Finding Lost Antioch: exhibition, catalogue, programs

Kondoleon succeeded in bringing together the five mosaics pictures (often called insets, or emblemata, in the scholarly literature) that paved the triclinium, now dispersed among four museums. For the part of the decorative border not available she substituted full-color photographic reproductions set into place on the floor. This installation achieved visually what no combination of plans, drawings, and texts could do: it gave the viewer a chance to imagine what it would be like to enter and circulate through the fountain court of a luxuriously decorated house. Of course, it was not possible to provide the view that a diner had in antiquity. For that, the visitors would have had to walk into the dining room itself and recline on a couch.

I, for one, wished there had been some way of showing how the three couches (three klinai, hence the word triclinium) were set up, and just how the diners managed to support themselves on their left elbows while eating with their right hands. In addition to the portable couches (made of wood or bronze; several were recovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum), tables for food would be arranged near the couches. In the triclinium featured in the exhibition, the U-shaped decorative border of trompe-l'oeil diamonds designated the places for the three couches.

Roman dining etiquette not only followed the Greek custom of reclining, it also codified the social pecking order by assigning a name to each position on the couch. For example, the guest of honor reclined on the leftmost place on the rear couch, meaning that he or she bad the best view out of the room. Studies of what a diner saw looking out from this position reveals that architects, wall painters, and mosaicists set up features to reward this viewer. (4) In the Antioch show, the reward for someone looking out from the room (and these would be the diners on the rear and left-hand couch) was--as reconstructed--several niches with statuary and a fountain. In the Cleveland installation, it was bard to imagine the triclinium as a room, since the curators decided to erect a fence around the "good parts" of the pavement (the picture insets) rather than build the low wall that surrounded the reconstructed triclinium at Worcester (Fig. 3). All sense of the diners' couches as positioned against the walls of a U-shap ed room disappeared, and for the uninformed viewer the picture mosaics became a viewing puzzle. Why were the pictures along the crossbar of the T right-side up while the other two, on the stem of the T, looked upside down?

I would have liked a model of the room with couches and diners in place, showing just how they looked and what they were looking at: both the mosaics on the floor and the view out to the nymphaeum. Curiously, in the standard scholarly literature on dining all you will find is a much-reproduced diagram of the arrangement of diners' bodies on the three couches. Only recently, in Stephan Mols's book on the wooden furniture at Herculaneum, do we find an artist's reconstruction of what ancient diners looked like (both in overhead view and from the entry to the triclinium). (5)