On view
Mosaic pavement: Apollo and Daphne,
late 3rd century CE
Archaeologists uncovered this mosaic in a suburb of Antioch known as Daphne-Harbie, where it was originally displayed on the floor of an elite villa named the House of the Menander. A photograph of the site prior to its excavation is on view nearby, as is the original archaeological find card that describes it. The central panel depicts the two main protagonists: Apollo, the god of music and prophecy, who pursues a young woman named Daphne. According to the myth, after Cupid strikes Apollo with one of his arrows, he becomes obsessively enamored with Daphne, who had pledged herself to the cult of the virgin hunter goddess, Diana. As Apollo relentlessly chases the young girl, she begs for her father, a river god, to help her escape. In the moment shown here, Apollo grabs Daphne while the river god saves his daughter by transforming her into a laurel tree, ensuring that Daphne avoids Apollo’s assault. In his Metamorphoses, written in the first century CE, Ovid evocatively describes Daphne’s physical transformation:
Her prayer just spoken, dull weight grips her limbs
as slender bark enfolds her supple torso.
Her hair sprouts up as leaves, her arms as branches.
A stiff root clasps her foot, just now so swift.
The treetop takes her mouth. Just her gleaming beauty remains.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.548–52, adapted from a translation by Stephanie McCarter
More About This Object
Information
late 3rd century CE
Turkey, , Daphne Harbie
- Richard Stillwell, ed., Antioch-on-the-Orontes III: the excavations 1937–1939, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941)., cat. no. 198, pp. 167-168, pl. 41 and 45
- Doro Levi, Antioch mosaic pavements, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947).
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Frances F. Jones, "Antioch mosaics in Princeton", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 40, no. 2 (1981): p. 2–26.
, fig. 16, p. 9 (illus) - John Boardman, et. al., Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae (LIMC), (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1981-2009)., Vol. 1: p. 25, Acheloos 216
- Christine Kondoleon, Antioch: the lost ancient city, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
- F. Cimok, ed., Antioch mosaics: a corpus, (Istanbul: A Turizm Yayinlari, 1995)., p. 88-89
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Vanessa James, The genealogy of Greek mythology: an illustrated family tree of Greek myth from the first gods to the founders of Rome, (New York: Gotham Books: Melcher Media, 2003).
, - Susan Woodford, Images of myths in classical antiquity, (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)., fig. 127, 166
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Isabella Sandwell, Religious identity in late antiquity: Greeks, Jews, and Christians in Antioch, (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
, Digital image
