A previously unknown building has been found within Hadrian’s Villa—the 1,900-year-old imperial complex of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Even more exciting, it is decorated with stunning artwork, according to archaeologists.

The building is filled with floor mosaics depicting abstract art along with patterns, marble revetments (wall façades), red and yellow painted wall panels separated by delicate vegetal designs, and nearly an entire ceiling fresco filled with mask-like faces, griffins, and sphinxes. Of course, given nearly two millennia, much of this artwork is in pieces—but it is striking nonetheless.

The building appears to be an apartment in a part of Hadrian’s Villa known as the Macchiozzo—a compound near the center of the property that combined luxury (like marble-faced walls) with utility (ramps and water channels).

So who lived in the apartment?

You may think something with so much lavish artwork was a member of the imperial family, but after archaeologists compared the site to similar structures at Ostia (ancient Rome’s harbor city at the mouth of the Tiber River), they concluded the resident of this apartment was not the emperor, but likely a high-ranking member of his staff.

However, this does not make the find any less important.

“Until now, scholarship has focused very much on the pageantry—the beautiful statues, the reception halls—and less on the workaday,” said Francesco de Angelis, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia, who has been leading a dig at the site, according to a Columbia statement.

Hadrian’s Villa has been viewed in the “pageantry” sense in the past, as the UNESCO World Heritage Site has long been used as a way to gain fascinating insights into the life of Emperor Hadrian (who ruled from 117-138 CE)—one of the Five Good Emperors of Rome, a fair and brilliant ruler, whose admiration for ancient Greek culture gained him the nickname of Graeculus (“Greekling”).

Besides building this enormous complex—which is nearly twice as large as the entirety of Pompeii—he is also known for building Hadrian’s Wall (in what is now the United Kingdom), and for deifying and spreading statues of his lover Antinous throughout the Roman Empire after he tragically drowned in the Nile.

But this villa is now offering views of those history often forgets—the personnel, staff members, and slaves who lived there even when Hadrian was away, as he spent nearly half of his tenure as emperor travelling to distant lands.

“How did they live, work, and worship?” asked de Angelis. “This intersection of high and low, quotidian and ceremonial, can be investigated by looking jointly at the grand architecture and decoration and the more ordinary spaces.”

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Image credit: Kevin MacNichol

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