Personifications and paideia in Late Antique mosaics from the Greek East*

Archaeological sites in the Eastern Mediterranean, Syria and Turkey, have yielded a rich supply of mosaic pavements dating to the fourth to sixth centuries AD, a significant number of which feature personifications of abstract concepts. Perhaps the best-known examples of these were excavated in the 1930s in Antioch on the Orontes and its suburbs, but more recently important examples have also been found in Apamea and Shahba-Philoppolis in Syria and Nea Paphos on Cyprus. Regardless of the different ways in which abstract personifications are deployed on eastern mosaics, they share a common feature–the use of name labels to identify the personifications. One of the earliest commentators on the phenomenon of abstract personifications at Antioch was Glanville Downey. In a 1938 article, he declared that the personifications in the Antioch mosaics 'furnish new and noteworthy evidence of the analytical and subjective attitude toward moral and personal values which is characteristic of the late Graeco-Roman period'.