the labyrinth story presented in Roman baths are specific to the medium of floor mosaics. Wall paintings of Theseus and the Minotaur, such as those surviving from the Vesuvian region, focus on the hero's vic torious exit from the labyrinth: we see him outside.18 But the mosaics depict a wholly different moment in the narrative and spread out the patterns and convolutions of the labyrinth itself (Fig. 1). Such pavements, stretching across large rooms, rarely feature any of the ancillary characters (such as Ariadne and the crowds of onlookers and grateful Athenian children) who are often present in wall paintings. Instead, the floor mosaics showcase the architecture of the labyrinth and pre sent a journey underfoot.

Because their narrative of journey unfolds across the sur face of a floor, labyrinth mosaics are representations of spa tial experience that unify art and architecture. The otherwise unremarkable action of walking cannot be taken for granted across these surfaces, since the mosaics call for immersion

and immediacy on the part of the observer.19 The experience of mosaics thus involves a sort of phenomenological vision, prompting a larger cognitive, perceptual, retinal, and episte mological effort toward understanding. Maurice Merleau Ponty's emphasis on the "lived perspective of the visible world in relation to our living body" provides an important model here, since he describes perception as "our kinaesthetic, prescientific lived-bodily presence to the world."20 As she actually treads on the images, the beholder is moved to become actively engaged in the narrative unfolding under foot.

Roman baths are environments designed to serve and cel ebrate the human body; these are spaces created for rituals of great physicality. Observers experienced the labyrinth mosa ics while also partaking of the social rituals of bathing. Bath ers moved through different temperature zones, in and out of water of various temperatures, walked barefoot across cold


ROMAN LABYRINTH MOSAICS AND THE EXPERIENCE OF MOTION 289

floors as well as room-temperature floors and other chambers with floors too hot to traverse without shoes. A heightened bodily awareness was stimulated by the highlighted physical ity of the bathing experience itself. Some rooms would have been full of steam and dim light, others full of sunlight and the splash of water. A poem from the Latin Anthology even links the bodily pleasures of bathing and the mental pleasure provided by the decor of the bath itself."'

Simply as a dynamic pattern of tight rhythmic lines, laby rinths are a pleasing visual decoration. The contrast between a violent and dangerous struggle (Theseus versus the Mino taur) and the pleasures of bathing was probably not lost on a Roman audience.21 Because the sea god Neptune clearly oversaw the watery realm of the bathhouse, a viewer con fronted with a labyrinth mosaic might well remember the connection of Neptune to the Minotaur.2'' Katherine Dun babin has suggested that "the remarkable popularity of laby rinth designs for the decoration of rooms in or attached to baths, though perhaps in part intended for the entertain ment of bathers who can puzzle out the maze while they relax, may also have been influenced by the notion that the wanderings of the maze baffle or distract the evil spirits or the malevolent gaze."24 Certainly, apotropaic resonance can be accepted as a reason for the popularity of this myth in this context.25

More nuanced interpretations can be made, however, from analyses of labyrinths, taking into account their different settings in the bath, their relation to the surrounding archi tecture, and the imagery of the rest of the bathing ensemble, such as sculptural programs. Furthermore, the labyrinth mo saics make fresh sense when we situate them within their

architectural settings. These pavements, themselves illustrat ing a journey, rely also on the physical movement of the beholder; while the realm of the mosaic begins at the en trance to the room, only an oblique view of the entire com position is available from that vantage point. The narrative will not culminate until one steps into and then through the room.26

Labyrinth mosaics often present both a picture and a pic ture of a plan, as the mosaic from the Baths of Belalis Maior demonstrates (Figs. 1-3).27 The mosaic is still in situ, paving an unheated room in a small thermal establishment from the

early fourth century. The labyrinth itself measures approxi mately 5% square yards (4.8 square meters).'8 The outer part of the mosaic represents heavy masonry walls splaying out on all four sides, as if to hold the rest of the structure within the

high circuit of the depicted walls reaching to the very walls of the room itself. A crenellated gate, one on each side of the room, punctuates each mosaic wall, represented as huge stone blocks laid in double courses. Only one gate, at bottom right, opens to reveal a single arched doorway in the heavy exterior wall offering access to the labyrinth's interior. This gate, though facing inward toward the labyrinth, corre sponded with the actual opening into the room. The laby rinth would first be seen from the doorway of the room, by a beholder poised, perhaps between columns, looking into the room's southern half. The central image, however distant and oblique, would be oriented toward the oncoming viewer.

Within the fortress walls are walls again, but now they make no pretense to three-dimensionality and are rendered only as

2 Combat between Theseus and the Minotaur, early 4th century CE, detail of center of labyrinth mosaic, frigidarium, Baths of Theseus and the Minotaur, Belalis Maior, Tunisia (artwork in the public domain; photograph from Mahjoubi, "Le theme du Labyrinthe," fig. 3)

lines, black and red on white. It is a floor plan of the convo lutions of a labyrinth, rendered on the floor of the Roman frigidarium, a cold room that is the traditional finishing point in the sequence of Roman bathing. Black and red lines representing walls on the Belalis mosaic create and traverse a winding pattern. Theseus finds the Minotaur in the laby rinth's innermost chamber, shown at the center of the mosaic

and also the center of the frigidarium (note the ball of thread between Theseus's knees, Fig. 2). Even though beholders probably did not bother to follow the tortuous lines of the hero's path, they would have been aware of Theseus's mon umental journey underfoot.

It is rare that entire large-scale mosaic floors bespeak a single narrative, though the labyrinth floors often do. More often, patterns and sets of figural scenes are collaged to gether. Multiple borders often frame mosaic pictures (em blemata), and these borders regularly tell their own ancillary stories.29 Even the massive floors of North African baths that

are transformed by mosaics into spectacular and continuous expanses of the ocean show episodes from many different aquatic narratives taking place across the realm of the room.30 But the image within a labyrinth is not isolated by its immediate mosaic enframement; the floor renders a single myth, and the contextualized emblema at its center shows the combat between hero and monster in the labyrinth's inner most chamber.31

While the surrounding labyrinth is designed as if observed from overhead and in plan view, the combatants in the center are seen from the side and modeled to evoke three dimen

sions (Fig. 2). At the center of the floor mosaic, where Theseus and the Minotaur fill the available space, the tes serae are smaller and more colors are used. Because the

fortress walls reach to the very walls of the room itself, the flat, horizontal floor mosaic reiterates the space of the room itself. In a dialogue of art and architecture, depicted walls meet actual walls; the very center of the labyrinth is also the center of the frigidarium. The viewer's movement across the space of the labyrinth provides the narrative links and thus the sense of common ground.



3 Plan of labyrinth mosaic, early 4th century CE, frigidarium, Baths of Theseus and the Minotaur, Belalis Maior, Tunisia (plan by Mahjoubi, "Le theme du Labyrinthe," fig. 2)

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i—i—i—i—nu iiii! JL?-'1JCfc l i ~l r.

2 m.

The play between two and three dimensions emerges as one aspect of this game, but it is not the one mentioned by the ancient sources. Pliny the Elder focused on a different kind of spatial complexity: the compression of extended space into a small area. The labyrinth, he wrote, contains passages "that wind, advance and retreat in a bewilderingly intricate manner."32 While Pliny's description highlights the role played by multiple doors to hinder physical navigation, it is a different confusion that accompanies the experience of a labyrinth mosaic. The floor itself is a wide, flat expanse, easy for any walker to traverse. But space is so visually compressed within the mosaic lines of the labyrinth floor that it is inevi tably difficult (or even impossible) to follow any one path way—with the eyes. And so, the spectator is optically lost, even though he is standing on an open floor. At Belalis Maior, the visual instability is heightened by the alternations of the red and black lines that compose the labyrinth, which shimmer and shift back and forth at every turn, blurring the distinction between figure and ground.

Scholars have wondered about the disjunction between the floor mosaics displaying unicursal labyrinths—those that of fer only a single route forward, where in fact it would be completely impossible to lose your way—and the literary implications of a labyrinth as a maze in which one actually could get lost.33 These theories imagine the labyrinth as if scaled down and on paper; with a pen in hand, one surely could trace a unicursal path from beginning to end. By

contrast, Roman labyrinth mosaics are not mazes to be fol lowed physically. Indeed, only one (at Mactar, see below) is large enough for a person to follow its course, albeit in tight footsteps. These are instead visual mazes, and visually, across the floor of a Roman bathhouse, it is virtually impossible for the eye to stay the dizzying course. In every case, however, the beholder has only to take a few easy strides over the flat mosaic surface to reach the center of the labyrinth, which is usually also the center of the room. A terrible journey through high-walled corridors with no end in sight is com pressed to a pattern of flat lines, and the center is gained easily. The story of Theseus and the Minotaur is, of course, a well-trodden path with positive outcomes. The frame of these mosaics, designed to imitate an enclosure of towering city walls, helps to simulate the deep view underfoot, but the epic journey is accomplished in abbreviated form, and the mythic protagonist easily handles the danger at the center. Nonethe less, the labyrinth design invites all who enter this space to give first-person attention to their movement, not just to walk unthinkingly across the monumental passages condensed un derfoot.

Baths of the Labyrinth, Thuburbo Maius: Theseus as Wrestler

For too long, the study of labyrinth mosaics has focused exclusively on comparisons made within the mosaic corpus, and in nearly every case the study has remained divorced



from any consideration of a broader architectural and social context.31 The size and dimensions of the labyrinth's picto rial organization, so uncanny in book illustrations, nonethe less make perfect sense for the actual turning and moving viewers on the mosaic, enmeshed in the story told on its multiply oriented surface. The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur gains new resonance when it is placed on the floor, in the path and as the path of its beholder in the Roman baths, a space designed as much for athletic activities as for cleansing and relaxing. Theseus, after all, did defeat the Minotaur in a wrestling match, and the hero is credited with laying down the rules of this sport.35 Though Hercules and Hermes are more commonly considered the patron gods of sporting events, the heroic combat of Theseus and the Mi notaur was itself an athletic spectacle, and the pleasures of Roman baths certainly included sporting activities. In his otherwise magisterial 1977 study of labyrinth mosaics, Wiktor Daszewski erred when he ignored the "caractere sportif' of the Roman baths.36

The majority of large-scale African baths contained facili ties for exercise and combat sport: palaestrae surrounded by colonnaded courtyards.37 But smaller bathing establishments borrowed the agonistic imagery, even if they might not have offered exercise space within their walls. The high concen tration of agonistic iconography in Roman baths signifies the sporting ambiance that dominated these buildings.38

Many bathers exercised before bathing. We know from Roman authors—including Martial, Juvenal, and Seneca— that exercises such as weight lifting, ball play, and wrestling took place in the baths as a prelude to cleansing.40 Greek style combat competitions (boxing, wrestling, athletic games) gained in popularity in proconsular Africa after the com mencement of the Pythian Games in Carthage in the Severan era, as is attested by a rich epigraphic and iconographic record. " Later sources, too, are perfectly clear on this point: a statue base from 378 CE from Sabratha (Libya), for exam ple, lauds Flavius Vivius Benedictus for restoring the local baths and thereby restoring exercise to the people.42

At the small Baths of the Labyrinth at Thuburbo Maius, late third to early fourth century, a mosaic of boxers deco rated the center of the tepidarium floor (Fig. 4).43 Both boxers have their hands protected by tightly wrapped cestes, a Roman form of boxing gloves. While the younger man re mains standing at right, the older man crouches in a defen sive posture, bleeding after a heavy blow to the head. Inscrip tions at other thermal establishments in the region tell us that boxing combats were offered, sometimes when the bath was dedicated.44 The Baths of the Labyrinth, barely more than 480 square yards (400 square meters) in size, lacked a palaes tra, though archaeologists speculate that a basilical hall at the northwest may have fulfilled a sporting function.45

Whether or not people actually exercised within these walls, the overall decor of the Baths of the Labyrinth aimed for an athletic ambiance, and I believe that the labyrinth mosaic adorning the adjacent frigidarium was another impor tant part of this milieu (Fig. 5). The frigidarium itself is approximately 36 square yards (30 square meters) with two steps leading down to a single cold-water pool in one corner. The pool was paved with large tesserae in different colors laid in a random pattern, and this mosaic would have presented a

4 Mosaic of boxers, late 3rd-early 4th century CE, from the tepidarium, Baths of the Labyrinth, Thuburbo Maius, Tunisia. The Bardo Museum, Tunis (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

5 Labyrinth mosaic, late 3rd-early 4th century CE, frigidarium, Baths of the Labyrinth, Thuburbo Maius, Tunisia. The Bardo Museum, Tunis (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

scintillating, shimmering surface when seen underwater. In the normal course of events, the labyrinth and the frigi darium would be entered both before and after the beholder


292 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

oral 6 Drawings of the same geometric mosaic from the market at Roman Hippo Regius, Algeria, contrasting perspectives of two viewpoints: an oblique view and one directly en face (drawings by Lassus, reproduced with permission from Lassus, "La mosai'que romaine," pi. CLIX, fig. 1)

had spent some time contemplating and traversing the mo saic of boxers in the tepidarium.46

Although the labyrinth mosaic paving the floor of the frigidarium has been damaged, an interesting array of archi tectural structures still serves as its border: heavy masonry facades and black doorways seem to open onto cold, dark recesses beyond. Blank walls and multiple entrances must originally have gone completely around the edges of the Thuburbo labyrinth mosaic, presenting a host of gates and openings to the viewer enclosed within.

All these open doors recall Pliny the Elder's description of an Egyptian labyrinth:

[It was] quite the most abnormal achievement on which man has spent his resources. [. . . This Egyptian labyrinth was the model for the one Daedalus built on Crete] con

taining passages that wind, advance and retreat in a bewil deringly intricate manner. It is not just a narrow strip of ground comprising many miles of "walks" or "rides" such as we see exemplified in our tessellated floors or in the ceremonial game played by our boys in the Campus Mar tius, but doors are let into the walls at frequent intervals to suggest deceptively the way ahead, and to force the visitor to go back upon the very same tracks that he has already followed in his wanderings. [. . . All are] alike in being roofed with vaults of carefully worked stone. There is a feature of the Egyptian labyrinth which I for my part find surprising, namely an entrance and columns made of Parian marble. The rest of the structure is of Aswan gran ite, the great blocks of which have been laid in such a way that even the lapse of the centuries cannot destroy them.47

With the multiple angles of viewing set up through the depicted architecture, the surface of the mosaic ceases to be a fixed and static picture and turns instead into a structure within which the viewer must circle around to see

it from all sides and must look out at the multiple axes of the walls from within. Even a simple pattern (like that of the labyrinth's black lines across the white ground) ap pears notably more dramatic and dynamic when seen from an oblique angle (Fig. 6).48

As at Belalis Maior, the heavy architectural exterior of the Thuburbo labyrinth mosaic gives way to an orderly delinea tion of the labyrinth's interior walls. Again, the endlessly twisting hallway winds through all four quadrants of the labyrinth before opening onto the square field at the center (Fig. 7), where Theseus and the Minotaur appear amid the strewn human remains of the monster's former victims: a

head, a severed arm, a single foot, and what appears to be a leg bone bracket the combatants. On a sand-colored surface, Theseus lunges inward to kick or knee the Minotaur's flank. The Minotaur, as Apollodorus said, had "the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human."49 On one knee, the monster

appears entirely at the hero's mercy. Theseus has wrenched back his head by one horn, and though the Minotaur grabs Theseus's elbow in futile protest, it is obvious that a blow from the hero's curved stick (pedum) is about to dispatch the monster.

So far, there has been nothing to suggest this mosaic presents anything but a mythic, epic combat. But several details actually blur the line between sporting events held in the mythic and worldly realms. In the Roman context, the heavy athletic disciplines were wrestling, boxing, and the pankration, a brutal blend of wrestling and boxing. There were no weight classes in antiquity, and so these sports were not for small men. The advantage went to the heavier man in the struggle to throw his opponent off balance and to the ground.30 The boxers in the next room at Thuburbo Maius are both heavy, bulky men, and within the labyrinth, Theseus and the Minotaur are no lightweights, either. Both man and monster have similar physiques—thick arms and legs and matching pot bellies. Dio Chrysostom disparaged wrestlers as "pot-bellied bullies," and in the second century Galen criti cized them for their long meals and their practice of force feeding themselves, all in order to get their weight up.51 On the Thuburbo mosaic, the decidedly human, nonheroic body type of Theseus blurs the boundary between mythic and everyday combatants.52 The fighting strategy employed by Theseus in the central

scene is also copied from observations of contemporary sport ing events like the pankration. "Turn your body sideways to your opponent and grip him by the head with your right hand," directs a notation from a papyrus found in the Egyp tian city of Oxyrhynchus, giving instructions for wrestling practice.53 Though Theseus reserves his right hand for his pedum, he clearly has a firm grip on one horn of the immo bilized Minotaur.

Plutarch describes the joy of King Minos when Theseus overcame the Cretan bull, father of the Minotaur, in a wres

tling match at funeral games. Like Ariadne, who was watch ing, "Minos also was delighted with him, especially because he conquered Taurus in wrestling and disgraced him."54 Apollodorus tells us that Theseus killed the Minotaur by smiting him with his fists, and Plutarch reveals that the hero's journey into the labyrinth was undertaken "carrying no war like weapon."55 The pedum was Theseus's only weapon be sides his skill at fighting and his not inconsiderable bulk and strength.56

The Minotaur's pose would have caused any Roman ref eree to yell out "Round over!" for touching one knee to the ground signaled a loss in the wrestling arena.57 Rather than



7 Combat between Theseus and the Minotaur, late 3rd-early 4th century CE, detail of center of labyrinth mosaic, from Baths of the Labyrinth, Thuburbo Maius, Tunisia. The Bardo Museum, Tunis (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

8 Four young athletes with classic short wrestling haircuts, each wearing a necklace, three with amuletic pendants; the two pairs flank a table bearing palms of victory and a prize crown, late 3rd-early 4th century CE, from a threshold in the House of the Boxers at Utica, Tunisia, mosaic. The Bardo Museum, Tunis (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

showing us an evenly matched pair of combatants at the outset of the contest, mosaic battles of Theseus and the

Minotaur regularly show the man vanquishing the beast in a victory clearly marked by the pose of the Minotaur with his knee to the ground. This can be seen at Belalis Maior as well and on labyrinth mosaics from Roman sites around the Med iterranean.58

Other aspects of the Thuburbo mosaic find further paral lels with everyday Roman sporting practice, including The seus's spiky, closely cropped hairstyle. Wrestlers, especially professionals, generally wore their hair short so as not to offer

their opponents any long hair to grip and pull. '9 Further

more, Theseus is shown wearing a bulla or amulet on a red-brown cord around his neck, as are all four of the young boxers or wrestlers on a mosaic from Utica (modern Tuni sia), late third to early fourth century (Fig. 8), as does the bath attendant labeled "Tite" in a mosaic from the late Ro

man villa at Piazza Armerina, Sicily.60 Regular bath goers, who doubtless came in all shapes and sizes, might well be undressed like Theseus and wearing such an amulet accord ing to contemporary practice.61

As a matter of course in images of athletic contests, the older opponent tends to be vanquished by the younger. This happens in the boxing scene in the tepidarium at Thuburbo



9 Labyrinth mosaic seen from the west, 150-200 CE, frigidarium, baths at Hippo Regius, Algeria (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Marcel Bovis, reproduced with permission from Lassus, "La mosai'que romaine," pi. CLIX, fig. 2)

Maius, where the bearded, older man is shown bleeding, the younger man upright and balanced on his toes after scoring a major hit (Fig. 4). While the boxers in the next room at Thuburbo Maius presented a blunt and even brutal portrait of human athletics, the wrestling match of Theseus and the Minotaur was of more heroic and mythical proportions. The seus the athlete goes far toward explaining the popularity of the labyrinth in bath contexts. Hercules was also shown em ploying the poses and holds commonly used in the palaestra in epic wrestling matches against Antaeus, Achelous, Triton, and even the Nemean lion.62 We should add Theseus to this

category of mythical-CMrn-Roman sportsmen.

Baths at Hippo Regius: Minotaur as Athlete Mosaics of the labyrinth, depicted at a large scale in the realm of the Roman bath, and by extension their viewers acquire the semiotic status of performativity. Any image at the center of the labyrinth (and the center of the room) would not be legible at first glance, so a viewer looking in from any door way would feel impelled to explore and traverse the labyrinth, like Theseus. The physical action of crossing these floors quickly embeds the observer within a mythic narrative.

The frigidarium of a small private bath in the center of Hippo Regius (in modern-day Algeria) must have been a spectacular place. Its construction and mosaics date from 150-200,63 and expensive slabs of marble covered the frigi darium walls. The cold plunge was also lined with marble and flanked by marble niches in which bathers could take their leisure. A massive black-and-white labyrinth mosaic paves the

10 Drawing of labyrinth mosaic, 150-200 CE, frigidarium, baths at Hippo Regius, Algeria (plan by E. Stawski, reproduced with permission from Marec, "Le theme du labyrinthe," pi. CCIX, fig. 2)

frigidarium floor, a space measuring nearly 7 feet 8 inches by 6 feet 7 inches (7 by 6 meters) (Fig. 9).64 Again, the mosaic displays a scene that must be experienced to be understood; the image on the far side would become visible only after several steps had been taken. The mosaic image would trans port the viewer optically, even as his body was also in motion.

Heavy black walls, indicated in the mosaic as four courses high and topped by a rippling line of crenellations, entirely surround this labyrinth (Fig. 10). On the north side of the room, the Active walls are pierced by a single gate through which a thick black line wends its way through the labyrinth's interior. This line is the path taken by the thread of Ariadne, who fell in love with Theseus when she saw him in the

wrestling match.ba Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of thread, one end of which he was to fasten to the lintel of the labyrinth door. Holding the ball in his hand, he was to unwind it while penetrating deeper and deeper into the labyrinth. The thread was not shown navigating the Thuburbo Maius mosaic (Fig. 7), and, while the labyrinth at Belalis Maior was de signed in alternating lines of red and black, the ball of thread was featured only at the conclusion of the narrative in the central scene (Fig. 2). But here, at Hippo Regius, the thick line of the thread weaves throughout the entire room, be tween the thinner lines representing the labyrinth walls.(lf> The single, wide line of the thread and the multiple, thin lines of the walls appear serrated because the tesserae are set diagonally across the floor. This jagged line breaks up the monotony of the pattern and gives tautness to the separate elements.



11 Minotaur, 150-200 CE, detail of the center of the labyrinth mosaic, frigidarium, baths at Hippo Regius, Algeria (artwork in the public domain; photograph from Marec, Hippone, fig. 54)

The path of the thread culminates in the center with the large black ball of thread punching into the middle zone (Fig. 11). Here, a torso-length portrait of the Minotaur, ren dered in gray, black, and white, already occupies this square area. Long eyelashes, pointed ears, a thickly muscled chest, and curving horns are all shown in some detail, and his head is turned slightly, almost coyly, away from the intruding ball of thread. The Minotaur's image recalls nothing so much as the bust-length mosaic portraits of heavyset athletes from the frigidarium of the Baths at Thapsus, the Antonine Baths in Carthage, and the exedrae of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.67

At the small baths of Hippo Regius, this labyrinth mosaic has already been successfully traversed: the thread, borne through many winding corridors, has arrived at the center. Theseus, however, is nowhere to be seen, and the role of the

hero is left to the beholder, who has also crossed the laby rinth. This gives us a clear instance of what Wolfgang Iser would have called a "constitutive blank."68 What is missing from the scene (the hero/protagonist) prompts the viewer to accord special attention to his own status. The viewer has already assumed all the intermediary movement and expen diture of time and easily accomplished the laborious journey to the center of the labyrinth. When both Theseus and the Minotaur are represented, as at Belalis Maior and Thuburbo Maius, the mosaic displays not an equal contest but a victory. No labyrinth mosaics ever show Theseus alone at the center, but at Hippo Regius, the Minotaur appears like an opponent, ready for the match and all comers.69

As Alois Riegl has written, "every work of art does presup pose the existence of a perceiving subject,"70 and here the beholder has stepped into the role of the hero since his own

12 Drawing of a now-lost labyrinth mosaic with a helmet at its center, before 79 CE, from Pompeii, Italy (artwork in the public domain; photograph from Gli ornati delle pareti e i pavimenti delle stanze dell'antica Pompeii incisi in rame [Naples: Stamperia Regale, 1808], pi. 93)

movement, both visual and physical, implicates him in the myth underfoot. The idea of mobility is already present in the work, as the arrival of the thread at the center demonstrates

that a journey through the labyrinth has been accomplished. The Minotaur, at the center, must be mastered just as the labyrinth has been mastered. The Hippo Regius labyrinth transforms the motif from a visual game to something more like a physical event. Because the observer is situated within the setting of the labyrinth, he gains the status of a character in the drama underfoot, traveling within and along the course that must be experienced and apprehended.

The path for the feet alters what had been merely a game for the eyes. As the viewer moves from edge to center and the myriad paths underfoot are stepped on and over, great dis tances for the eye and the imagination are traversed in a few steps. It is the beholder who arrives at the center of the labyrinth, to be confronted by the representation of an ad versary of mythic proportions. The heroic protagonist is not imaged, but the hero can still be understood as present, now in the body of the beholder.

A now-lost labyrinth mosaic from Pompeii offers an inter esting early parallel to this process of interactive viewing (Fig. 12). Rather than a portrait of the Minotaur, that labyrinth had a helmet at its center, a point of confusion for every commentator.71 The situation becomes clearer when we

think of Lucian's description of the method of drawing lots for the wrestling matchups at Olympia, which E. Norman Gardiner explained in 1905: "Lots marked in pairs with the letters of the alphabet in succession and corresponding to the number of competitors were thrown into a silver helmet sacred to that purpose from which each competitor in turn



13 Plan of the Great East Baths, Mactar, Tunisia, baths dedicated 199 CE, showing location of labyrinth mosaic in northern hemicycle next to palaestra (plan © Yegiil, Baths and Bathing, fig. 212, adapted by James M. Morris)

drew a letter."72 In the same way, the Pompeian mosaic intimates an opponent waiting at the center of the mosaic: the as-yet-unknown adversary's name will be drawn from the helmet.''5 Again, the path across the mosaic stage embeds the beholder within the larger narrative and, again, in confron tation with an adversary.

The Great East Baths, Mactar: Path to the Palaestra

Just as mosaics are not freestanding works of art independent of the surrounding architecture, so their perception must also include the architecture the mosaics simultaneously de fine as a physical surface and reinvent with their visual imag ery. Across the terrain of these labyrinth floors, it is the perceiving subject who finds, in the flat floor underfoot, a stage for a narrative that elevates his own movement and an invitation to synchronize his actions with the work of art. Visual perception is just one layer of this process of bodily perception and projection: depicted space complements and expands actual space via the introduction of history, imagi nation, and mythology. Motion is, once again, the key to the labyrinth mosaic of the Great East Baths at Mactar, and here again we encounter the unity of the work of art with the architecture and an invitation to interactive viewing.'4

Monumental, symmetrically planned, and dated to 199 by a dedicatory inscription, the establishment at Mactar is classed as an "imperial type" of thermae (Fig. 13).75 Per haps the best-preserved Roman bathing edifice in North Africa, it retains many walls that rise to a height of several meters and often give an indication of the cross-vaulting that once soared overhead. Two internal palaestrae are surrounded on three sides by huge, U-shaped cross-vaulted ambulatories. The palaestrae are set on either side of the swimming pool, which opened to the countryside through five large windows.76

Adjacent to each palaestra is a semicircular exedra. The

floor of the northern hemicycle is entirely filled with a laby rinth mosaic in black, gray, and white (Fig. 14). The space of the exedra is a kind of pivot for circulation in various direc tions, which recalls the multiple curves of the labyrinth itself as well as Plutarch's description of its "intricacies."77 The exedra can be entered from five doors within its curved walls,

and it gives onto the palaestra itself between six arcaded piers.

Only the thread of Ariadne delineates the wide paths of this mosaic labyrinth, which entirely fills the exedra. The thread begins to unwind from the central doorway at the back of the arc. The labyrinth culminates in a half circle abutting the marble lintel of the central door on the opposite side, which opens into the palaestra. Here the rigid line of thread breaks into loose curves, as if to show the last few feet unwound before the hero dropped the ball of thread on the floor to commence his battle with the

Minotaur (Fig. 15). At Mactar, the Minotaur is not shown, and neither is The

seus. We are left at the threshold with nothing but an image of a ball of thread on the ground and the insinuation of a larger, missing totality. Rather than rendering recessional space, this floor mosaic borrows from the space of the room to generate its illusions of three-dimensionality, projecting a winding image that claims to obey the same laws of gravity that govern the viewer. Such an "addition" to real space creates an ambient for arriving bathers and wrestlers to oc cupy and a space where the stage is set for narrative, but the main characters are unseen, or at least unseen in the art. The

viewer's entrance into the performance space outlined by the mosaic is, on one level, manifestly possible. The high socles or believable architectural forms that often occupy the fore grounds of Roman wall paintings are missing, as are the high walls that surround other mosaic labyrinths. The floor itself is bounded by high walls and multiple doorways, and the mo



14 Labyrinth mosaic and palaestra, in the Great East Baths, Mactar, Tunisia, dedicated 199 CE (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

saic has usurped this entire space of considerable dimensions to evoke one story line of athletic heroism. At Mactar, the here and now can never be detached from this mosaic nar rative.

One more step from the center of the Mactar labyrinth—in fact, the inevitable next step forward—puts the viewer on the threshold of the palaestra. Then a step down, and the be holder would gain the sand of the wrestling ring itself. Fol lowing a passage from Lucian, Ranon Katzoff posits that the skamma (wrestling ring) should be understood as "a small marked off terrace, perhaps somewhat raised or lowered, in the court, where the sand was piled for sand wrestling."78

Rather than providing a self-enclosed mythological narra tive already populated by a full cast of characters, the Mactar mosaic is not an autonomous work of art. Following Riegl, the external unity between image and viewer can be understood as an "indispensible prerequisite and actual raison d'etre" for a

work of art.79 As both art and architecture, the Mactar laby rinth awaits the viewer's activation and animation because its

completion relies on a beholding subject to take the stage it provides. The myth is no longer merely a prototype for human experience; it is now a call to specific action. The floor mosaic literally sets the stage for the viewer to occupy.

If the permanent exchange of different levels of percep tion is central to the function of many floor mosaics, it is essential here. The labyrinth culminates at the doorstep of the next room—the palaestra—rather than within the center of the room it adorns. There is nowhere else to go from this central threshold. The location of the labyrinth mosaic can not be accidental: the invitation for the viewer to displace his own motion into the realm of myth is very clear. The laby rinth mosaic lacks even a black border on the edge to distin guish it from neighboring spaces, and this lack of visual resolution prompts the viewer to participate in the illusion

15 Threshold of the palaestra, with the culmination of the labyrinth mosaic, Great East Baths, Mactar, Tunisia (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

fostered by the ongoing spectacle in adjacent spaces. This monumental mosaic is not a static given; we have no image of an event, and thus it is not possible to arrest the time of a recorded narrative. Rather, it is a precarious, moving image,



16 Bas-relief of wrestlers, both human and divine, Great East Baths, Mactar, Tunisia (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

whose complete lack of borders encourages the blurring between the mythical realm of the floor and the activities taking place in reality.80

Gilbert-Charles Picard believes that matches held in the

great palaestra of Mactar were organized by notables and fought by professionals.8' Sand in the pit would have pro vided a smooth, soft surface on which athletes could be

thrown in wrestling matches and not be injured when they hit the ground. This wrestling pit, surrounded by a U-shaped colonnade, is positioned as if at the center of the semicircular labyrinth of the exedra (Fig. 13). The labyrinth mosaic is itself a symbol of a challenge, and its presence in the baths would have lifted wrestling matches held there into the realm of mythological reenactment or, at least, provided appropri ate and resonant mythological echoes.

A sculpted bas-relief nearly 6 feet 7 inches (2 meters) long also contributed to the sporting atmosphere of the Mactar baths (Fig. 16). It is not clear exactly from which part of the baths this relief came, but Picard suspects it would have been completed by another length of stone, and that the whole may well have decorated the upper zone of a niche holding a statue of a victorious athlete or donor.82 It displays six figures: a chubby figure at right holding a wreath has been identified as Eros;83 Hercules stands nearby with his ankles casually crossed and his club at his feet. Also visible is the skin of the

Nemean lion, a beast strangled by means of a wrestling hold. Hercules' heavy labors, including his defeat of Antaeus in wrestling, made him as natural a subject for the decor of Roman baths as Theseus. Next to the hero are two pairs of naked wrestlers. The first pair, one man shown flying through the air on the way to a tough fall, illustrates a dramatic throw. The arms and legs of the second pair are locked in combat: each man tries to trip the other and get him in a headlock at the same time. This relief easily conjoins human and divine

athletics onto the same plane; the labyrinth mosaic should be classed as another of these links.

The labyrinth, location of an epic wrestling match involv ing the hero credited with laying down the rules of the sport, was just as fitting an adornment for a bath as a relief of Hercules, god of the palaestra. At the Mactar baths, architec ture and decorative scheme collude to implicate the be holder in their surrounding narrative. It is not a static image of victory but, rather, a prompt toward participation that uses the mythic landscape underfoot and the beholder's move ment to activate an open doorway and the space beyond.

Wrestling with Myth The labyrinth is an especially appropriate subject for a floor mosaic since it represents a journey that must itself be navi gated in order to be seen and experienced. This can be a traversal shared between two realms: the viewer moves both

across a room and into a myth. In the baths of Roman Africa, as bathers walked across mosaic images and patterns, the pavements' epic images and complex designs became the stage for the viewer's own actions. The pattern of the laby rinth implies movement, and it is essentially the construction of a spatial and temporal program. It scales up the architec tural space it adorns by turning the lloor surface into a vast plane of heroic enterprise, and the labyrinth mosaics play with the notion that the beholder might be transformed into a second hero merely by making the journey to the laby rinth's center. Labyrinth mosaics invite the beholder's move ment to their centers, where the Minotaur awaits, whether in

the form of an image or in the form of a human opponent in an impending wrestling match.

The depictions of Theseus and the Minotaur borrow much from the lived experience of the baths, and specifically their sporting ambiance. The poses and body types of the hero,



famous for his wrestling prowess, link him with living wres tlers and pancratiasts, whether bulky or ideal, and with por traits of athletes found in many Roman baths. The tangles of wrestling, the required twists and turns of the body, were compared by Catullus to the structure of the labyrinth itself, with the winding thread of Ariadne guiding Theseus from the "inextricable entanglement of the building."84 So, too, when the early Christian moralist Tertullian speaks of wrestling, he evokes the "binding twist" of the body and the "suppleness that eludes."85 The "many miles of walks or rides" that Pliny the Elder describes as compressed into tessellated floors of the labyrinth86 may also prompt a nexus between myth and current life, harking back to the leisurely strolls taken by bathers along the porticoes and through the long halls of the larger bath complexes, which often featured statues of Her cules, athletes, and even bulls.87

There can be little doubt that context makes meaning for the labyrinth mosaics, and vice versa: the labyrinths of the North African baths offered many prompts to blur athletic and heroic activity, sometimes, as at Mactar, even relying on the architecture of the space to provide doorways at once both actual and mythological. Labyrinth mosaics are repre sentations of a spatial experience on whose surfaces the otherwise unremarkable action of walking cannot be taken for granted. In the realm of the Roman bath in North Africa, their traversal easily takes on metaphoric meaning, as mosaics energize lived spaces and the beholder's actual path and the horizon of myth are fused.

Rebecca Molholt received her PhD in art history from Columbia University in 2008. Her dissertation on Roman floor mosaics was completed during a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. She is an assistant professor at Brown University [History of Art and Architecture, Brown University, Providence, R.I. 02912, rebecca_ molholt@brown. edu].

Notes

I would like to thank the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the American Academy in Rome for funding my work on this project, and audiences at these institutions for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of these arguments. I am very grateful to both institutions for funding years of fellowship in Rome and in Washington, D.C., where these ideas gestated. Christine Kondoleon intro duced me to mosaics, and she and Bettina Bergmann have encouraged me (and traveled with me) since the beginning. At Columbia, I was lucky enough to be in Richard Brilliant's first-ever mosaics seminar, and Francesco de Angelis was always generous with his time and ideas. Roger Hanoune and Fikret Yegiil advised me on earlier versions of this article, first presented at the Association Internationale pour l'Etude de la Mosaique Antique in Portugal. Additional thanks to Prof. Dr. Yegul for permission to publish a version of his plan of the Mactar baths with the labyrinth mosaic inserted. Jean-Pierre Darmon and Katherine Dunbabin kindly provided advice for seeking out illustrations, and Lindsay Elgin generously assisted with the images. Heartfelt thanks to many friends and colleagues who have offered critique and conver sation, including Susan Alcock, Sean Anderson, Michelle Berenfeld, John Bodel, Sheila Bonde,John Cherry, James Frakes, Barbara Kellum, Dian Kriz, Aicha Malek, Elizabeth Marlowe, Douglas Nickel, James Trilling, and Herve Vanel. Many thanks to The Art Bulletin editor Karen Lang and the two anonymous reviewers at The Art Bulletin for their many helpful and perceptive comments on the manuscript and to Fronia W. Simpson for her copyediting. This study has benefited most significantly from years of conversations with Natalie Kampen, gift to us all.

1. Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, October 22, 1917, quoted in Michael Jennings, Bridget Doherty, and Thomas Levin, eds., The Work

of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 197.

2. Scholarly uneasiness with floor mosaics is surprising and long-lived: in 1991 Roger Ling described floor mosaics as "disturbing" and "uncom fortable" for modern viewers; Ling, Roman Painting (New York: Cam bridge University Press, 1991), 19-20. Seeking to furnish evidence for lost monumental paintings, scholars have long privileged figural mosa ics; the most famous Roman floor mosaics are the so-called Bildmosai ken, "paintings in stone." See, for example, Bernard Andreae, Antike Bildmosaiken (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2003); and Ada-Cohen, The Alexander Mosaic: Stories of Victory and Defeat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Scholars who consider the narrative possibili ties inherent in horizontal display and who consider nonfigurative mo saics have not assumed mosaics were created in imitation of paintings. See esp. John Clarke, Roman Black-and-White Figural Mosaics (New York: New York University Press, for the College Art Association of America, 1979); Christine Kondoleon, Domestic and Divine: Roman Mosaics in the House of Dionysos (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); Ellen Swift, Style and Function in Roman Decoration: Living with Objects and Inte riors (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009); and Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Har vard University Press, 1990). Bettina Bergmann considers the "inhabit ant's supposed locadon in the room" when viewing circus mosaics such as the one from Piazza Armerina, Sicily, and another from a villa at Silin, Libya; Bergmann, "Pictorial Narratives of the Roman Circus," in Le cirque et son image, ed. J.-M. Roddaz and J. Nelis-Clement (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2009), esp. 371-76. In her monumental survey of Greek and Roman mosaics, Katherine M. D. Dunbabin notes that mosaics, given their durability, "offer an invaluable contribution to our knowl edge ... of major painting." She is, however, quick to point out that mosaics are a significant art form in their own right, and it is hoped her book will render such statements unnecessary for future publica tions; Dunbabin, Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.

3. Stephen Cosh and David Neal, "Roman Mosaics," Current Archaeology 157 (May 1998): 18. These authors recommend that mosaics are best imaged by means of paintings, and indeed, painstaking watercolors of floor mosaics accompany their text.

4. Here I am drawing on the work of Eugene Y. Wang, especially his fasci nating chapter "Watching the Steps: Peripatetic Viewing in Medieval China," in Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 116-38.

5. The contextual deployment of myth and the resulting interactions be tween life and myth have been especially well explored by Paul Zanker and Bjorn Ewald, Mit Mythen Leben: Die Bilderwelt der romischen Sarkophage (Munich: Hirmer, 2004). The authors trace the selection of particular moments chosen from grand narrative schemes and the ar tistic display of these moments in specific contexts to prompt meaning ful and powerful links with situations in daily life, up to and including the direct assimilation of beholders with mythological protagonists.

6. Michele Blanchard-Lemee et al., Mosaics of Roman Africa: Floor Mosaics from Tunisia (New York: George Braziller, 1996), 190. See also nn. 40, 41 below.

7. In 1977 Wiktor A. Daszewski collected and published sixty-two Roman mosaics depicting themes of the labyrinth, from across the Roman world; Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee: Etudes sur les mosai'ques avec representations du labyrinthe, de Thesee et du Minotaure (Warsaw: PWN, Edi tions Scientifiques de Pologne, 1977). To these we can add the laby rinths from the Baths of Julia Memmia at Bulla Regia (Tunisia) and a small threshold labyrinth from a Roman house in second-third century CE Conimbriga (Portugal), not featured in Daszewski's catalog, for a total of sixty-four labyrinth mosaics. The Baths of Julia Memmia have been most recently published by Roger Hanoune, "Decor du monu ment: Les pavements mosalques," in Recherches archiologiques franco tunisiennes a Bulla Regia, vol. 2, pt. 1, Les thermes memmiens: Etude architec tural et histoire urbaine, by Henri Broise and Yvon Thebert (Rome: Ecole Frangaise de Rome, 1993), 245-71. The Conimbriga threshold labyrinth is cat. no. 129 in Hermann Kern, Through the Labyrinth: De signs and Meanings over 5,000 Years (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 91, with earlier bibliography. It should be noted that Daszewski's catalog in cludes eight mosaics, probably all from houses, that show the combat between Theseus and the Minotaur without any enframing labyrinth surround. These eight vignettes almost all show the interactions be tween hero and monster taking place outside the labyrinth, with the heavy walls and doors of the structure serving as a backdrop to the scene. I have omitted these from my calculations because they lack an associated labyrinth surround, hence my total of fifty-six.

8. Daszewski divided his study by typology; I divide the corpus by context and location. As Daszewski notes {La mosaique de Thesee, 99), the pave ments are almost exclusively from the western provinces of the empire, and, despite the abundance of mosaics surviving from Roman prov



inces in Syria, Egypt, Anatolia, Israel, and Palestine, there seem to be no labyrinth mosaics from any site farther east than Cyprus. Twenty eight labyrinth mosaics come from houses and villas. About half the labyrinth mosaics of North Africa (seven of sixteen) come from baths. This is a striking preponderance of a theme already notably popular in North Africa. None of the seven labyrinth mosaics in Roman Iberia comes from baths, and only two of the seventeen surviving Italian laby rinth mosaics come from baths.

9. Herodotus, 2.48; Pliny, Natural History 36.86.90; Plutarch, Theseus esp. 15, 19, 21; Pausanias, 1.27.10; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.1.4 and Epitome, 1.7-10; and Strabo 8.6.2, among others.

10. Broise and Thebert, Recherches, 41: "This subject was often represented and seems to have been especially prized in the salles de repos of the baths, where it constituted perhaps a sort of visual game" (my transla tion).

11. Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, 95-96; and Katherine Dunbabin, "Ba iarum Grata Voluptas: Pleasures and Dangers of the Baths," Papers of the British School at Rome 57 (1989): 40. See also n. 25 below, on the apo tropaic resonance of mosaics.

12. Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, 95.

13. Ibid., 99.

14. Federica Cordano, "II labirinto come simbolo grafico della citta," Melanges de I'Ecole Frangaise de Rome: Antiquity 92, no. 1 (1980): 7-15; Gianna Dareggi, "I mosaici con raffigurazione del labirinto: Una varia zione sul tema del 'centro,' " Melanges de I'Ecole Frangaise de Rome: Anti quity 104, no. 1 (1992): 281-92.

15. Most recently in Yvon Thebert, Thermes romaines dAfrique du nord et leur contexte mediterraneen: Etudes d 'histoire et d 'archeologie, Bibliotheque des Ecoles Fran^aises d'Athenes et de Rome, fasc. 315 (Rome: Ecole Fran gaise de Rome, 2003), 479 n. 110. Also Dunbabin, Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World, 11. See also Simone Wiedler, "Labyrinthdarstel lungen," in Aspekte der Mosaikausstattung in Badern und Thermen des Maghreb (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac, 1999), 55-57.

16. I discuss only the four best-preserved examples of North African bath labyrinths here: Hippo Regius in Algeria, and Belalis Maior, Thuburbo Maius, and Mactar, all in Tunisia. The other three bath labyrinth mosa ics come from Dellys and Rusguniae (Algeria), and the Baths of Julia Memmia (Tunisia). To make a grand total of sixteen, the other nine North African labyrinths come from various settings: six from houses or villas in Libya, Algeria, and Tunisia (and none of these six defini tively from bath suites), two from churches at sites in modern-day Alge ria, and one from a tomb (Hadrumentum, Tunisia). Numbers are based on Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee; and Hanoune, "Decor du monument." Hedi Slim, "La mosaique du labyrinthe de Thysdrus," An tiquites Africaines 15 (1980): 207-8, suggests that only six of the sixteen North African labyrinths are from baths, but he considers the Thuburbo labyrinth (Figs. 4 and 5) to be from a villa. This may be a domestic mosaic, but it is certainly from a bath suite.

17. See David Lindberg, Theories of Vision from AVKindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 1-17; David Summers, Vision, Reflec tion, and Desire in Western Painting (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); A. Mark Smith, Ptolemy's Theory of Visual Perception (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996); Albert Lejeune, Euclide et Ptolemee: Deux stades de I'optique geometrique grecque (Louvain: Bibliotheque de l'Universite, 1948); and idem, L'optique de Claude Ptolemee, dans la version latin d'apres I'arabe de Vemir Eug&ne de Sidle (New York: E.J. Brill, 1989). Henri Lavagne briefly touched on the problem of mosaics and the optic versus the hap tic in La mosaique: Que sais-je? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 11-12. Optical and hap tic experiential reactions have been analyzed by architectural histori ans; see esp. Diane Favro's re-created urban walks in The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

18. Wall paintings at the Basilica of Herculaneum and the Houses of Mar cus Gavius Rufus and Marcus Lucretius Fronto at Pompeii show only the labyrinth's deep entrance. In each case, the hero is present at the doorway, his journey already accomplished, and his defeat of the Mino taur evidenced by the hero's relaxed stance and/or the vanquished body of the beast.

19. Clarke, in Roman Black-and-White Figural Mosaics, opened a discussion of the viewer's relationship to the mosaic floor underfoot. He presented the concept of "kinaesthetic address," which he defined as "the use of the figure to influence spectator movement" (21). Figures underfoot, he suggests, might prompt the walking viewer to go to the left, turn to the right, or continue through a nearby door, according to what he calls a "traffic-flow suggestion" (33). These concepts have been further elaborated by Ellen Swift, who studied geometric pavements, especially thresholds, and their use as apotropaic symbols and identifying mark ers for different rooms. See "Interiors: Non-figurative Floor Mosaics and Other Domestic Decoration," in Style and Function, 27-104.

20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cezanne's Doubt," in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthet

ics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 8.

21. Anthologia Latina 1.208.

22. While discussing the Hunting Baths of Leptis Magna, Fikret Yegiil sug gests that the dramatic scenes of danger at the hunt "might have re called, in a general and distant way, the literary and heroic idea of bathing as a pleasurable reward for those who have endured physical hardship"; Yegiil, Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 184.

23. Indeed, Neptune is at the beginning and the end of the story. Apol lodorus tells how Minos prayed to Poseidon for a bull to be sent up from the depths of the sea, but when the god answered his prayers, the king failed to sacrifice the bull to Poseidon, as he had promised (The Library 3.1.4). The eventual sacrifice of the Minotaur, fruit of an unnat ural union, might have been pleasing to Poseidon, and perhaps the story of the labyrinth and the death of the Minotaur might also have been appropriate for bath decoration because of this link with water and the god of the sea.

24. Dunbabin, "Baiarum Grata Voluptas," 40.

25. Images and patterns in other types of settings, such as thresholds, can also be understood to have apotropaic resonance. See Swift, "Interiors." The idea of the labyrinth as a puzzle for the eyes, trapping the gaze, lent it considerable apotropaic power in the Roman world. Small laby rinths and knots, impossible to untangle, occasionally appear at thresh olds, where, it was hoped, they could bind envy and ill will and prevent these forces from entering the house. On knots, see Eunice Maguire, Henry Maguire, and Maggie Duncan-Flowers, Art and Holy Powers in the Early Christian House (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3-4. On the "binding" language of spells, see Christopher Faraone, "The Agonistic Context of Early Greek Binding Spells," in Magika Hiera, ed. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3-32; and Katherine Dunbabin and Matthew W. Dickie, "Invidia rump antur pectora: The Iconography of Phthonos/Invidia in Graeco-Roman Art," Jahrbuch fur Antike und Christentum 26 (1983): 7-37. See also Pliny, Natural History 36.19.85, where he is careful to note that "We must not, comparing this last to what we see delineated on our mosaic pave ments, or to the mazes formed in the fields for the amusement of chil

dren, suppose it to be a narrow promenade along which we may walk for many miles together; but we must picture to ourselves a building filled with numerous doors, and galleries which continually mislead the visitor, bringing him back, after all his wanderings, to the spot from which he first set out." Pliny, Natural History, trans. D. E. Eichholz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 340. It should be noted that the labyrinth mosaics are unicursal, offering only a single route forward, and thus, even if the single path might be difficult to follow with the eyes, their lack of "puzzle" would be easily apparent. Nonetheless, in each case, the visual scintillation of the pattern can impede optical clarity. See also n. 31 below, on mosaics of Medusa.

26. One parallel for this study can be found in the work of Timothy O'Sullivan, who examines the Odyssey Landscapes (in the Vatican Mu seums) with attention to the painted portico that surrounds the fres coes, allowing the beholder to "walk with Odysseus," both physically and mentally, along the course of the hero's journeys; O'Sullivan, "Walking with Odysseus: The Portico Frame of the Odyssey Land scapes," American Journal of Philology 128 (2007): 497-532.

27. The Baths of Theseus and the Minotaur at Belalis Maior (Tunisia) were excavated in 1960-65 and are named after this mosaic. The baths have

been published in Thebert, Thermes romaines, 132-33, with a schematic plan at pi. 33, 4. See also Ammar Mahjoubi, "Le theme du Labyrinthe et du Minotaure figure sur une mosa'ique de Belalis Major (Henchir el-Faouar)," Africa (1969-70, published 1972): 335-40; and idem, Recher ches d'histoire et d'archeologie a Henchir-El-Faouar (Tunisie) (Tunis: Publications de l'Universite de Tunis, 1978), 209-27. According to Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, 123, the mosaic is currendy in a local storage house near the site. The labyrinth mosaic also features in Kern, Through the Laby rinth, 93, cat. no. 140. Marta Novello refers to the mosaic as adorning the "House of Theseus and the Minotaur," at Belalis Maior, where only the baths survive. See Novello, Scelte tematiche e committenza nelle abitazioni

dellAfrica proconsolare: I mosaic figurati (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2007), 225.

28. See Mahjoubi, "Le theme du Labyrinthe," 340; and Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, 52, pi. 18.

29. A floor mosaic of Theseus and the Minotaur from a Roman house in

Gurgi, Libya (ca. 200) does not feature a labyrinth plan but shows a scene of the hero dragging the monster out the door of the labyrinth, under the watchful gaze of Ariadne. An adjacent vignette shows a still life of rabbit, chicken, and fruit. See Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, 119-20, no. 45, pi. 36; and Kern, Through the Labyrinth, 101.

30. For one example, see the late third-century mosaic from the baths at Thina, Tunisia, where at least twenty marine narratives are collaged onto a single watery surface. See Nabiha Jeddi, "Etude descriptive et


ROMAN LABYRINTH MOSAICS AND THE EXPERIENCE OF MOTION 3Q]

analytique des mosaiques de Thaenae (Thina en Tunisie)" (PhD diss., Universite de Paris-IV Sorbonne, 1990); J. Thirion, "Un ensemble ther mal avec mosaiques a Thina (Tunisie)," Melanges de I'Ecole Frangaise de Rome: Antiquite 69 (1957): 207-46; and Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, Mo saics of Roman North Africa: Studies in Iconography and Patronage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 273.

31. As with the many mosaics of Medusa, also a frequent feature in Roman baths, the nearly abstract pattern of most of the floor is also doing nar rative work: manifesting the terrible power of her vision in a kaleido scopic swirl of pattern around her head. See, for example, a second century mosaic of Medusa from a tepidarium in Dar Zmela, now in the Sousse Museum, Tunisia. See also Louis Foucher, Inventaire des mosaiques: Sousse (Tunis: Institut Nationale d'Archeologie et Arts, 1960), 121-22, no. 57.274, pi. 67; Dunbabin, Mosaics of Roman North Africa, 163 n. 149 and 271 n. 30b; and Carolyn McKeon, "The Iconography of the Gorgon Medusa in Roman Mosaic" (PhD diss., University of Michi gan, 1983), 291-93, no. 64. Suzanne Germain, Les mosaiques de Timgad (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1969), 90, notes that the design of such mosaics evokes Medusa's aegis.

32. Natural History 36.19.85, trans. Eichholz, 67. Pliny is writing about a lab yrinth in Egypt, which he declares to be still extant, and which he as serts must have served as the model for Daedalus's labyrinth in Crete. Pliny goes on to mention the many miles that are compressed by laby rinth mosaic floors and by the maze games played by boys running around in the Campus Martius.

33. See John Kraft, "The Cretan Labyrinth and the Walls of Troy: An Anal ysis of Roman Labyrinth Designs," Opuscula Romana 15, no. 6 (1985): 79-86; Anthony Phillips, "The Topology of Roman Mosaic Mazes," Leonardo 25, nos. 3-4 (1992): 321-29; and Penelope Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).

34. The sensitive study of Roger Hanoune on the Baths of Julia Memmia is an exception; Hanoune, "Decor du monument."

35. Pausanias 1.39.3, as cited in E. Norman Gardiner, "Wrestling," Journal of Hellenic Studies 25 (1905): 19. See also idem, "Wresding (Contin ued) ," Journal of Hellenic Studies 25 (1905): 263-93. Further discussion of this tradition can be found in Michael Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (New Haven: Yale Uni versity Press, 1987), 46, 136. One could also compare these works with Roland Barthes's essay on wrestling, "The World of Wrestling," in My thologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 15-25.

36. Daszewski, La mosaique de Theste, 94. In her magnificent article on bath decor from 1989, Dunbabin ("Baiarum Grata Voluptas," 24) explored the "world of beauty and luxury which lay at the heart of the bath aes thetic," but she too knowingly left aside the sporting aspect of the baths.

37. Yegul (Baths and Bathing, 185, with sources) points out that these spaces were suitable not only for games and gymnastic performances but also for banquets. An honorific inscription from Africa praises a man who "gave a banquet to the entire population and a gymnastic contest; at the same spectacle he also showed boxers . ..trans. Anne Mahoney, Roman Sports and Spectacles: A Sourcebook (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Publishing, 2001), 64. As noted by Mahoney, the date and the name of the honoree are unknown.

38. See also Thebert, Thermes romaines, 67-68. For athletic scenes from baths in Italy, and suggestions of their appropriateness to the location, see Zahra Newby, "Greek Athletics as Roman Spectacle: The Mosaics from Ostia and Rome," Papers of the British School at Rome 70 (2002): 177-203, where she suggests that mosaic figures shown beneath living bathers "could serve as a model to which to aspire" (200).

39. According to Garth Fagan, Roman (men) embarked on the bathing process only "after a good sweat had been worked up"; Fagan, Bathing in Public in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 10. He is referring only to Roman men in this discussion. How Roman women, families, or children made use of baths, both public and private, has not yet been a topic of scholarly study.

40. See Newby, "Greek Athletics as Roman Spectacle," 180, with citations. Also Inge Nielsen, Thermae et Balnea: The Architecture and Cultural History of Roman Public Baths (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1990), 144.

41. Mustapha Khanoussi, "Pugilist Spectacles and Athletic Games in Pro consular Africa," in Stories in Stone: Conserving Mosaics of Roman Africa, ed. Aicha Ben Abed (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum Publications, 2006), 79-91, including discussion of mosaics of wrestlers and various athletic games from the early fourth-century baths at Gafsa (now in the Gafsa Archaeological Museum, Tunisia) and from the third-century Baths at Gigthis, now in the Bardo Museum, Tunis. See also Mustapha Khanoussi, "Les spectacles de jeux athletiques et de pugilat dans l'Afrique romaine," Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts: Romische Abteilung 98 (1991): 315-22; and idem, "Spectaculum pugilium et gymnasium: Compte rendu d'un spectacle de jeux athletiques et de

pugilat, figure sur une mosaique de la region de Gafsa (Tunisia)," Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Comptes Rendus, 1988: 543-60. For a recent compendium, see Simone Wiedler, "Gymnische Agone oder Certamina Graeca," in Wiedler, Aspekte der Mosaikausstattung, 57-72.

42. Joyce M. Reynolds and John B. Ward Perkins, eds., Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (London: British School at Rome, 1952), no. 103a, cited in Fagan, Bathing in Public, app., 243, no. 35.

43. The Baths of the Labyrinth at Thuburbo Maius have been published most recently in Thebert, Thermes romaines, 172-73. Mosaics are pub lished in Margaret Alexander, Alcha Ben Abed-Ben Khader, S. Besrour Ben Mansour, David Soren, Corpus des mosaiques de Tunisie, vol. 2, fasc. 1, Thuburbo Maius: Les mosaiques de la region du Forum (Tunis: Institut National d'Archeologie et d'Arts, 1980), 20-31, as end 3rd-beginning 4th century. Thebert (ibid.) concurs, and Dunbabin, Mosaics of Roman North Africa, 274, says "?4th century." For the architecture, see Louis Drappier, "Les thermes de Thuburbo Maius," Bulletin Archeologique du Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1920: 55-75. Boxers face off as well in a threshold mosaic at the House of the Boxers in Utica, discussed below. See Margaret Alexander, S. Besrour, Mongi Ennaifer et al., Corpus des Mosaiques de Tunisie, vol. 1, fasc. 3, Utique, mosaiques sans localisation precise et El Alia (Tunis: Institut National d'Archeologie et d'Arts, 1976), 276, cat. no. 246, pi. 2. Boxers feature in mosaics of the Thermae of the Pugilists at Thina, as well as in the second-century mosaics of the Baths of Massongex in the Valais, Switzerland. See Jean Paul Thuillier, Le sport dans la Rome antique (Paris: Editions Errance, 1996), 141. The athlete portraits in the mosaics of the Baths of Cara calla at Rome are another obvious parallel (see n. 67 below), as are the mosaic portraits of athletes from the Baths of Porta Marina, Ostia. Re garding a black-and-white mosaic from Ostia, boxing, wrestling, and associated literary sources, see Christopher Jones, "The Pancratiasts He lix and Alexander on an Ostian Mosaic," Journal of Roman Archaeology 11 (1998): 293-98. For general surveys, see Zahra Newby, "The Athletic Ideal in the Second Sophistic," a chapter in her dissertation, "Educated Fantasies: Interpreting the Visual Arts in the Second Sophistic" (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 2000); and idem, "Greek Athletics as Roman Spectacle," 177-203; Poliakoff, Combat Sports; and Jean-Paul Thuillier, "Athletic Exercises in Ancient Rome," European Review 12 (2004): 415-26. See also n. 35 above, on wrestling.

44. Thebert, Thermes romaines, 455, citing several third-century inscriptions, and see also his n. 55.

45. Ibid., 172. The smaller North African baths generally did not have pa laestrae. See Yegul, Baths and Bathing, 186-87. This is the labyrinth mosaic Slim classed as from a villa, rather than a bath; see n. 16 above.

46. The narrow threshold between the frigidarium and tepidarium was marked by a mosaic of sandals. See plan in Thebert, Thermes romaines, pi. LVII, 3; and Alexander et al., Thuburbo Maius, 27 and pi. IX. Such a mosaic of footwear at a threshold certainly addresses a walking viewer, indicating that the temperature underfoot was about to change dramat ically. At this point, precautionary measures would be taken to protect unshod feet from heated floors, or, conversely, bath sandals no longer needed could be taken off.

47. Natural History 36.19.84-86, trans. Eichholz, 69.

48. Such a perspectival illusion has been noted by Jean Lassus, discussing a mosaic from the markets at Hippo Regius; Lassus, "La mosaique ro maine: Organisation des surfaces," in La mosaique Gr'eco-Romaine II, ed. Henri Stern and Marcel Le Glay (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1975), 337 and pi. CLIX, 1.

49. Apollodorus, The Library 3.1.4, trans. J. Frazer (Cambridge, Mass.: Har vard University Press, 1939).

50. Poliakoff, Combat Sports, 8. See also Gardiner, "Wrestling," 24. For more on the pankration, see n. 58 below.

51. Dio Chrysostom, 8.26; and Galen, Exhortation for Medicine 9-14; dis cussed in Stephen G. Miller, Arete: Ancient Writers, Papyri and Greek In scriptions on the History and Ideals of Greek Athletics and Games (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). According to Galen, Roman wres tlers seeking to add strategic heft were said to gorge themselves on flesh and blood (Exhortation for Medicine 9-14). This is also, however, a reasonably apt description of the Minotaur's diet. He is shown in some labyrinth mosaics (as at Thuburbo Maius) surrounded by the detritus of past victims, his own meals of flesh and blood.

52. Wulf Raeck has studied the late-antique trend of actualizing mythologi cal scenes by using contemporary clothing and hairstyles for mythologi cal characters in his book, Modernisierte Mythen: Zum Umgang der Spatan tike mit klassischen Bildthemen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992). At Thuburbo Maius, Theseus's bulla (amulet), his short hairstyle, the chunky body types of both figures, and the recognizable wrestling holds offer an up dated version of the labyrinth story. The body type of Theseus at Bela lis Maior (seen in Fig. 2) is decidedly more heroic. The nonheroic body type is unusual for mosaics of Theseus—I know of only one addi tional example, from the Villa Domizia on the island of Giannutri, It



aly. This pavement, entirely black-and-white and dated to 150-200 CE, shows the two protagonists kneeling in a narrow rectangular space at the labyrinth's center. Theseus is nude and quite thick around the middle. Nonetheless, the battle is about to be won. With one hand, Theseus has a good grip on one of the Minotaur's horns, and the hero again wields his pedum in his other hand. See Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, cat. no. 29, pi. 15.

53. See Gardiner, "Wrestling (Continued)," 265, for discussion of the Oxy rhynchus papyrus 3.466.

54. Plutarch, Theseus 19.3, trans. B. Perrin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948).

55. Apollodorus, Epitome 1.9; Plutarch, Theseus 17.3, trans. Perrin. See also Roger Ling, "The Casa della Caccia Antica at Pompeii," Journal of Ro man Archaeology 18 (2005): 597-98, for a discussion of Theseus's fight ing accoutrements in Pompeian wall painting, with bibliography.

56. As referenced by Ovid, Heroides 10.101-2.

57. For in-depth discussion of the rules of wrestling, see Gardiner, "Wres tling," 14-31; Gardiner, "Wrestling (Continued)," 263-93; and Polia koff, Combat Sports.

58. Of the sixty-two mosaics featured in Daszewski's catalog, La mosaique de Thesee, twenty-six show a scene of combat between Theseus and the Mi notaur. Fully twenty-two of these combat scenes show the Minotaur brought to his knees. The kicking pose, however, is a signal that this match may be more of a pankratiort-style encounter, in which hitting and kicking were allowed. Fighting continued on the ground in the pankration, and the match ended only when one adversary acknowl edged defeat. In the myth and on the mosaics, this batde was, of course, the end of the Minotaur, and, unlike wrestling, the pankration could be a life-and-death matter. See Gardiner, "Wresding," 19-21, with sources on the pankration. See also Poliakoff, Combat Sports, 54. Galen's satire on professional athletes gave the prize to a donkey for demonstrating such prowess in kicking (Protrepticus 13). Other mosaic labyrinths intimate combat even if the two protagonists are not pre sented, showing, for example, two crossed lances and a shield at the labyrinth center (a bath complex at Chusclan, France; see Daszewski, cat. no. 15), or usurping the immediate architectural surround by plac ing the labyrinth's center at the threshold of the bath's palaestra (Mac tar, Tunisia, see below).

59. On wrestlers' hairstyles, see Gardiner, "Wrestling," 18, citing Philostra tus, Imagines 2.32, and Plutarch, Aratus 2.3.6, among others. A version of this hairstyle can be seen in many mosaics of athlete portraits, such as the bust-length mosaic portraits of stocky athletes wearing necklaces featured in floor mosaics at the Baths of Thapsus, from ca. 300 CE. See N. Ben Lazreg, "Byzacene cotiere: Athletes," in Ai'cha Ben Abed-Ben Khader, Image de pierre: La Tunisie en mosaique (Paris: Ars Latina, 2003), 492-93, 534 and figs. 312, 313.

60. On the Utica mosaic, see Alexander et al., Utique, 276, cat. no. 246, pi. 2. The mosaics of Piazza Armerina, including the bath attendants, are most comprehensively published in Gino Gentili, La villa romana di Pi azza Armerina Palazzo Erculio, vol. 3, I mosaici figurati: Descrizione e interpre tazione (Osimo: Fondazione Don Carlo, 1999). See also Andrea Caran dini, Andreina Ricci, and Mariette de Vos, Filosofiana: The Villa of Piazza Armerina; The Image of a Roman Aristocrat in the Time of Constantine (Pa lermo: S. F. Flaccovio, 1982).

61. Amulets appearing within mosaic images might echo the apotropaic import of the labyrinth motif itself. On the apotropaic nature of the labyrinth, see Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, 95-96; Dunbabin, "Bai arum Grata Voluptas40; and see also n. 25 above. Amulets (along with bells and symbols) probably also served as apotropaic functionaries out side tombs. See Donatello Nuzzo, "Amulet and Grave in Late Antiquity: Some Examples from Roman Cemeteries," in Burial, Society and Context in the Roman World, ed. John Pearce, Martin Millett, and Manuela Struck (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000), 249-55. Surviving examples (in bronze) of amulets that parallel those worn by athletes and heroes on North African mosaics can be seen in Stephanie Boucher, Bronzes ro mains figures du Musee des beaux-arts de Lyon (Lyons: Editions de Boc card, Paris, 1973), cat. nos. 311-17, all long pendants and largely phal lic in import. Cat. no. 322 in Boucher, a bronze caduceus 4% inches (12.5 cm) long, looks to be the kind of amulet that could easily be re alized in rope or leather cord, a more friable form of necklace or amu let that does not survive for us today but might more closely approxi mate what the mosaic athletes often appear to be wearing. In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, there is a pendant amulet of a bull's head, perhaps an interesting option for a wrestler (though this exam ple is dated to 600 BCE and thus much earlier than any mosaics dis cussed here). See Mary Comstock and Cornelius Vermeule, Greek, Etrus can and Roman Bronzes in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1971), cat. no. 275.

62. Gardiner ("Wrestling" and "Wrestling [Continued]") traces these wres

tling poses and motifs back to early black-figure vases. See also discus sions in Poliakoff, Combat Sports, passim.

63. Erwan Marec, "Le theme du labyrinthe et du Minotaure dans la mosaique romaine," in Hommages a Albert Grenier, vol. 3 (Brussels: Lato mus, Revue d'Etudes Latines, 1962), 1094-112. Also idem, Hippone la Royale: Antique Hippo Regius (Algiers: Imprimerie Officielle, 1954), 100; and Wiedler, Aspekte der Mosaikausstattung, 236, with previous bibliogra phy.

64. Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, 101.

65. Plutarch, Theseus 19.

66. Only a few mosaics show the thread traversing the path of the laby rinth. One Roman labyrinth mosaic, today in the Kunsthistorisches Mu seum, Vienna, shows a red thread winding through a black labyrinth and ending in the central square zone where Theseus has the Mino taur already on his knees (Daszewski, La mosaique de Thtste, cat. no. 7). Another, from a fourth-century church in Algeria, shows the thread curving along to begin the journey, and then petering out quite soon (ibid., cat. no. 4). At the Roman villa at Nea Paphos, Cyprus, the laby rinth is traversed by a band of guilloche that entirely encircles the cen ter scene (this pavement is the focus of ibid, and his cat. no. 8). At the Baths of Julia Memmia (Bulla Regia, Tunisia), the labyrinth's path is followed by a laurel garland; see Hanoune, "Decor du monument." A sixth-century floor in S. Vitale, Ravenna, offers a path in opus sectile to the labyrinth's blank center (Daszewski, La mosaique de Theste, cat. no. 38); this labyrinth is composed like the one at Mactar discussed below: all thread, no walls, no hero, no Minotaur (ibid., cat. no. 57). In addi tion to the Mactar labyrinth, only three other labyrinths show the ball of thread at the labyrinth's center—all from North African baths—the ones at Hippo Regius and Belalis Maior, discussed here, and another from Dellys, Algeria (ibid., cat. no. 3), where the thread is pictured in the central battle scene.

67. For the athlete mosaics from Thapsus, from ca. 300, see Ben Abed-Ben Khader, Image de pierre, 492-93, 534. Other mosaics of athletes in North Africa can be found at the Antonine Baths in Carthage and baths at the following sites: Bou Arkoub, Gigthis, Thina, Utica, Tebessa, Cher chel, Baten Zammour. See Khanoussi, "Pugilist Spectacles," "Les specta cles," and "Spectaculum pugilium." For the athlete mosaics in the pa laestra exedrae of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, see Antonio Insalaco, "I mosaici degli atleti dalle Terme di Caracalla: Una nuova indagine," Archeologia Classica 41 (1989): 283-327; and Giuseppina Ghi rardini, "Die im Jahre 1824 bei den Grabungen Egidio Girolamo Di Velos in den Caracallathermen aufgedeckten Athletendarstellungen," in Die Sammlung antiker Mosaiken in den Vatikanischen Museen by Klaus Werner (Vatican City: Monumenti Musei e Gallerie Pontificie, 1998), 217-51.

68. Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), esp. the chap. "In teraction between Text and Reader," 31-41.

69. A similar bust appears at the center of a labyrinth mosaic from a Ro man baths at Stolac (Daszewski, La mosaique de Th&ste, cat. no. 29), and the Minotaur appears alone in the center of two mosaics from houses in Conimbriga, Portugal (ibid., cat. nos. 46, 47). A vanquished and dy ing Minotaur appears solo in a mosaic from a house in Calvatone, Italy (ibid., cat. no. 25), and also in a tomb mosaic from Sousse, Tunisia (ibid., cat. no. 54). I have not been able to find a plan of the small baths of Hippo Regius, which would allow a reconstruction of the be holder's access to the labyrinth; did he or she enter the room from the same side that the ball of thread enters the Minotaur's inner sanctum?

70. Alois Riegl, "Spatromisch oder Orientalisch?" Beilage zur Munchener Allgemeinen Zeitung 93-94 (April 23, 1902), translated as "Late Roman or Oriental?" in German Essays on Art History: Winckelmann, Burckhardt, Panofsky, and Others, ed. Gert Schiff, German Library Series, vol. 79 (New York: Continuum, 1988), 181. This essay summarizes Riegl's argu ments from his book Late Roman Art Industry, which first appeared in 1901.

71. See Kern, Through the Labyrinth, cat. no. 160. Also Daszewski, La mosaique de Thtsee, 116-17. Both authors date the mosaic to ca. 50 CE, without going into detail. Its original dimensions are unknown. Discov ered in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century and subsequently entirely lost, it may have come from a house.

72. Gardiner, "Wrestling," 16, discussion of Lucian, Hermotimus 40.

73. Other labyrinth mosaics also directly hint at athletic victory: in the laby rinth from the Baths at Verdes, France, the central motif is a crown of laurel leaves. See Daszewski, La mosaique de Thesee, 108, cat. no. 18. Slim ("La mosaique du labyrinthe," 209 n. 1) suggested that in this case there is no relation between the center motif and the geometric frame of the labyrinth. But the link between the labyrinth and athletic events can once again render the conjunction meaningful; laurel wreaths were awarded as victory crowns, such as the one pictured in Fig. 8.

74. The work of Zanker and Ewald (Mit My then Leben) on the ways Roman


ROMAN LABYRINTH MOSAICS AND THE EXPERIENCE OF MOTION 3Q3

sarcophagi encouraged identification of the self (and the deceased) with mythological figures is again a productive parallel here. See also Raeck, Modernisierte Mythen; and Newby, "Greek Athletics."

75. For the classification, see Yegul, Baths and Bathing, 186-217. For the architecture, Thebert, Thermes romaines, 144-45. Also Gilbert-Charles Picard, "Les grands thermes a Mactar," Bulletin Archeologique du Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1972: 151-99; idem, "Les fouilles de la mission franco-tunisienne a Mactar en 1970-71: Les grands thermes orientaux," Bulletin Archeologique du Comity des Travaux Histo riques et Scientifiques, fasc. 8-B (1972): 149-53. Gilbert-Charles Picard et al., Recherches archeologiques franco-tunisiennes d, Mactar, vol. 1, La Maison de Vfrnus (Rome: L'Ecole Frangaise de Rome, 1977), 29 n. 61, labels all the floor mosaics here as "nonfigural," though, as we will see, this is not entirely the case. The authors also note the presence of numerous tesserae found in the excavations that reveal the vaults were once cov

ered in mosaic, though of what subject we have no idea.

76. Fikret Yegul (personal communication) feels that these two palaestrae at Mactar could well have been used for recreational athletics. The two

open courtyards at the Great East Baths of Mactar are repeatedly de scribed as palaestrae. See Thebert, Thermes romaines, 144; Broise and Thebert, Recherches; and Yegul, Baths and Bathing, 196-97.

77. Plutarch, Theseus 19.2, trans. Perrin.

78. Lucian, Anacharsis, or Athletics 2, sees. 1-2 and 28, have much discussion of mud and sand and men making themselves either muddy and slip pery or sandy and gritty to evade the holds of their opponents. On lo cations for wrestling, see Ranon Katzoff, "Where Did the Greeks of the Roman Period Practice Wrestling?" American Journal of Archaeology 90 (1986): 437-40. "Why do you roll in the sand?" asks Tertullian in his attack on the vanity of the palaestra {De pallio 4). In a walkover in a wrestling match, where an opponent did not show up or simply with drew, the victor was said to have won akonitei (without the dust). See Poliakoff, Combat Sports, 12 and 166 n. 14 with many sources on the skamma. See also Gardiner, "Wrestling," 73-74, and "Wrestling (Contin ued)," 16-18. The sandy surface of the wrestling ground also recalls the single strip of setting given beneath the feet of the combatants pic tured at the center of the Thuburbo labyrinth; this, too, was the color of sand.

79. Alois Riegl, "Excerpts from 'The Dutch Group Portrait,' " trans. Benja min Binstock, October, no. 74 (Autumn 1995): 3. This subjective "exter nal unity" or "external coherence [aussere Einheit]" was explored by Riegl in a discussion prompted by intermediary figures glancing out from paintings to meet the eyes of the beholder; Riegl, "Das Hollandi sche Gruppenportrat," Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhochsten Kaiserhauses 23 (1902): 71-278. This has been most re cently translated by Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt, The Group Portrai ture of Holland, Alois Riegl (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999). See also Margaret Olin,

"Forms of Respect: Alois Riegl's Concept of Attentiveness," Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 285-99.

80. A parallel to this fusion between decor and experience has been ex plored in the realm of Pompeian architecture and painting by Verity Piatt, who explores images of Narcissus and Diana, among others, whose stories rely on water featuring as part of the beholder's immedi ate ambient; Piatt, "Viewing, Desiring, Believing: Confronting the Di vine in a Pompeian House," Art History 25, no. 1 (February 2002): 87 112. See also Newby, "Greek Athletics," on unbordered mosaics of human athletes in Roman baths, especially those deliberately placed in areas close to the palaestra to blur "the line between bathers and the mosaic figures" (191).

81. Gilbert-Charles Picard, "Un bas-relief agonistique a Mactar," Bulletin Archeologique du Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, fasc. 18-B (1988): 99. But see n. 76 above, for Yegul's willingness to interpret Mactar's two palaestrae as being appropriately scaled to recreational, rather than professional, athletics. Semipublic athletic competitions at baths (in Italy) are discussed by Newby, "Greek Athletics."

82. Picard, "Un bas-relief agonistique," 98. See also Thebert, Thermes ro maines, 455, who says the scene on the bas-relief must have been con tinued on another block of stone.

83. For the connection between Eros and athletics, see Thomas F. Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

84. Catullus 64.112-15, trans. F. W. Cornish (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).

85. Tertullian, De spectaculis 18, trans. T. R. Glover (Cambridge, Mass.: Har vard University Press, 1931).

86. Natural History 36.19.85.

87. As, for example, the Great Baths at Lambese, Algeria. See J. Bayet, "Les statues d'Hercule des Grands Thermes de Lambese," in Ideologie et plas tique (Rome: Ecole Frangaise de Rome, 1974), 405-10. Miranda Marvin notes that Hercules is "ubiquitous in bath sculpture"; Marvin, "Free standing Sculptures from the Baths of Caracalla," American Journal of Archaeology 87 (1983): 379. For the athlete mosaics from the Baths of Caracalla at Rome, see n. 67 above. Yegul (Baths and Bathing, 175-77) discusses the College of Herculean Athletes in the Thermae of Trajan and reproduces an image from the Baths of Nero at Rome, featuring athletic scenes on a capital today in the Belvedere Court of the Vati can. Hubertus Manderscheid offers images and discussions of statues of athletes from Roman baths in Trier (cat. no. 10), two baths in Ostia (cat. nos. 82, 98), two baths in Ephesus (cat. nos. 163, 190), and Mi letus (cat. no. 225); Manderscheid, Die Skulpturenausstattung der Kaiser zeitlichen Thermenanlagen (Berlin: Gebruder Mann Verlag, 1981). For mosaics of athletes in baths of North Africa, see esp. n. 41 above.


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Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion