Why Were Elaborate Floor Mosaics More Common in Antiquity Than Today?

Ancient Greek and Roman wealthy homes often bore elaborate and beautiful floor mosaics, many of which depicted gods, heroes, and mythic and historical scenes in exquisite detail. Many such mosaics have survived to the present day, are displayed in museums and art collections all over the world, and are justly admired as great works of art.

Some people have recently wondered why floor mosaics were so popular in antiquity and why they are no longer as popular today as they were back then. In this post, I will attempt to answer this question. Along the way, we will take a deep dive into the ancient and modern economics of art and artistic labor.

The question

On March 15th, 2024, a user on Twitter posted a set of photos of a detailed floor mosaic depicting fish swimming in a pond, accompanied with the question of why every U.S. home doesn’t have such mosaic floors. This tweet received over two and a half thousand likes and 205 replies, which are mostly people posing possible answers to the question.

The mosaic shown in the photos is modern; it was created by the artist Gary Drostle in 1996 on a commission for the London Borough Croyden, as Drostle himself describes in this blog post he wrote about the mosaic in 2016. Nonetheless, it is clearly inspired by ancient Greek and Roman floor mosaics.

The simple answer to the original poster’s question is that figurative floor mosaics are far too expensive for most people to afford. There has never been any time period in which “every” private home has had a floor mosaic. Even at the height of floor mosaics’ popularity during the Roman imperial period, they were a highly expensive luxury and the vast majority of people did not have them in their residences.

In fact, the majority of people who lived in the Roman Empire lived in quite small, simple dwellings. Most non-elite free residents of Roman cities during the Principate lived in insulae, large multi-story complexes that contained many small apartment units. These apartment complexes were owned by wealthy landlords, often senators, who leased the units to tenets in exchange for rent. These buildings were known for their cramped conditions and often shoddy construction standards, and were notoriously prone to fires, collapses, and the spread of disease.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the ruined exterior of the Insula dell’Ara Coeli in the city of Rome, one of the very few surviving ancient Roman insulae or apartment complexes

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a part of the interior of the Insula dell’Ara Coeli in Rome. Notice the lack of floor mosaics.

Meanwhile, the non-elite free inhabitants of the Roman Empire’s rural areas were mostly subsistence farmers who lived in small farmhouses with few luxuries. In many cases, these rural subsistence farmers did not even own the farmhouses they lived in or the lands they farmed, but rather rented from wealthy landowners.

Only people who were affluent (i.e., at least what we would think of as upper middle class) could afford to own a house with a floor mosaic. Even then, most of those who could afford such a decoration could only afford one floor mosaic in a single room, which was usually the entrance room to their house or the room where they would entertain guests. Only the very wealthy could afford to have multiple rooms with elaborate mosaic floors.

Despite all this, it is certainly true that floor mosaics were much more common during the Roman imperial period than they are today. It is therefore worth considering why they are no longer so common. To understand this, we first need to consider how and why they became common in antiquity to begin with.

A history of how floor mosaics became widespread in antiquity

The popularity of floor mosaics in wealthy homes in the ancient world was a specific cultural phenomenon that occurred within a specific cultural and social context. To begin with, there is almost no evidence for floor mosaics in private homes in the Greek world before the fourth century BCE. As best as archaeologists can reconstruct, they first started to become fashionable in affluent Greek households in the fourth century BCE.

Some of the oldest surviving Greek floor mosaics come from the city of Olynthos in northern Greece. King Philippos II of Makedonia destroyed the city in 348 BCE and it was never resettled, so all its floor mosaics can be confidently dated to the first half of the fourth century BCE, before the city’s destruction. These mosaics have only two or three colors and mostly depict abstract designs, but one depicts the hero Bellerophontes slaying the Chimaira.

ABOVE: Photo I took last summer of a mosaic at Olynthos dating to before 348 BCE, depicting Bellerophontes slaying the Chimaira

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a clearer view of the same mosaic from Olynthos

ABOVE: Another mosaic at Olynthos dating to before 348 BCE

Another famous early Greek floor mosaic was found in the third chamber of the Kasta tomb near Amphipolis (also in northern Greece) and dates to the second half of the fourth century BCE. This mosaic features a wider color palette than the ones at Olynthos and depicts a detailed figural scene of the god Hades abducting the goddess Persephone by carrying her off in his chariot while the god Hermes guides the way to the underworld.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the mosaic from the third chamber of the Kasta Tomb, dating to the second half of the fourth century BCE, depicting the abduction of Persephone

Floor mosaics became more popular in the Greek world during the Hellenistic Era, which is conventionally said to begin with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Archaeologists have uncovered a large number of floor mosaics from wealthy private homes on the Greek island of Delos dating between the second half of the second century BCE and the first century CE. The most famous of these mosaics comes from a house that modern excavators have nicknamed the “House of Dionysos” and depicts the god Dionysos with wings, holding a thyrsos (a staff made from a fennel stalk with a pinecone mounted at the top) and riding on a tiger.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a mosaic of the god Dionysos riding on a tiger from the House of Dionysos on the Greek island of Delos, dating to the second half of the second century BCE

Rome conquered Greece in the middle of the second century BCE. Roman soldiers who served on campaigns in Greece brought home spectacular loot taken from Greek cities they had sacked like Corinth in 146 BCE. As a result of this, Greek art forms, including mosaics, exploded in popularity in Roman Italy.

Many wealthy Romans who didn’t have original Greek artworks to decorate their homes hired skilled artisans to create imitations. In this cultural context, mosaics imitating the style of earlier Hellenistic Greek examples became a major status symbol among wealthy elites in the world under Roman rule. As the Roman state extended its political control to new territories, floor mosaics became popular among elites in those territories.

Floor mosaics reached the pinnacle of their popularity during the Roman imperial period, which lasted from the late first century BCE through the fifth century CE. During this time, mosaics were a common fixture in wealthy households from Iberia in the west to Syria in the east.

ABOVE: The Alexander Mosaic, a massive floor mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii dating to between c. 120 and c. 100 BCE depicting Alexander the Great charging into battle against Darius III of the Achaemenid Empire in the Battle of the Issos, based on an earlier Hellenistic painting

ABOVE: Mosaic depicting the Judgement of Paris, dating to between 115 and 150 CE, from the city of Antioch in what is now southeastern Turkey, now held in the Louvre Museum

ABOVE: The Centaur Mosaic from the Villa of Hadrian in Tivoli, Italy, dating to the reign of the emperor Hadrian (ruled 117 – 138 CE), now held in the Altes Museum in Berlin

ABOVE: The Zeugma Girl Mosaic, from the city of Zeugma in what is now southeastern Turkey, now held in the Zeugma Mosaic Museum

Different ancient and modern attitudes on money and economics

Now that I’ve given a very brief overview of the history of ancient floor mosaics, let’s talk about some possible reasons why these kinds of mosaics are not as widespread in private homes today as they were during the Roman Empire. The first reason, I think, is because modern people generally think about money and economics quite differently from how the typical ancient person thought about them and, in general, have very different economic priorities.

If a person has money, they have many options of things they can do with it. On the one hand, they can choose to spend money on things like elaborate floor mosaics for their private homes, which may look beautiful and signal status, but do not hold much capacity to generate financial profit. On the other hand, they can choose to invest their money in capital, which, in turn, can earn them even more profits.

As I have discussed before on this blog (including in this post I made just a couple of months ago), ancient Mediterranean societies had pre-capitalist agrarian economies. Wealthy people in antiquity were typically old-money aristocrats who derived most of their wealth from the fact that they had inherited large amounts of agriculturally viable land and resources (including slaves) needed to work that land.

The typical ancient elite was highly concerned with signaling their elite status, but very little concerned with notions of investing in economic capital to generate profit. In fact, ancient elites tended to look down on people who tried to increase their wealth through entrepreneurial ventures and often saw such people as greedy troublemakers who disturbed the social status quo. Elites who engaged in profit-seeking endeavors outside of agriculture ran the risk of finding themselves ostracized from the company of other elites.

Thus, in antiquity, it was actually seen as more respectable for a wealthy person to spend their wealth on expensive status-signaling decorative artworks like elaborate floor mosaics, rather than on investments to make themself wealthier.

Today, by stark contrast, the United States has a capitalist economy and social norms are reversed from how they were in antiquity; people tend to regard spending huge sums of money on expensive floor mosaics as a waste of money that could be used more sensibly to generate profits.

This does not apply as much to the ultrawealthy, who have enough money that they can both invest in capital and buy expensive floor mosaics, but it does apply to those on the lower strata of wealth—the upper-middle-class and lower-upper-class people who could buy floor mosaics if they wanted them and might have done so in antiquity, but nowadays more commonly put that money into things like the stock market or businesses they own.

Different aesthetic values and ways of signaling class

The first factor I have described here does not completely explain why floor mosaics are not as popular today as they were in Roman times. After all, wealthy people in the United States today still spend money on all kinds of highly expensive class signals. This is where a second factor comes into play, which is that modern people generally have different aesthetic values and ways of signaling class than people in antiquity did.

For the ancient Romans, having elaborate floor mosaics in one’s home had markedly positive associations and cultural connotations in most contexts. It was a sign that someone was a member of the elite. Today, by contrast, floor mosaics are not a commonly thought of or well-known symbol of contemporary elite status.

To the extent that modern Americans associate elaborate figural floor mosaics with anything at all, they generally associate them with Old World hereditary monarchs and aristocrats and the values that those figures held, which, for many people, is not a particularly desirable association. Since the United States was founded, the mainstream national ideology of this country has generally opposed the notion of hereditary aristocrats and instead maintained that the U.S. is a land of equal opportunity where everyone has a chance.

The reality, of course, is that the contemporary U.S. class system is much more closed and hereditary and the opportunities for those who are born poor or even middle class are much more limited than patriotic ideology tells us. Nonetheless, the idea of equal opportunity has had a substantial impact on U.S. aesthetic values. As a result, many people perceive elaborate floor mosaics in private homes as garish and untasteful, a kind of un-American Old-World showiness.

Relatively stable aesthetic consensus versus changing and individualistic tastes

A third factor that has also potentially influenced the difference in popularity of floor mosaics between Roman antiquity and the present-day United States is the fact that a figurative mosaic is not aesthetically neutral and, once installed, it becomes a permanent part of the house it decorates that is relatively difficult and expensive to remove and even more expensive to replace.

In Roman antiquity, this was seldom an issue because a general consensus existed among elites about what constituted “good” interior decorating and this consensus remained more-or-less stable over the course of centuries. From the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE, although minor trends came and went, elites continued to appreciate mosaics in the same basic styles that depicted the same general sorts of subjects. Thus, a mosaic could decorate the same house for generations or even centuries without going out of fashion.

Today, by contrast, interior decorating tastes tend to change much more quickly than they did during the Roman Empire. Fashionable household interiors in the 2020s look quite different from those in the 1990s, let alone those from the 1960s or earlier. Additionally, individual tastes today vary more than they did in antiquity and people are more likely to sell their homes, whereas, in antiquity, elite houses were usually passed down through families for generations without ever going on any kind of real estate market.

As a result of this, modern people tend to look for relative aesthetic neutrality when it comes to fixtures of their household interior that they expect to last a long time. Many houses today have patterned tile floors, but these usually follow relatively basic patterns without figurative depictions. Even these relatively simple designs, however, can fall out of popularity in ten or twenty years.

Different attitudes on artists and the value of artistic labor

A fourth factor that may contribute to floor mosaics being less popular today than they were in antiquity is the fact that most people today have different ideas about the value and purpose of artists and artistic labor than they did in antiquity.

The notion of “art for art’s sake” did not exist in antiquity, nor did anyone regard art as primarily a form of creative individual expression. People only made art if it served a purpose and the most common purposes it served were decorate temples, public buildings and monuments, and private homes and to signal status.

In ancient Greece and Rome, art was a trade and artists themselves were low-status manual laborers who typically worked on projects that wealthy clients commissioned. Some artists, such as Myron, Polykleitos, Pheidias, Apelles, Praxiteles, and Lysippos did become famous and widely respected for their work, but the general public always saw them merely as artisans who happened to be exceptionally skilled; they did not see them as creative geniuses in the way that someone today might think of, say, Leonardo or Picasso.

An illuminating example of the low status of material artists in the Roman world occurs in the text The Dream, which the Syrian orator and satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) wrote in the Greek language. The narrator of the text, who may represent a fictionalized version of Loukianos himself, describes how, when he was a boy, he was apprenticed to his uncle to become a sculptor. He fails at his attempt at sculpting, so his uncle beats him and he runs away.

That night, the narrator has a dream in which two women appear to him. The first is a beautiful woman with fine manners who is dressed in fine clothing, speaks fluent and eloquent Greek, and represents παιδεία (i.e., education in Greek culture, especially literature and philosophy). The other is a plain, “mannish” woman dressed in shabby clothes covered in stone dust who has rough, calloused hands, speaks imperfect Greek, and represents statue-carving.

The two women deliver speeches, each trying to convince the narrator to come over to her side. In the course of the argument, Education warns the narrator not to be a sculptor, saying (Dream 9, tr. Lionel Casson):

“Even if you become a Pheidias or Polykleitos and create wonderful masterpieces, the world will acclaim your art—but not one of your admirers, if he has any sense, would ask to be in your shoes. Whatever sort of person you may be, people will still think of you as a workman, a manual laborer, a man who makes his living with his hands.”

In the end, the narrator chooses Education rather than Statue-Carving and the text frames this as a wise decision.

Artists found financial success or failure based on their ability to produce works that satisfied the aesthetic tastes of their wealthy clients, which, as I have just discussed, tended to be fairly thematically and stylistically conservative. There was generally little or no incentive for artists to transgress boundaries or subvert norms and expectations and, in fact, an artist who made a habit of doing such things was unlikely to be commercially successful or respected.

As a result of this, the socioeconomic aspects of artistic production in the ancient world were very different from what they are today. Artistic labor was generally less valued and artists themselves were less respected, but, as a result of the widespread elite desire to signal status, the demand for certain kinds of artistic labor was actually higher and artists generally worked in the areas of demand.

As a result of these factors, although it was still quite expensive for an ancient Roman to hire a mosaicist to create a floor mosaic for one’s home, the cost of hiring one was merely that of hiring a skilled manual laborer, rather than hiring an “artist” in the modern sense of a person whose job description is to be creative and innovate.

ABOVE: Photo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website showing a Greek red-figure column-krater dating to between c. 360 and c. 350 BCE, depicting a statue workshop with a sculptor finishing a statue of Herakles

Feedback loop of limited market resulting in limited supply resulting in higher cost

Finally, in economic terms, the fact that, in the twenty-first century, elaborate floor mosaics are only in demand for a very small market leads to there being relatively few jobs for skilled mosaicists, which makes it economically less viable for someone to make a living that way, which, in turn, leads to a lower number of highly skilled mosaicists.

This limited supply results in the skilled mosaicists who do exist charging higher rates per service, which results in floor mosaics being even more expensive than they would be in a world where floor mosaics were all the rage. The higher cost of paying someone to create an elaborate floor mosaic, in turn, makes it harder for people who might want to have a floor mosaic to afford one.

This is, incidentally, the same reason why so many academic books are so expensive. Specialist academic publishers like De Gruyter Brill know that the market for the books they publish is extremely small and that the main buyers are well-funded university libraries, which will buy their books even if they cost a hundred dollars or more per volume. They therefore anticipate that they will sell a certain number of copies to university libraries and very few more, so they cut their losses by only printing a limited number of volumes. Then, because only a relatively small number of copies exist, each individual copy ends up being very expensive.