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INTRODUCTION
It is now nearly 90 years since the Roman building known as the Villa Dionysos was discovered at Knossos.1 During this time there have been several campaigns of investigation on the site, with long intervals between. The surviving records are far from complete. The few published accounts are brief and scattered, and in some cases inconsistent. It seems therefore useful to bring the available sources of information together, and to attempt to form a coherent account of the history and nature of the building from them and from the surviving remains.
The site lies on the eastward-facing lower slopes of Monasteriaki Kephala, overlooking what was probably the monumental centre of the Roman city, Colonia Iulia Nobilis Cnossus, for many years the only colony in the province of Crete-and-Cyrene (Paton 1994, 142; Sanders 1982, 14). The ground rises behind it to the west and falls away to the north and east. The excavated remains consist of a series of rooms ranged round three sides (north, south and west) of a colonnaded courtyard (Fig. 1; Suppl.Fig. 1). These rooms form an integrated design focussed on the peristyle court, and appear to have functioned as the public reception area of what must have been a large domus. The full extent of the house is so far unknown, though it can be partly delimited by nearby excavations and by geophysical investigations to the south of the site.2 The rooms were very richly decorated, with marble wall panelling, painted plaster and elaborate plaster mouldings, and they have magnificent polychrome mosaic floors, three of which depict Dionysos and his attendants. The largest room, named by the excavators the oikos, is c. 8.5 m2; it dominated the western end of the peristyle, onto which it opened through a stately columnar entrance. The peristyle surrounded a courtyard garden, with an ornamental pool at its western end.
Fig. 1.
Site plan.
[Figure omitted. See PDF]
The house was ruined, apparently by earthquake, probably in the late second/early third century. The rooms on the south side of the courtyard collapsed rapidly. In this part of the site, smashed architectural mouldings, painted wall plaster and broken pieces of marble veneer were found lying on the floors, together with fallen...