Taphoi wrote:
If people were walking on the mosaic for over half a millennium, it is in remarkably good condition. Pompeii mosaics were only exposed for a century or so before the eruption, but exhibit very heavy wear patterns.
A completely untrue statement in every respect. Why on earth do you make up this sort of thing ? The mound/tomb mosaic is a 'pebble' mosaic, possibly the finest extant, and certainly among the finest. The earliest of these date to the 8 C BC from Gordion, and by the 5 or 4 C BC latest appear in Greece and Macedon, as evidenced by the famous examples from Olynthus [destroyed in 348 BC by Philip] and Pella. They reach their apogee of sophistication from roughly the Philip/Alexander era to circa 200 BC. [digression: if we were to judge solely by the style of this pebble mosaic, we would put its creation closer to 200 BC than 300 BC, but mosaic style is not at all dating evidence].
They are generally made of whole pebbles set in a matrix, usually concrete. The mosaics at Pompeii are of the 'tessellated' variety, which appeared initially in Sicily around the mid third-century, and became very widespread by 100 BC. They are made of small cubes of cut stone and sometimes other materials, set in concrete. These largely superceded the 'pebble' type in the Hellenistic world in the second century BC. ( I hasten to add that in the interests of brevity, these are broad generalisations and simplifications).
Now if there is one thing which can be said of a floor made of stone set in concrete, it is that it is extremely durable! For example, in Britain you can find mosaic floors made in Victorian and Edwardian times using identical techniques to the Romans, everywhere from great buildings such as museums and public baths right down to shop entrances which have been walked on by millions over the last 150 years or so and which show little or no signs of wear.
The older houses extant in Pompeii date back to the third century BC, and their mosaics to the second century BC, though they are difficult to date, precisely because of their durability and lack of wear. Many were thus some 200 years old when the eruption occurred, not "a century or so". I have visited Pompeii, Herculaneum and other Vesuvian villas, and the museums displaying their mosaics many times since the 1970's, and I can assure you that few, if any, show signs of wear at all, let alone "very heavy wear patterns".
This latter interpretation comes from the work of Martin Beckman, a Canadian who interpreted the current damage to the extant Alexander mosaic as "wear" from Romans crowding around to look at Alexander, while the owner of the house stood to the right of Darius on another damaged patch, and it assumes the damage occurred, and the concrete patches were put in as repairs, in Roman times. This mosaic was installed between 110 BC and 75 BC, in the second phase of building of the House of the Faun, hence this one mosaic is indeed about a century old. The House of the Faun was excavated between 1830 and 1832, and the mosaic discovered in 1831. Almost immediately it was painted, intriguingly, in completely intact form, by the Italian artist Michele Mastraccio . It is uncertain whether the mosaic was actually intact when Mastracchio painted it, or whether the artist simply used his imagination to 'fill the gaps'. The painting, along with the mosaic, are to be seen in the Naples museum. The mosaic was dug up and moved to the Naples Museum some time later in September 1843, and regrettably for Beckmans postulation, the damage might well have occurred in this process. Moreover the tesserae, each less than 4 mm across, are not worn at all, but completely 'missing' from the damaged patches. Nothing suggests any 'wear' on the mosaic, and there are no signs of any. If the damage really did occur in antiquity, it is far more likely to be due to the earthquake of AD 62, rather than 'wear' from feet standing around it, for the House of the Faun suffered serious damage in the earthquake and its after tremors and was still undergoing repairs in AD 79 when Vesuvius famously erupted.
And thus a very unlikely postulation about a single mosaic becomes
"... Pompeii mosaics were only exposed for a century or so before the eruption, but exhibit very heavy wear patterns."
, which is clearly nonsense to anyone with any knowledge of Pompeii mosaics, like so many of Andrew's assertions.
Taphoi wrote:
However, I am glad that we have finally agreed here in Pothos that Edson's paper does not prove that Olympias's tomb was at Pydna.
We have not "finally agreed" on this at all, since no-one said such a thing in the first place.
But on any 'reasonableness' or 'balance of probability' basis the likelihood is that the first Olympias wife of Philip ( formerly Myrtle) is buried somewhere around Pydna, where she was captured and almost certainly executed by Cassander, notwithstanding the red herring of Olympias II of Epirus, daughter of Pyrrhus, who lived in the 3 C BC, and has no known association with Pydna whatever.
I have the feeling that we shall all be enjoying 'schadenfreude' at Andrew's expense when he is hoist on the petard of his oh-so-many public media pronouncements about the likelihood of the Katsas tomb being that of Olympias.
