House of the Dolphins

VillaAfrica Proconsularis · El Jem, TunisiaBuilt 200 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

The largest known house at Thysdrus sprawled across roughly 3,500 square meters around a sunken peristyle garden 16 meters square, with a curved marble basin set into one wall facing the main reception room. Excavators named it for a mosaic of dolphins found among its floors. Builders raised it during the town's 2nd- to 3rd-century boom, when olive-oil money was turning El Jem into one of Africa's richest cities, decades after Trajan's 117 CE death.

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.