Dionysus Villa, Dion
About
Excavators at Dion, the sanctuary city below Mount Olympus, found a banquet-hall mosaic in 1987 showing Dionysus arriving in triumph on a chariot pulled by panthers. Builders raised the villa around 200 AD, more than eighty years after Trajan died, joining five courtyards into one sprawling home before it was later split into three houses. Its floors also carried a Medusa mosaic in a circular frame. The Dionysus mosaic remains on view at the Dion Archaeological Museum.
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
Nearby
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