Villa of the Triumph of Neptune
About
An inscription found inside named its builder outright: Asinius Rufinus, an Acholla-born senator whom Commodus made consul in AD 184, the year he raised this seaside villa. Its peristyle held three semicircular fountains lined with marine mosaics, facing a room paved with a Bacchic procession and Neptune's triumph. French and Tunisian teams excavated the site starting in 1954. The villa had lain abandoned on the coast south of Cape Kaboudia for over 1,700 years.
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://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-review/article/abs/triumph-of-neptune-s-gozlan-la-maison-du-triomphe-de-neptune-a-acholla-botria-tunisie-1-les-mosaiques-etude-ceramique-par-ariane-bourgeois-collection-de-lcole-francaise-de-rome-160-pp-xviii308-72-figs-2-folding-plans-103-plates-rome-ecole-francaise-de-rome-institut-national-ddarcheologie-et-ddart-de-tunis-1992-paper/3E5A6DECB305A70A08B072F991B890EC
- https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0006:entry%3Dacholla
Nearby
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