Abstract:

Animals were popular subjects for Roman mosaics, featuring in many contexts. In his influential book, Season Mosaics of Roman North Africa, David Parrish included a short section on animals symbolising the Seasons, appearing either with personifications or representing the Seasons by themselves. This article widens the discussion and looks beyond North Africa. It begins by examining mosaics on which personifications of the Seasons ride animals and continues with those in which the association is progressively less direct, with a view to analysing which animals can be shown to carry seasonal connotations and whether those animals were associated with more than one season. Mosaics in which four animals appear without personifications are also considered in order to assess whether or not they represented the Seasons. The presence of other seasonal imagery supports this idea, while factors such as the context in which the animals appear and the order in which they are shown can suggest an answer one way or the other. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that whenever four animals are depicted in a mosaic it is worth considering whether they might have seasonal associations, while bearing in mind that this will not necessarily be the case in every instance.

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