According to Greek legend, the city of Troy (in modern Turkey) was besieged for ten years by the Achaeans, a coalition of Mycenaean Greeks fighting to recover Helen of Sparta, who had been led away from her husband by the Trojan prince Paris. This war has inspired countless retellings, including Homer’s 8th-century BC Iliad, an epic poem focusing on a period of a few weeks in the final year of the conflict. How far did Homer’s version influence later representations of the Trojan War and its protagonists? A mosaic recently excavated in Rutland offers tantalising clues about the myth’s reception in Roman Britain.
The first hints of the mosaic’s presence emerged last year, when Jim Irvine spotted pottery fragments and intriguing cropmarks on farmland owned by his father Brian Naylor. Jim contacted Leicestershire County Council’s archaeology team, and Historic England secured funding for the site to be investigated by the University of Leicester Archaeology Services (ULAS), after which geophysical surveys combining magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar revealed a sprawling late Roman villa complex complete with barns and potential bathhouses. Some of these structures were explored further through excavation – and within one apsidal structure, buried beneath 30-40cm of rubble, was the impressive 11m by 7m mosaic depicting the Greek hero Achilles and Hector, leader of the Trojan forces.
Epic imagery
The excavated scenes will be broadly recognisable to any readers familiar with the Iliad, representing a dramatic section of the poem immediately after Hector has killed Patroclus, a beloved companion of Achilles. The grief-stricken Achilles kills Hector in turn, but his revenge is not complete: he degrades the Trojan’s corpse by dragging it behind his chariot, until King Priam of Troy pays a ransom for his son’s body.
