Villa of the Aviary, Carthage

About

Excavators in the 1960s uncovered this Carthage townhouse's showpiece: a peristyle floor mosaic packed with ducks, squirrels, and long-tailed peacocks around an octagonal garden. The mosaic dates to the 2nd century AD, decades after Trajan died in 117 CE, so the villa did not yet exist at the empire's widest extent. Workers reused columns from nearby ruins to rebuild the courtyard for modern visitors. The site sits inside Carthage's Roman Villas park near the Antonine Baths.

What happened here

A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeological_site_of_Carthage
• https://www.historyhit.com/locations/carthage-roman-villas-and-kobba-bent-el-rey/

Nearby

Destruction of Carthage

201 m

Roman Theatre of Carthage

205 m

Amphitheatre of Carthage

345 m

Circus of Carthage

358 m

Byrsa Hill and the Roman Forum

429 m

The Punic Ports of Carthage

617 m