Introduction
On a recent family holiday to the Isle of Wight, as my young children waved their plastic gladii aloft amidst the excellent displays of Brading Roman Villa, I encountered the strangest Roman mosaic I had ever seen.Footnote 1 Whether this mosaic was discovered via the diligent probing of the retired merchant seaman Captain Thorp, or accidentally via the agricultural labours of local farmer Mr William Munns,Footnote 2 neither could have foreseen in 1879 that this first result of what would become substantial excavations would not simply be the most striking of their discoveries, but one that almost 150 years later would remain perplexing.Footnote 3 For this mosaic depicts an unparalleled scene — two four-legged, long-tailed, and possible winged beasts, a square structure with triangular roof on top and runged structure in front — and a human figure with the red-crested head, wattle and claws of a rooster (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Lower panel of pavement mosaic in Room III, Brading Roman Villa. (Left) rooster-headed man; (middle) building raised above stepped structure; (right) two animals (photo © Brading Roman VillaTrust).
Further excavations quickly revealed that this odd tableau forms the rectangular central panel of one side of a square mosaic (Fig. 2).Footnote 4 That on its right-hand side, as one stands in front of it, is totally destroyed. That on the left is also partially lost, but the half that remains clearly shows a retiarius gladiator from the tip of whose trident dangles his net. Directly opposite is another fragmented image depicting a four-legged animal, either a fox or a hound, under a tree or vine, running in the direction of a domed building. Only one of the quadrants survives (that between the retiarius and the running animal), depicting a naked, long-haired bust with a stick of some kind, topped with a cross, over its right shoulder.Footnote 5 Rounding off the image is a parallel naked bust with a simpler staff or rod in a medallion at the centre of the mosaic, generally accepted to depict Bacchus.Footnote 6
Fig. 2. Whole pavement mosaic in Room III, Brading Roman Villa. (Lower panel) rooster-headed man scene; (left-hand panel) gladiatorial combat scene; (top panel) animal moving away from vine towards domed building (photo © Brading Roman VillaTrust).
Within this cryptic whole, the extraordinary oddity of the rooster-headed figure prompted from the start a flurry of explanations. One of the earliest reports, that of the Reverend S.M. Mayhew, speaks already to two existing interpretations. One held that this was the Gnostic deity Abraxas.Footnote 7 But Mayhew himself, prompted by the bust of Bacchus, preferred to read the mosaic in mythological terms: ‘This building is an elevated lodge or watch-tower, and the mystic figures emblematic of Watchfulness and Courage’.Footnote 8 In the same year, Cornelius Nicholson spoke of ‘many conjectures’,Footnote 9 but gave airtime to only two — again, one religious and one mythological. Charles Roach Smith, he reported, had dismissed the image as an idle caricature, probably of the Egyptian deity Anubis.Footnote 10 And Frances Power Cobbe had suggested that the figure depicted Alectryon, the one-time friend of Ares turned into a cockerel after he proved an inadequate guard during the god of war’s Aphrodisian trysts. Nicholson himself offered two further hypotheses. First, that it was ‘merely a piece of grotesquerie, the sport of an artist’s prolific imagination’, to be compared to the Alexamenos graffiti of the donkey-headed deity, and similarly intended to mock Christianity.Footnote 11 Or second, that since the Latin for rooster is gallus, the figure might be doubly-charged mockery of the emperor Gallienus, who also — he claimed, incorrectly — happened to have died in Gallaecia.Footnote 12
In the next year, the most authoritative early report was produced by John Price and Frederick Hilton Price who had taken over excavations. They too speak of various interpretations related to myth and fable sent to them in personal communications, singling out Rodolfo Lanciani’s opinion that it shows Oedipus interrogating the sphinx and Prof. Lanzone of Turin’s view that the image depicts Aesop’s fable of the cock and the fox (reading the rooster-headed man together with the running animal on the opposite side of the mosaic).Footnote 13 The Prices’ own inclinations, however, were religious — ‘it will probably be proved that this quaint composition is to be associated with the worship of Mithra the sun-god of Persia’ — and again associating the latter with Abraxas.Footnote 14
The Prices’ confident prediction proved prescient. Apart from Thomas Morgan’s suggestion that the rooster-headed man represented a lanista preparing his gladiators at cock’s crow (‘gallicinium’), as part of a mosaic triptych illustrating three parts of the day,Footnote 15 the religious interpretation dominated twentieth-century commentary, gradually increasing in speculative complexity. So where successive surveys assumed the identification with Abraxas, with more or less caution,Footnote 16 Jocelyn Toynbee went further, suggesting that ‘the scene depicts some mystic initiation, in which the neophyte wears a bird-mask, with the ladder or steps as a symbol of the soul’s ascent to heaven, represented by a temple, and the Griffins as guardians of the dead’.Footnote 17 This theory reached its zenith in the 1980s, in tune with the scholarly zeitgeist and its twin interest in both the mystery cults and the Gnostics. Martin Henig, for example, confidently equated the rooster-man with Abraxas, also called Iao, and added his own imaginative interpretations of the ladder-like object — ‘presumably this is an allegory of the straight and narrow ways of God leading to the security of the heavens’ — and the creatures — ‘representing the demons encompassing man and threatening to destroy him’.Footnote 18
This increasingly unmoored speculation triggered a reassessment, fuelled by another fashionable topic of the day — Roman entertainment. Roger Ling argued that hunting images, frequently found in mosaics in North Africa in particular, but also in Britain, were a more likely context for explanation. Mythical beasts feature amidst the many depictions of animals being hunted either for or in the arena, including the so-called kynokephaloi — dog-headed men mentioned throughout Greek and Roman literature (see e.g. Augustine, De civ. dei 16.8). Ling therefore suggested that the Brading rooster-man was an attempt at such a depiction, butchered by a local artist of mediocre talent.Footnote 19 Such a reading would align this figure with the animals, which Ling saw as mythological griffins, and make the temple and ladder-like object a huntsman’s look-out post or cage, and a ramp or a gang-plank, respectively.Footnote 20
Ling’s theory was honed by Patricia Witts, who identified the sprouting sticks above the two animals as millet stalks, a familiar symbol in North African mosaics associated with certain amphitheatre factions, and perhaps found elsewhere in Britain too.Footnote 21 Reading the millet stalks together with the animals, Witts suggested that our scene depicts a venatio — a hunt in the Roman arena — with the building a background temple familiar from arena mosaics,Footnote 22 and the rooster-man a venator, or hunter, identified as such by his distinctive striped tunic.Footnote 23 The identification would be strengthened if the item in his right hand were identified as a weapon — but this must remain speculative because of damage to the mosaic.Footnote 24 This reading embeds the mosaic in its wider context, with gladiatorial combat on one side and hunting opposite, all around Bacchus, often associated with the amphitheatre in mosaics.Footnote 25
Witts also honed Nicholson’s earlier suggestion that the rooster-head was a joke, but, she thought, one at the expense not of Gallienus but Constantius Gallus, the short-lived, mid-fourth-century Caesar supposedly contemporary with the Brading mosaic, who, Ammianus Marcellinus tells us, was an arena aficionado: ‘This also was a sign of his savage nature, which was neither obscure nor hidden, that he delighted in cruel sports (Erat autem diritatis eius hoc quoque indicium nec obscurum nec latens, quod ludicris cruentis delectabatur)’ (Amm. Marc. 14.7.2).Footnote 26 This was developed further by Rosamond Hanworth in a 2004 note which offers a possible patron for a fourth-century British mosaic lampooning Gallus — Palladius, the bureaucrat banished from Antioch by Gallus in 361.Footnote 27 Her argument is based on three pillars — that Britain was a known destination for contemporary eastern exiles,Footnote 28 that the Brading mosaics echo those of the House of Dionysus and Ariadne at Antioch,Footnote 29 and that the second half of the fourth century saw a new owner of the Brading villa who commissioned new mosaics throughout.Footnote 30
So matters stand today.Footnote 31 The trajectory traced above represents a wonderful thread of incremental scholarly detective work across more than a century, much of it aired in this journal. Each of these three theories — that the rooster-headed man depicts Abraxus vel sim, a dog-headed beast, or a venator with a punning, perhaps even imperial, name — have found supporters, and each is possible. But they all also have problems, some long acknowledged, others previously unappreciated. In what follows I discuss these, before offering an alternative explanation — that our mosaic depicts not a hunt, but the second of the three parts of a day at the games, the midday executions in which exoticism and oddity were prized elements of the entertainment. The tendency in such “fatal charades” to seek to bring tall tales to life then allows the rehabilitation of long-neglected interpretations of the mosaic.
Poultry problems
All three of the theories that have dominated scholarly interpretation have notable problems. Interestingly, the most long-lived reading, the association with Abraxas, was critiqued already in 1880 on the basis that all known depictions of that deity have not just the head of a cock, but snakes for legs.Footnote 32 Another objection is that on such a reading this panel is disconnected from the other panels on this mosaic, in particular the gladiatorial munus.Footnote 33 Henig, the most persistent advocate of the religious reading, forces that scene into a subordinate position, reading it simply as a metaphor for the uncertainty, danger and risk of life that mysticism promises to mitigate.Footnote 34 But this feels like special pleading.
The hunt-based explanations of Ling and Witts offer a better holistic reading of all the mosaic’s panels. But both have other limitations. Ling’s theory that the rooster-headed man is a local attempt at a kynokephalos requires artistic incompetence, given the obvious differences between canine and gallinaceous anatomy: ‘it is possible that the mosaicist was trying his best to make sense of a picture in an illustrated text or copybook which he did not fully understand’.Footnote 35 Similarly, if this image represents a hunt, it is a hunt without hunters, something also unknown elsewhere.Footnote 36 Again, Ling resorts to artistic limitation: ‘the mosaicist has clearly selected only a few random details from his models’.Footnote 37 But such dismissals of provincial skill go back to Roach Smith, and the nineteenth-century colonial atmosphere in which he wrote.Footnote 38 The anatomical detail of crest, wattle and claws should be proof that the image depicts exactly what its creator intended.Footnote 39
Witt’s insight that the rooster-headed figure is not an animal but a venator with a rooster-related name is preferable in this regard.Footnote 40 But her reading is problematic in two other ways. First, the twin-striped tunic she points to as distinctive of the hunter could also be sported by gladiator, trainer, umpire, or even musician (both the Nennig and Zliten amphitheatre mosaics illustrate a selection of these roles), and is thus better taken as a marker of arena participation more broadly than of hunters specifically.Footnote 41
Second, the imperial identification with Gallus remains tenuous.Footnote 42 The putative joke relies on widespread knowledge of Gallus’ interest in the games, which is attested only in Ammianus. And Ammianus’ comment in fact continues, ‘sometimes in the Circus, absorbed in six or seven contests, he exulted in the sight of boxers pounding each other to death and drenched with blood, as if he had made some great gain (et in circo sex vel septem aliquotiens deditus certaminibus, pugilum vicissim se concidentium, perfusorumque sanguine specie, ut lucratus ingentia, laetabatur)’ (Amm. Marc. 14.7.2). That focus on pugilism serves Ammianus’ broader point, which is Gallus’ cruelty towards other men. Hence, for example, his comment on Gallus’ wife that ‘she, a Megaera in mortal guise, constantly aroused the savagery of Gallus, being as insatiable as he in her thirst for human blood (Megaera quaedam mortalis, inflammatrix saevientis assidua, humani cruoris avida nihil mitius quam maritus)’ (Amm. Marc. 14.1.2). So, if Ammianus is accurately relaying a common stereotype of Gallus — as this theory requires — then our mosaic should have depicted the rooster-headed man in human combat.
Caput capon
What is needed is an explanation that builds on the fine work that has highlighted the arena association in these motifs, while both acknowledging the strangeness of the figure and embedding it properly alongside the other details of the scene. Such an explanation, I suggest, lies close at hand. Our first steer comes from the entirely ignored suggestion of Thomas Morgan, mentioned above, that our scene should be considered part of a chronological triptych depicting what he called ‘the seasons of the day’.Footnote 43 Morgan speaks of gladiators training by fighting animals at first light, gladiatorial combat in the afternoon, and dinner and wine (symbolised by a fox in a vineyard) in the evening. That schema cannot be sustained — there is no evidence for such early training against animals,Footnote 44 and the dinner reading is stretched. But the idea was prescient.
The games thrived on diversity, and we can delineate three discrete elements in a (relatively) set order — venationes in the morning (hence the running fox or hound), gladiatorial munera in the afternoon (hence the retiarius), and in between executions, in which condemned criminals (or more rarely prisoners-of-war) were forced to fight either each other or wild animals.Footnote 45 It was this last to which the passage of Seneca that Morgan erroneously applied to munera actually referred: ‘In the morning they throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators (Mane leonibus et ursis homines, meridie spectatoribus suis obiciuntur)’ (Ep. 7.4).Footnote 46 Such executions are a familiar theme on mosaics concerned with the arena, especially from North Africa,Footnote 47 and have been found in other media in Roman Britain.Footnote 48 Moreover, the triptych of venationes, munera and damnationes ad bestias is paralleled elsewhere in the Zliten mosaic (where it has been suggested that the scenes depict two days in sequence), the Wadi Lebda amphitheatre mosaic, and perhaps the Torrenuova Borghese mosaics.Footnote 49
Ling’s worry about his interpretation of our scene as a hunt mosaic — that it lacked hunters — thus missed the point. The animals are the hunters, and our rooster-headed man the hunted — a damnatus. Typical images of damnati in mosaics depict them partially side-on and passive or flinching. The body of our rooster-headed man is turned slightly more face on — though this may be due to stylisation — but his head is also in profile, and his body language too is passive, braced, even fearful.Footnote 50 That he has been dressed as a rooster for the arena is illustrated by his outfit. As we saw above, he sports the striped tunic associated with assorted participants on the sands — including damnati, if the individuals apparently forced towards a bull in the mosaic at Silin are identified as such.Footnote 51 But our figure is also bedecked in a triangular orange cowl unparalleled elsewhere, and yet to be adequately explained. This, I suggest, mimics the distinctive golden cape and hackle of a rooster. Tunic and cape together signal that our figure is neither man nor animal, but man dressed as animal. And for that we have precedent — what Kathleen Coleman dubbed ‘fatal charades’, and Carlin Barton later called ‘snuff plays’.Footnote 52
In their search for ever more novel forms of punishment, the Romans deliberately humiliated and socially ostracised the condemned by dressing them up as part of elaborate theatrical executions — what Coleman called ‘the punishment of criminals in a formal public display involving role-play set in a dramatic context’.Footnote 53 In some cases, the goal seems to have been simply novelty and creativity. This included dressing criminals up as animals to be attacked by others higher up the food chain. Tacitus notes of those Christians killed under Nero that ‘derision accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs (pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent)’ (Ann. 15.44).Footnote 54 Our rooster-headed man, I suggest, is just such a damnatus, dressed as a chicken to be torn apart by wild animals, echoing that same phenomenon in nature.
Reading the scene as a ‘fatal charade’ would explain the lack of obvious injury to the damnatus as seen in some other executions on mosaics — since death comes as an inevitable but delayed ‘twist’ in the tale, rather than a straightforward execution.Footnote 55 It also offers a better reading of the ladder-like object and building. That the latter is supposed to be elevated is clear from its position higher than the rooster-headed figure, and from the grey tesserae to either side which likely represent the elevated ground on which it is resting (note that the higher of the two animals is also depicted standing on a strip of similar tesserae).Footnote 56 That the runged structure is a ladder is clear from the numerous depictions of ladders in other mosaics which echo the diagonal positioning and rungs made from juxtaposed strips of lighter and darker tesserae (e.g. in the Saint-Romain-en-Gal Rustic Calendar mosaic).Footnote 57 Moreover, multiple reliefs and graffiti testify to the use of ladders in arena spectacles.Footnote 58
One well-documented feature of ‘fatal charades’ was the construction of elaborate, raised scenery, such as the reconstructed, fragile Mount Etna from which a bandit active in that region ‘fell’ into the cages of beasts (Strabo 6.2.6).Footnote 59 Apuleius, similarly, talks about condemned criminals in the arena ‘fixing towers of beams joined with boards forming a complicated machine in the image of a movable house (instruentes confixilis machinae sublic<i>as turres tabularum nexibus, ad instar circumforaneae domus)’ (Apul. Met. 4.13).Footnote 60 The building on our mosaic can on this reading be read as a ‘prop’ for this imaginative execution — i.e. a man-sized coop for a man-sized cock.Footnote 61
Evidence for Roman chicken coops supports this association. In iconographical terms, I can find only one possible comparandum, a control mark on the obverse of one of the last series of Republican coins to bear such marks, those of L. Roscius Fabatus (e.g. RRC 412.1; Fig. 3). On this coin series, the reverse depicts a girl facing a serpent, with one possible control mark depicting two fowl feeding on the left-hand side. The obverse shows a bust of Juno Sospita in a goatskin headdress, with a paired control mark of a building identified as a chicken coop on the left-hand side.Footnote 62 The latter identification is due to its constant appearance with the feeding fowl, the control-marks of L. Roscius Fabatus being of the type that always appear together.Footnote 63 If this is correct, it certainly echoes the building on the Brading mosaic in its stylised boxed structure, triangular roofs, front-facing doorway and side-on, 3D portrayal.
Fig. 3. RRC 412 (a) obverse and (b) reverse, British Museum 2002,0102.4121 (photo © British Museum).
In literature we are better served, since Varro and Columella both give elaborate descriptions of how to build a coop. Neither describes exactly what we see in our mosaic — both seem to speak to larger structures, though the former at least is speaking about mass husbandry (Varro, Rust. 3.4.2; see too 3.5.1).Footnote 64 But there are nevertheless clear parallels, in particular the cubic shape (Columella, Rust. 8.3.2), and the need to raise the birds’ living quarters above the ground for protection (Columella, Rust. 8.3.3; 8.8.2).Footnote 65 Most striking is Varro and Columella’s mutual highlighting of the need for ladders:
Circum huius aedifici parietes intrinsecus multos esse palos, ubi aves assidere possint, praeterea perticis inclinatis ex humo ad parietem et in eis traversis gradatim modicis intervallis perticis adnexis ad speciem cancellorum scenicorum ac theatri.
Around the walls of this building on the inside there should be a number of poles for the birds to perch on; and, in addition, rods sloping from ground to wall, with transverse rods fastened to them in steps at moderate intervals, after the fashion of the balustrades of the theatre or the arena. (Varro, Rust. 3.5.4)Footnote 66
Ascensus deinde avibus ad tabulata per utramque cellam datur iunctis parieti modicis asserculis, qui paulum formatis gradibus asperantur, ne sint advolantibus lubrici. Sed ab cohorte forinsecus praedictis fenestellis scandulae similiter iniungantur, quibus irrepant aves ad requiem nocturnam.
Next a means of ascent for the hens to the lofts across each of the cells is provided by attaching to the wall moderately sized planks which are roughened a little by having steps made on them, so that the hens may not find them slippery when they fly on to them. Similarly little ladders should be attached on the outside leading from the poultry-yard to the little windows mentioned above, by which the birds may creep in for their nightly repose. (Columella, Rust. 8.3.6)Footnote 67
This, of course, chimes precisely with the ladder on our mosaic leading up to the building. Such a ‘prop’ would have both enhanced and prolonged the execution, since the raised coop and ladder were, as Varro and Columella say, designed to protect the birds, but in the arena would offer only temporary reprieve.Footnote 68 Moreover, if this is a depiction of a ‘fatal charade’, then it is an appropriately ‘agricultural’ one, in keeping with the decorative scheme of the villa as a whole.Footnote 69 We might even read a degree of talio into the punishment, perhaps memorialising or imagining the sentence of a rooster rustler.Footnote 70
Playing chicken
Arguably the most striking feature of ‘fatal charades’ was the effort to bring famous tales to life.Footnote 71 Roman literature bears witness to criminals killed in the guise of a burned Hercules, a castrated Attis (Tert., Apol. 15.4; Ad Nat. 1.10.47; Anth. Pal. 11.184), an ineffective Orpheus killed by a bear (Mart., Spect. 24[21]), a similarly mauled wingless Daedalus (Mart., Spect. 10[8]), and a Pasiphae raped by a bull (Mart., Spect. 6[5]; cf. too perhaps Apul., Met. 10.23, 28–9, 34–5) — even the aforementioned Christians in animal skins might have been representing Actaeon, since others are described as dying as Danaids and Dirces (1 Cor. 6.2).Footnote 72 If the Brading mosaic depicts a kind of ‘fatal charade’, some early readings of the mosaic never given serious attention might be reconsidered.Footnote 73
Two suggestions in particular bear re-examination. First, that of Lanzone, mentioned above, that the image depicts Aesop’s fable of the cock and the fox.Footnote 74 That story — in which a rooster on a manure pile is tricked and seized by a fox, who in turn, chased by dogs, is tricked by the rooster into releasing him — has precisely the undertone of threatened violence that might have appealed in such an imaginative execution. Of course, in the arena, it would have ended worse for the rooster than in the tale, but such reversal was a common feature of ‘fatal charades’.Footnote 75 Moreover, it would fit nicely with the panel opposite, which would then illustrate another of Aesop’s fables, that of the fox and the grapes, in which the hungry fox tries to get at grapes on a vine, but when unsuccessful departs pretending he never wanted them (see Babrius 19; Phaedrus 4.3).Footnote 76 This latter interpretation finds support in the oft-noted oddity that this animal is moving away from the vine.Footnote 77
A variant on Lanzone’s reading would be that our scene depicts another fable, perhaps that of the cat and the cock, in which the former seeks plausible excuses for killing and eating the latter, and despite failing to find one, does so anyway.Footnote 78 This is preferable to Lanzone’s suggestion because the two creatures most closely resemble cats on account of their long tails; moreover the mosaicist has depicted them in grey with black tiles both as an outline and scattered throughout like spots, suggesting leopards.Footnote 79 But a further fable arguably lends itself even better to a ‘fatal charade’, that of the cock carried in a litter by cats.Footnote 80 In the additional fables from a no-longer extant fifteenth-century manuscript of Phaedrus transcribed by Niccolò Perotti, this runs as follows:
Feles habebat gallus lecticarios. hunc gloriose vulpes ut vidit vehi, sic est locuta: ‘Moneo praecaveas dolum; istorum vultus namque si consideres, praedam portare iudices, non sarcinam.’ postquam esurire eoepit felum societas, discerpsit dominum et fecit partes funeris.
A cock had some cats as his litter-bearers. A fox saw him proudly borne along in this style and said: ‘I advise you to watch out for treachery; if you were to take a good look into the faces of those fellows, you would conclude that they are not porters with a load, but hunters bringing home their booty.’ When the team of cats began to feel hungry, they tore their master to pieces and divided the kill. (Phaedrus, Ap.18)
One can immediately see the appeal of this as a ‘fatal charade’, with the victim dressed as an over-sized rooster, perched precariously on a litter attached to two over-sized cats with the victim’s devouring inevitable, but delayed. Such suspensions of criminals are known from elsewhere.Footnote 81 And this reading has the advantage of combining the rooster, the leopards and the possible fox opposite, as well as the building and ladder-like object (on this reading a raised litter).
The examples of ‘fatal charades’ of which we know from elsewhere, however, seem to stage tales from myth rather than fable.Footnote 82 A second suggestion worth reconsidering is thus that of Frances Power Cobbe — also mentioned above, and also never seriously considered — that the rooster-headed man depicts Alectryon.Footnote 83 That myth comes down to us via Lucian’s The Dream, or the Cock, in which the eponymous bird tells his interlocutor, Micyllus, ‘I who now appear to you in the guise of a cock was a man not long ago (οὑτοσὶ γὰρ ὁ νῦν σοι ἀλεκτρυὼν φαινόμενος οὐ πρὸ πολλοῦ ἄνθρωπος ἦν)’ (Gall. 3).Footnote 84 Micyllus then tells the tale of Alectryon, drinking buddy of Ares and appointed look-out while the god of war canoodled with Aphrodite, who, having fallen asleep and allowed Helios, and via him Hephaestus, to discover the tryst, was punished by Ares by this avian transformation. The joke would be appropriate for both ‘fatal charade’ and mosaic, because in the myth Alectryon is in military garb, and Ares thus ‘changed him into this bird, weapons and all, so that he still has the crest of his helmet on his head (μεταβαλεῖν αὐτὸν εἰς τουτὶ τὸ ὄρνεον αὐτοῖς ὅπλοις, ὡς ἔτι τοῦ κράνους τὸν λόφον ἔχειν ἐπὶ τῇ κεφαλῇ)’. The rooster-headed figure in the arena thus has weapons and crest, like other arena combatants — but they will do him little good.Footnote 85 On this reading, the raised building would not be a chicken coop, but either the doorway to Ares and Aphrodite’s love nest, or a raised look-out post.Footnote 86
If this mosaic at Brading does represent a so-called ‘fatal charade’, it would be the first such discovered on a mosaic.Footnote 87 But there are parallels in other visual media. Since Coleman wrote, to my knowledge four sculptural reliefs depicting arena scenes have been identified as putative ‘fatal charades’. The first two, from Capua, display the myth of Artemis and Actaeon (evidencing Tacitus’ claim about the imaginative execution of Christians) and the punishment of Marsyas (perhaps an inventive death for a political prisoner), respectively.Footnote 88 The third, from Cibyra, may show Orpheus about to be torn apart by a bear (as described by Martial above).Footnote 89 A fourth, from Mytilene, depicts an Eros clinging to a pole suspended above a beast.Footnote 90
In addition, but more speculatively, a medallion preserved in the collections of the Lugdunum Musée et théâtre romains presents Eros tied to a post on a platform approached by a ladder before a gallery of watching figures (Fig. 4).Footnote 91 This has often been read as a mythological scene where the upper register reflects a divine tribunal,Footnote 92 but is displayed in the museum as an arena execution.Footnote 93 In defence of the latter reading, there are only eleven, rather than twelve, figures depicted, and anyway a row of heads with a single, central, larger figure representing the editor is standard elsewhere in late antique iconography as a depiction of the audience at a public spectacle.Footnote 94
Fig. 4. Terracotta medallion depicting Eros tied to a post on a platform approached by a ladder, Lugdunum Musée et théâtres romains 2000.0.2528 (photo © Lugdunum Musée et théâtres romains).
Moreover, there are a number of stories told about Cupid in pain or punished which might be being reenacted here.Footnote 95 The idea of Eros punished goes back at least as far as Aristophon (fr. 11 apud Ath. 13.563b–c), and he is habitually mentioned in chains (Anth. Pal. 9.108; Luc., Dial. D. 6[2].1) or even bound to a pillar with hands behind his back, as here (Anth. Plan. 16.195–99).Footnote 96 Most familiar to modern audiences is the story of Cupid burned by hot oil in Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche tale (Met. 5.23), which might explain what the figure at the top of the ladder seems to be pouring (this figure is winged too, but might be Psyche, who was also typically depicted with butterfly wings).Footnote 97 This would certainly have the note of irony typical of ‘fatal charades’, well articulated by Apuleius himself: ‘O bold and reckless lamp, worthless servant of Love, to scorch the very god of all fire (Hem audax et temeraria lucerna et Amoris vile ministerium, ipsum ignis totius deum aduris)’ (Apul., Met. 5.23).
Less well known, but arguably a better fit, would be Ausonius’ Cupid Cruciatus, telling of Cupid bound, hung from a myrtle tree and tortured,Footnote 98 including with brands, torches and flaming lamps, by the assorted mythical women he wronged who subsequently died in gruesome circumstances, as well as his mother, for good measure (cf. Luc., Dial. D. 19[11].1; 20[12].1–2; and especially Anth. Lat. 273).Footnote 99 Intriguingly, Ausonius claims to be ekphrasising an image he has seen — in Trier, interestingly, given the Gallic origins of the medallion — and the story may have been common in contemporary performance.Footnote 100 That this is the tale here depicted is perhaps indicated by the parade of torches behind Cupid in the bottom register, which may represent the means by which he inflamed the now-enraged women.Footnote 101 In Ausonius’ tale, Cupid was eventually released — which would have added the common element of uncertainty or inversion to this ‘fatal charade’. Either story would nicely explain the medallion’s ambiguous legend ‘Incendiarius’, or ‘fire-starter’. And if this is a ‘fatal charade’, its runged ladder would echo that on our Brading mosaic.Footnote 102
Conclusion
The Brading rooster-headed man has proved an enduring mystery. The combined detective work of a century and a half has produced three popular and plausible theories — that he represents a deity, a hunted beast, or a hunter with a rooster-related name, perhaps nodding to the mid-fourth-century emperor Gallus. All three have strengths, but also problems, some previously unarticulated. The latter two both correctly link the mosaic to arena shows. I have here argued that the missing puzzle piece is the third element of such spectacles after munera and venationes — damnationes ad bestias. Such executions were often staged in exotic and dramatic ways. On this reading, the rooster-headed man is a condemned criminal dressed as a rooster, alongside his own man-sized chicken coop, thrown to two leopards, as either an agriculturally-themed punishment, or a deliberate reenactment of a myth or fable.
We do not need to choose between these possibilities.Footnote 103 Part of the ‘fun’ for an audience was presumably figuring out which mythological references were being replayed before them. Multivalency may thus have been desirable. But to my mind the idea that this mosaic depicts a ‘fatal charade’ does better credit to the sheer strangeness of the Brading image than explanations offered thus far.Footnote 104 These exotic executions provide some of the oddest descriptions in the literature of the Roman world, and are thus prima facie a good explanation for its oddest extant mosaic. It also, I suggest, provides a more satisfactory explanation of both the details of the image and its relationship to the surrounding scenes.Footnote 105
A British ‘fatal charade’ at Brading would be a further example of the singular arena mosaics in which Britain seems to have produced a particular line, as at Rudston or Bignor.Footnote 106 As such, it provides a salutary qualification to the desire of both Ling and Witts to demonstrate the urbanity of the British Romans at Brading via their engagement with known classical motifs from elsewhere.Footnote 107 Such classicism was certainly on ample display — but so too was the bloodlust and callous disregard for human life and dignity with which it went hand in hand. Here, as everywhere, the Romans exhibited their education, imagination and brutality in equal part.
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