Mosaic with personifications of Pleasure and Wealth

The Greeks and Romans regularly used figures with human characteristics to represent abstract ideas and qualities. This tradition reached its apogee in late antiquity, with scores of mostly female personifications inventively presented on a variety of domestic objects, including floor mosaics. On the right side of this mosaic fragment, a male figure identified by a Greek inscription as Wealth (Ploutos) sits on a wood-en bench, throwing down gold coins; next to him, his female companion, labeled Pleasure (Apolausis), passes her arm behind his back, resting her hand on his shoulder. A second surviving fragment from the same mosaic pavement, now at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, shows a male figure identified as Life (Bios) reclining on a cushioned couch beside a female personification of Luxury (Tryphe). The imaginative pairing of the personified concepts as male-female couples allows the scene to be read as an allegory of the good life, a celebration of prosperity and pleasure. Both fragments show parts of trees, setting the scene outside, perhaps at an outdoor banquet.The heavy outlines and flat forms of the figures, with their elongated bodies and small heads, as well as the style of their clothing and jewelry, are hallmarks of Byzantine art of the sixth century A.D. The same personifications appear in a few late-antique pavements found at Antioch and elsewhere in Syria, and it is likely that the mosaic fragments in Boston and Toronto also come from this region. Undoubtedly part of a larger composition covering a floor, probably in a room of a home belonging to affluent Christians, this work underscores the vitality of Greek language and Classical culture in the Early Byzantine period.