Panel 3 of the Ketton Mosaic shows Priam, king of Troy, carrying a scale with golden vessels to equal the weight of his son, Hector.
A Roman mosaic recently discovered in Britain represents a long-lost version of the story of the Trojan War that differs from the more famous account of the saga told by Homer.
O Mosaic of Ketton shows a key conflict during the Trojan War.
However, according to a study last week in Britanniathe new artifact is not based on Homer’s “Iliad” – the most consensual version of the event.
Instead, this mosaic, which measures 10 by 5.3 meters, was inspired by a more obscure tragedy by the Athenian playwright Squirrel. Call “Phrygian”this version was written at the beginning of the 5th century BC and survives today only in fragments and analyzes discussed in other ancient texts.
As explained by , in Homer’s narrative about the Trojan War, the Greeks spend 10 years fighting the city of Troy, in what is today modern Turkey. According to myth, Paris, a son of Priam, king of Troy, kidnapped the beautiful queen Helen of Sparta, and the Greeks were fighting to get her back.
This mosaic shows, as revealed in , three scenes of the conflict between the Greek hero Achilles and the Trojan prince Hector.
In the first panel, the two duel after Hector kills Patroclus, a close companion and possible lover of Achilles. In the second, Achilles drags Hector’s dead body behind his car. In the third, Achilles rescues Hector’s body from his father, Priam, for its weight in gold.
Initially, researchers thought the mosaic represented scenes described in Homer’s epic, the “Iliad.” But upon deeper analysis, Jane Masseglialead author of the study and a historian at the University of Leicester, found that some of the details in the mosaic did not match Homer’s version.
Archaeologists argue that the differences point to “Phrygian” like to true inspiration for the image.
For example, in the “Iliad,” Achilles explicitly says that he will not accept gold as ransom for Hector’s body. And in the mosaic, Achilles drags Hector’s body around Patroclus’ tomb, while in the “Iliad” he drags it around the walls of Troy.
Fragments from “Phrygians” and ancient scholars’ analyzes of the text, however, describe both events as represented in the Ketton Mosaic. “Phrygians” is the only known version of the Trojan War that describes events in this way. – argue the researchers.
