House of Ephebe

I think I was making good time rushing through the archeological site of Volubilis with the hour that I was given by the cab driver. Apart from a few outstanding structures here, most of the places here involve some sort of mosaic. The mosaics are on the floor so if people would be able to get in here, they would have been trampled into oblivion. The solution was to cordon off the sensitive places such as where the mosaics would be. While this protects the mosaics from deterioration, it makes it very difficult to see what is actually here. Add to that the African sun which would make mosaics like these especially bright.

I was basically bouncing from one house to the next in Volubilis just going through all of them. The main difference between the houses is the mosaic that they have. Naturally, some people would prefer to have certain designs for their houses just as we do today. It is interesting how a lot of these designs are religious or mythology themed. I would have imagined that these kinds of designs would have belonged more to a temple rather than a house. The Houes of Ephebe features a mosaic which shows Dionysius or Bacchus as he is known in the Roman world. The figure can be clearly seen here but the female figure who is said to be Ariadne here is obscured. One could probably spend an entire day observing the mosaic and discovering various details here but alas, I only have an hour to go around the entire site.

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