The Villa Dionysos at Knossos and its predecessorsAuthor(s): Sara PatonSource: British School at Athens Studies, Vol. 2, POST-MINOAN CRETE: Proceedings of theFirst Colloquium on Post-Minoan Crete held by the British School at Athens and the Instituteof Archaeology, University College London, 10-11 November 1995 (1998), pp. 123-128Published by: British School at AthensStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40960153 .

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15 The Villa Dionysos at Knossos and its predecessors

Sara Paton

The Roman building known as the Villa Dionysos lies to the W of the Heraklion-Knossos road, just over half a kilometre NW of the Palace of Minos. The excavated remains consist of a series of large rooms with excep- tionally fine mosaic floors, arranged around three sides of a rectangular peristyle courtyard. These rooms appear to have been the formal reception apart- ments of a grand and luxuriously decorated Roman house, the full extent of which is unknown.

The Villa Dionysos was discovered in April 1935, when workmen planting vines on the N edge of Sir Arthur Evans' estate unearthed a colossal marble stat- ue of a Roman emperor. The statue was buried in a pit which had cut through a mosaic floor. Searching for its missing head the Curator of Knossos, R. W. Hutchinson, found a robbed-out wall and beyond it to the W a second mosaic floor. During the next few months he excavated an area, roughly triangular, of about 30 x 25 m, clearing the peristyle court with its fallen columns, three rooms on the N side of the court and several smaller rooms of the S range. He also dug a trench across the large room on the W side of the courtyard and another in the E peristyle walk, and in the following year he made trials at various points below the Villa's floor level.

The discovery of this imposing building with its magnificent mosaics naturally aroused great interest, and a proposal was made to continue the excavation with the help of the British School at Rome. During a visit to Knossos in 1937 the Rome School's Assist- ant Director, C. A. Ralegh Radford, drew a plan of the excavation and wrote a Report on Roman Remains at Knossos which included a brief account of the Villa Dionysos with an assessment of further work to be done. War broke out, however, before digging could start again. Few records of the Villa survived the German occupation of Crete; Hutchinson's excava- tion notebook and Ralegh Radford's plan were lost and many of the finds vanished, including a marble statue of a Muse which was despatched to Austria by General Ringel and has not been seen since.

Investigation of the Villa was not resumed until 1957, when Michael Gough (then Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the University of Edin- burgh) began a new series of excavations on the site for the British School at Athens. During four seasons

of work (in 1957, 1958, 1961 and 1971) his team uncovered the great room on the W side of the peri- style court (known as the oecus) and the remaining rooms of the S wing. Michael Gough died in 1973 having published only a few brief comments on these excavations. The pottery from the Villa was published by J. W. Hayes in 1983 but eighteen years passed before Gough's records of the site were made available for study, since his widow Mary Gough felt that they should not be released until secure arrangements had been made for the conservation of the mosaics. In 1 99 1, however, she handed over the records of the Villa Dionysos to the British School at Athens, and gave her permission for the present writer to study them and the finds in order to prepare them for pub- lication.1 The archive contains detailed and meticu- lous records by Mary Gough of the Villa's mosaics, but information on the excavation itself is meagre; no sectional drawings or trench plans or notes were kept, the position of finds was not recorded, and, apart from the pottery, the finds (with the exception of some from the final season in 1971) had never been sorted, cleaned or catalogued.2

Hutchinson and Ralegh Radford considered that the Roman structures they found on the site of the Villa Dionysos belonged to an extensive house that had undergone modification and expansion on several occasions between the first century BC and the second century AD. Gough, on the other hand, believed that the Villa was a religious centre for the practice of Dionysiac ritual. His diaries, apart from being a day- to-day record of whereabouts on the site digging was taking place, are largely concerned with the problem of reconciling what he found with this hypothesis, one consequence of which was his conviction that by the end of the 1971 season the building had been com- pletely excavated. This is far from certain, since the areas to the N and W of the excavated rooms around

1 Full publication of the finds is now in preparation, and the first stage of a programme of conservation of the mosaic floors will take place in the spring of 1997.

2 The finds from the Villa Dionysos excavations are stored in the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos.

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124 SARAPATON

the courtyard have never been investigated, while the trenches dug to the s in 197 1 were very poorly record- ed; moreover, assumptions were made at the time about the structures found in this part of the site that are seriously at variance with the surviving evidence.

The pre-war excavation recognized four periods of construction on the site: G/O (Period I); LHL/ER (Period II); first century AD (Period III), and second century AD (Period IV). These were described by Ralegh Radford in his unpublished Report on Roman Remains at Knossos, but since the plan he drew in 1937 to accompany the Report was lost the account was difficult to follow and indeed seems to have been largely disregarded during the later excavations. Fortunately it turned out recently that the British School at Rome still possessed not the plan itself but the annotated pencil draft from which it had been drawn up. The Rome School has kindly allowed the present writer to borrow this draft, and it has proved possible to reconstruct much of the 1937 ex- cavation plan from the annotations. The structures predating the Villa (Periods I and II) can now be located, and the two periods of construction of the Villa itself (Periods III and IV) can be identified. Recent experience of excavation in this quarter of Roman Knossos has cleared up another source of confusion, the so-called mud brick walls of the Villa. These occur where the stone core of a wall was removed from above, leaving the mortar rendering and the marble revetment in place; the resulting trench was thus in effect shuttered, and the silt which washed off the hill-side and gradually filled it appeared, when excavated, to be the original core of the wall - mud certainly, but not in fact mud brick. With the information from the reconstructed 1937 plan, and without the complication of spurious con- struction phases employing mud brick, it has become possible to understand more about the Villa and its predecessors on the site.

The earliest structures found in trial trenches dug in 1935-37 and described in Ralegh Radford's Report as Period I were two parallel walls and a floor of rough stones built over an accumulated deposit, 90 cm deep and G/O in date, with a similar deposit 20 cm deep above (though this contained a few sherds of later date). These walls, of roughly-mortared undressed or slightly dressed blocks of stone, were 55 cm wide and approximately 12 m apart; they are shown on the draft plan and can now be located below the N and S peri- style walk, running approximately E-w; the N wall was picked up again in the NW corner of the site (FIG. 15.1). Below the Geometric layer was a sloping deposit, more than 50 cm deep, of MM III-LM II; this deposit was also found in trials dug at other points and appeared to underlie the whole site, but no struc- tural remains were found with it.

Period II was a building of LHL or ER date on the E side of the site, partly re-used in the next phase. On

the draft plan it is called the Forty-five Degree Building. One wall, running SE-NW, is shown to the E of the Villa, and another can be seen in the ne corner of Room N2 where its presence below the floor caused the later mosaic to subside. Hutchinson considered that Well B could have belonged to this building (Well B was found near the Forty-five Degree wall to the E of the Villa but its exact position is no longer known). It also seems possible that the small oddly-shaped black-and-white mosaic in the NE room of the Villa (Room N3) could be a survivor from this phase; Mary Gough noted that its border showed signs of alter- ation to make it fit the later alignment.

In Period III the Villa itself was laid out, on an orientation closer to the points of the compass. The three rooms of the N range, Rooms Ni, N2 and N3, and the W room (Wi) c. 9 m2 known as the oecus belong to this period, with walls built of roughly coursed masonry containing many squared and well- dressed stones set in fairly hard mortar. At this stage the house also had an E range; three small rooms of this wing were found in 1935 under the E walk of the later peristyle. The reconstituted plan of the pre- war excavations gives the position of parts of these rooms. Their walls were plastered and the floors were of hard pink plaster with quarter-round fillets at the base of the wall. Both Hutchinson and Ralegh Radford thought it probable that in the first century AD (that is, in Period III) the Villa had had a smaller peristyle court, possibly with rooms surrounding it on all four sides; on Hutchinson's sketch section of the excavation, drawn for Gough in 1957, he noted against the blank wall which, in Period IV, closed off the E side of the peristyle, 'Drums of first century peristyle built into foundations'. It is also possible that some walls found by the Gough excavations in the SW corner of the site belong to this period, since they are aligned symmetrically with the N range and the oecus but seem to have been deliberately lowered to ground level at a later date.

THE NORTH RANGE The three rooms of the North Range share a common S frontage onto the courtyard. The E and N limits of the easternmost room, N3, were not found; all that remains of it is the oddly shaped mosaic panel and the threshold of the doorway opening onto the peristyle walk. It was in this room that the imperial statue now standing in the garden of the Villa Ariadne was dis- covered in 1935, though as Hutchinson pointed out it had been buried in recent times and did not originally belong to the Villa Dionysos.

The internal walls of the central room, N2, are entirely robbed out (they were consequently supposed to have been of mud brick), but the rectangular shape of the room and the design of its mosaic floor are of the form usual in a cubiculum. The main part of the

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THE VILLA DIONYSUS A T KNOSSOS 1 25

Fig. 1 5.1 The Villa Dionysos, Knossos: phase plan.

mosaic is a square panel with a bust of Dionysos in a central roundel, and semicircles and segments con- taining birds, fruit and flowers and the heads of nymphs or Seasons. Two rectangular panels with live- ly scenes of hounds hunting wild goats face this cen- tral square. The inner, N, end of the room has a rec- tangular mosaic, much damaged by subsidence, of pelta pattern in black and white.

The w room, Ni, is the largest of the N range, mea- suring c. 6.5 x 7 m internally. The wide doorway open- ing onto the peristyle walkway still survives; according to Hutchinson there was a window in the W wall. The walls were veneered with marble and the floor has an exceptionally fine mosaic, in which busts of the com- panions of Dionysos are portrayed in hexagonal pan- els set in a large circle with a delicate vine-scroll bor- der. A half-lifesize marble statue of a Muse was found in 1935, standing in the NW corner of this room.

THE WEST RANGE

The W end of the courtyard is occupied by the very large, nearly square, room known as the oecus (Room Wi). In its original form it was built during Period III though it seems to have undergone some modifica- tion during the final period of the Villa's existence. Recent erosion has revealed that the lower courses of the W and N walls of this room were constructed of large ashlar blocks, possibly Minoan in origin; the S wall is made of smaller and less regular blocks and may have been rebuilt when the Villa was altered in Period IV. There are traces of what may have been windows in this wall, and a small service doorway is tucked discreetly into the SW corner of the room. The main entrance to the oecus, from the courtyard to the S, also shows signs of alteration; the threshold blocks have cuttings for door fittings showing that the wide

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1 26 SARAPATON

columnar opening was not the original arrangement The walls of the oecus were veneered with marble, apparently up to about head height, with painted plaster above, and the floor has a mosaic with a large bust of Dionysos in the central medallion surrounded by heads of eight companions, the main octagonal panel being set in a series of elab- orate borders.

PERIOD IV: THE PERISTYLE AND ASSOCIATED BUILDINGS

During the second century AD a new and larger peri- style court was constructed and the E (and perhaps the s) rooms of Period III were demolished to make space for it. A new range of rooms was built further to the S, and the E side of the courtyard was closed off by a blank wall (Period IV). The N rooms were retained together with the oecus, but the original doorway of the oecus was replaced by a monumental triple entrance formed by two columns of pink Chian mar- ble crowned with fine Corinthian capitals of Proconnesian. This impressive arrangement was skil- fully contrived to focus the overall design upon the oecus while masking the absence of symmetry caused by the shift in axis between the old buildings and the new (the central point of the columnar entrance lies halfway between the axis of the room and the new axis of the courtyard).

The colonnade of the peristyle was restored by David Smyth in 1975. The seventeen columns are Roman Doric, made of poros limestone, and originally had stucco fluting though this has not survived. They stood c. 4 m high on a continuous stone plinth mea- suring 10.3 x 8.6 m and were linked together by a low balustrade or barrier, except at the SE corner where upright rectangular stone slabs guard the head of a well (Well A). At the W end of the courtyard there was a shallow brick-built fountain. The reconstituted 1937 plan shows clearly that both the SE corner of the peri- style and the E room of the S range (Si) were con- structed over the demolished remains of the Period III E wing. Since Room Si shares a common N frontage with the other rooms of the S wing, and the Period IV peristyle is symmetrically placed between the N and S ranges of rooms (the N and S walkways are of equal width), it seems extremely probable that all the rooms of the S wing, at least in their present form, belong to Period IV and that they were laid out in relation to the new peristyle.

A coin found during restoration work in 1975 under the base of one of the S columns of the peristyle colonnade provides evidence for the date of construc- tion. It is a sestertius of Faustina II and bears the obverse legend FAVSTINA AVGVSTA; it was there- fore probably issued between ist December AD 147 (the date on which, according to the Fasti Ostienses, Faustina first used the title of Augusta, the occasion

being the birth of her first child), and her death some twenty-seven years later (on posthumous coins she is DIVA). The coin is very worn and must have been in circulation for some years before it was placed beneath the column base; its presence there shows that con- struction of the colonnade can hardly have been under way earlier than about 160, and could quite possibly have been started as late as 185.

THE SOUTH RANGE No original walls remain of the easternmost room of the South Range, Room Si. It was excavated in 1935, but the mosaic floor had been uncovered by Sir Arthur Evans on an earlier occasion, many years before the Villa Dionysos was found. He had left it open so that Gilliéron could draw the central motif, a head of Medusa, but before this could be done the medallion was destroyed by treasure-hunters. Part of the maze-like shield remains, with four winged heads of putti or Seasons in the angles. In style and skill of execution this mosaic resembles the much larger mosaic of Room Ni.

West of Room Si there is what appears to be a pas- sage leading southwards from the courtyard; Ralegh Radford thought that there had been a staircase here, leading to an upper floor. Next to the W, in the centre of the long side of the peristyle and opposite the cubiculum Ni, is a small square room, S2, from which doors opened into the rooms S4 to the s and S3 to the W. The mosaic floor of S2 was in poor shape when found but the room had been richly decorated with marble, painted plaster and stucco architectural mouldings, and the doorway in its S wall was appar- ently flanked by fluted pilasters of pink-painted stuc- co. Room S4, to the S, was plainer; in it were found the remains of a wooden strongbox, bound with iron and bronze (and quite empty), standing against the W wall. Fragments of a second, smaller, chest lay scattered on the floor near the doorway. Si and the E parts of Rooms S2 and S4 were excavated in the thirties, the W parts in 1957 and 1958. Ralegh Radford noted in 1937 that the South Range showed signs of alteration.

Room S3, at the W end of the South Range, was excavated in 1958. It is rectangular, with an E-w axis lying parallel to that of the peristyle, and unlike the other principal rooms it was entered not directly from the courtyard but through a doorway in its E wall from Room S2 (the threshold is marked by a little doormat mosaic). Like Room N2, its shape resembles that of a cubiculum, consisting of a main rectangle with an elab- orate mosaic (panels of intricate polychrome geomet- ric pattern set in a meander border) and beyond, fur- ther from the door, a smaller rectangle floored with a simple reticulate design in black on white. A graceful ivy-wreath border runs right round the room, uniting the two parts of the floor.

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THE VILLA DIONYSUS A T KNOSSOS 1 27

The walls of this room, like those of the oecus and Room Ni (and probably also N2), were lined with marble veneer, the top edge of the marble being held in place, above eye-level, by an egg-and-tongue moulding of stucco. Surviving fragments of this moulding have smudges of paint on the back, showing that they were attached to walls that had already been painted - the marble veneer was redecoration. Signs of alteration can also be seen at the W end of the room, where the lower part of the wall was thickened by the addition of a secondary wall built against its inner face, to accommodate a semicircular brick-built aedic- ula or niche which faces down the length of the room towards the doorway. The contents of the niche (a prized statue perhaps?) would have been seen in a strong cross light from the large south-facing window beside it on the left, also probably a late alteration since it seems to have been constructed from re-used Period III door jambs. The mosaic floor, with its ivy- scroll border, was laid after these changes had been made. If the rooms of the South Range all belong to Period IV and were designed and built in relation to the new peristyle, where construction probably began between c. 160 and 185, they were at least in use for long enough to have been found unsatisfactory, and to have been transformed by elaborate and expensive redecoration.3

Very scanty direct evidence was found for the date of the catastrophe, almost certainly an earthquake, that destroyed the Villa Dionysos. The rooms of the South Range were wrecked; Gough noted in 1958 that the collapse there had been rapid, with roof tiles and marble veneer lying directly on top of fallen plaster and stucco mouldings on the floor. No sealed floor deposits containing pottery are recorded from this part of the building. On top of the destruction level the ruins had then been filled up with a heavy dump of domestic debris, dated for the most part to c. AD 160-180 and derived presumably from some nearby building that had also gone out of use (Hayes 1983, 102); all one can say for certain of the origin of this material is that it cannot have come from the rooms over which it was found.

The older part of the Villa Dionysos was also badly damaged, but there the roofs seem to have held up for longer. In the oecus some of the marble veneer slabs fell off the walls; with them was found a small floor deposit of the late second/early third century (AE[N]) layer 7. Hayes 1983, 103 and 164), which presumably dates from this original shock. There is evidence that a serious earthquake occurred at Gortyn in the reign of Marcus Aurelius which may also have been the cause of this disaster at Knossos, but the date (before April 169), though possible, does seem rather early for the Villa Dionysos (IC IV, 333; di Vita 1979-80, 437). If the peristyle and the rooms of the South Range were built not earlier than 160, and the rooms were in use for long enough after this

to require remodelling and redecoration, an other- wise unrecorded earthquake much nearer the end of the century would be a more comfortable fit. The date of the pottery from the fills dumped above the destruction levels should not be taken as conclusive, since we cannot be certain that the buildings from which this material came were destroyed at the same time as the Villa.

Squatter occupation followed; there were traces of fires on the mosaic floors of the oecus and Room Ni, and in the oecus some pottery dating to the second quarter or middle of the third century was found below a layer of fallen tile and building debris which marked the final collapse of the roof (Hayes 1983, 99). The fills that were later deposited on top of this w part of the site contained many of the terracotta objects often referred to as 'vault pins'; these are now known to be spacer pins used for the construction of cavity walls in caldana (Livadiotti and Rocco 1986-87), and their presence in such quantity (at least forty were found) suggests that much of the material dumped on top of this part of the Villa Dionysos came from the ruins of a large public bath building nearby.

Our uncertainty about the exact provenance of this material that was dumped on top of the collapsed buildings of the Villa Dionysos after its destruction needs to be borne in mind, since most of the finds from the site come from these fills and are thus only indirectly associated with the Villa. This proviso includes those finds - the lamps, and the bone and ivory needles and hairpins - which Gough adduced (rather oddly) as evidence that the building had been used for ritual purposes (Catling 1972, 21-2). His pri- mary reason for this identification was, of course, the mosaics, but Dionysiac imagery is common in Roman mosaics and does not by itself suggest cult practice. The images in the Villa's mosaics are static; Dionysos himself appears serious and benign (and most certain- ly sober); there are no references to myth or to mys- teries, no triumphs, no processions. The wall paint- ings do not help; although painted wall plaster was found in all the rooms of the Villa and in the peristyle (altogether about thirty crates of fragments were col- lected) the decorative schemes cannot be recovered since no find spots were recorded. With the exceptions of one small fragment of fresco showing a sketched face in profile, another (which can no longer be found) said to have shown a woman's face, and a quantity which appear to depict fruit and flowers, all the sur- viving fragments are geometric or abstract in design. The assumption that the Villa Dionysos had a specif- ically religious function is far from convincing and should be treated with caution, at least until such a

3 For comparison of the cost of marble veneer and painted plaster, see Corcoran and DeLaine 1994, 272-

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128 SARAPATON

function can be demonstrated for a comparable build- ing elsewhere.

What can be said with some confidence about the Villa is that, at any rate in its final form, it was designed to impress. The splendid figurative mosaics of the oecus and of Rooms Ni, N2 and Si are all direc- tionally laid in such a way as to be best seen from the peristyle walkways, viewed in each case from outside, through the doorway of the room as if in a frame. Only S3 has an air of privacy, since it was entered indirectly through the anteroom S2. All of these rooms were richly decorated with painted plaster, dec- orative stucco mouldings and, in most cases, marble veneer. The size of the building, and the splendour of its fittings do make the Villa Dionysos seem suited to some public or semi-public function. But lavish expenditure is not enough (at least, not in the second century ad) to rule out private ownership, and the houses of the rich and powerful at that time were often intended for public display (Wallace-Hadrill 1988). We do not know where the Villa's entrance was (the blank wall that closed the E side of the courtyard is not thought to have had a break for a doorway) but we can see that, once inside, the visitor's eye would be drawn down the length of the peristyle, over the shal- low fountain, towards the great east-facing columnar entrance to the oecus; if the Villa was the residence of some great personage with a large clientela (perhaps a magistrate and benefactor of the colony), it would be hard to imagine a more impressive setting for his morning salutano (Thébert 1985). Until we know more about the full extent of the building, and about the nature of this part of the Roman city of Knossos,

the question of the function of the Villa Dionysos, whether public or private, cannot be answered with assurance.

REFERENCES

Catling, H. W., 1972. 'Archaeology in Greece, 1971-72', AR 18: 3-26

Corcoran, S. and DeLaine, J., 1994. 'The unit measurement of marble in Diocletian's Prices Edict', Journal of Roman Archaeology 7: 263-73.

Di Vita, A., 1979-80. 'I terremoti a Gortina in età romana e proto-bizantina', ASA 61-62: 435-440.

Hayes, J. W., 1983. 'The Villa Dionysos excavations at Knossos: the pottery', BSA 78: 97-169.

Livadiotti, M. and Rocca, G., 1986-87. 'Note sull'uso di distanziatori fittili per la realizzazione di intercapedini nei calidaria: le Terme del Pretorio a Gortina (Creta)', ASA 64-65: 353-380.

Thébert, Y., 1987. 'How the domus worked', in P. Veyne (ed.), A History of Private Life I: 383-405. Harvard.

Wallace-Hadrill, A., 1988. 'The social structure of the Roman house', Papers of the British School at Rome 56, 43-97-

Unpublished sources include: Gough, Mary, MS notes on the Villa Dionysos mosaics and

wall plaster. Gough, Michael, MS excavation diaries for 1957, 1958,

1 96 1 (two versions) and 1971. Hutchinson, R. W., MS notes on the excavation of the Villa

Dionysos, with a sketch plan and a sketch section, sent to Michael Gough in May 1957.

Ralegh Radford, C. A., Report on Roman remains at Knossos. Typescript, September 1937.

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