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By Root 2774 0

the cases around the gallery in which the image of Christ is displayed you can see hoards of silver vessels, spoons and even pepper pots like the one in Chapter 40. They show a society that seems to have accommodated itself comfortably to both paganism and Christianity. A great silver dish found at Mildenhall in Suffolk shows Bacchus drunkenly cavorting with pliant nymphs, while the spoons found in the same hoard carry Christian symbols. A pagan dish with Christian spoons: that pretty well sums up Britain at this period, and it wouldn’t have disconcerted anybody at the time. In the Britain of the third and fourth centuries Christ was merely one god among many others, so the pairing of Christ with Bellerophon is not as incongruous as it might initially seem to us. The historian Professor Eamon Duffy explains how Jesus fitted in to the pantheon:

The image of Christ is not, I think, an attractive one; there’s that Desperate Dan chin! What impresses me is the juxtaposition of the image of Christ with powerful imagery from pagan mythology, the whole story of Bellerophon, Pegasus and the Chimaera. Christianity adapts that material for its own purposes to convey the message of resurrection, the triumph of life over death, and the implicit comparison of Christ’s work on the cross to a hero slaying a monster. That paradox – that the defeat of the founder of Christianity is actually a heroic victory …

Bellerophon is a figure of life triumphing over the powers of darkness. Eventually that kind of symbolic imagery would find its own Christian versions in figures like St George killing the dragon, or St Michael the archangel fighting the devil.

I wonder how many of the people who crossed this floor realized that they were walking from one world to another, from the familiar realm of myth to the new modern world of faith. Everybody would recognize the energetic Bellerophon. They might be less sure who was represented by the still figure facing away from them on the other side of the room, because very few of them would ever before have seen Christ represented. After all, how do you represent a god that you have never seen? There was nothing to go on – no likeness, no model, no description of what Christ looked like. It is a testing conundrum, both theologically and artistically, and I think we can all sympathize with the Dorset artist who had to confront it. Orpheus and Bacchus would have been easy in comparison – Orpheus would be wistful, young, artistic-looking, Bacchus energetic and sexy, clearly ready for a good time. And both of these would be recognizable by their attributes – Orpheus would have his lyre, Bacchus a bunch of grapes or something similar. At this time there were no such physical attributes associated with Jesus. Few people would have wanted to show the victorious, all-powerful Christ with that shameful instrument of suffering, the cross. He had told his disciples that he was the way, the truth and the life, but it is very difficult to show any of those physically. He had announced that he was the light of the world, but it’s really hard to show light in a mosaic, especially if, as here, the artist was, frankly, not very good. Instead of a symbol, the mosaicist at Hinton St Mary gave him the monogram with which we started – the Greek (‘Chi Rho’). In our mosaic, it lies like a halo behind Christ’s head.

The roundel showing Bellerophon riding Pegasus and overcoming the Chimaera

The Chi Rho was the symbol adopted by the Roman emperor Constantine after his conversion to Christianity in the year 312. Our floor was almost certainly made about forty years later. (We can be pretty confident of that, because both Christ and Bellerophon wear their hair in the fashion of about 350.) And it was Constantine’s conversion at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge that made our floor possible. Before he converted, no villa owner would have dared display their Christian faith so brazenly – practising Christians had been persecuted. But now, everything was different. Professor Dame Averil Cameron, of Oxford University, explains: