Ancient object
The Alexander Mosaic
Floor mosaic in opus vermiculatum
Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples
Object provenance
Record checked- Object
- Floor mosaic in opus vermiculatum
- Material
- Stone and glass tesserae, roughly a million of them
- Dimensions
- Approximately 5.8 by 3.1 metres
- Made
- Evidence level: Probablec. 100 BCE
- Copy of
- Generally held to reproduce a lost Hellenistic painting, sometimes attributed to Philoxenos of Eretria on the strength of a passage in Pliny. The attribution is an inference.
- Found
- Evidence level: DocumentedThe exedra of the House of the Faun, Pompeii
- Excavated
- 1831
- Inventory
- Not recorded in this catalogue
- Identification
- Evidence level: ProbableAlexander confronting Darius III in battle
Usually identified with Issus and sometimes with Gaugamela. The mosaic carries no label and the identification is an art-historical inference from the terrain and the composition. It should not be captioned as certainly one battle or the other.
Condition — Substantial losses, particularly on the left side. Recent conservation has addressed structural problems arising from the nineteenth-century mounting.
Read across
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.