Archaeologists Found a Roman Mosaic in Britain That Tells a Lost Version of the Trojan War

Buried in an English field, a floor reveals a forgotten version of an ancient myth.

by · ZME Science
The most dramatic of the mosaic’s three panels, with a naked Achilles attacking Hector. Credit: University of Leichester

In the summer of 2020, during Britain’s COVID lockdown, Jim Irvine noticed unfamiliar pottery scattered across his family’s farm in Rutland. When archaeologists called to the site investigated, they uncovered a Roman mosaic of startling ambition: a 33-foot narrative floor showing Achilles and Hector at the climax of the Trojan War. It’s now known as the Ketton mosaic.

Nothing like it had been found in Britain for a century. Unlike the geometric designs common in Romano-British villas, this floor told a story, scene by scene, almost like a graphic novel in stone. It once lay in a triclinium—a formal dining room—where guests would have reclined and absorbed its drama between courses.

At first, the archaeologists assumed the images came from Homer’s Iliad, the best-known account of the war. The scenes seemed familiar: the duel, the corpse dragged behind a chariot, the grieving father seeking his son’s body. But on closer inspection, the mosaic seems to present an alternate version.

Details did not line up. Achilles and Hector fought from chariots, not on foot. Hector’s body bore wounds that Homer explicitly says the gods prevented. And most striking of all, Hector’s corpse was shown balanced on huge scales, weighed against gold.

What the evidence pointed to was not Homer at all, but a much older—and nearly vanished—version of the myth.

A Lost Greek Play

Panel 3 of the Ketton Mosaic shows Priam, king of Troy, loading a set of scales with gold vessels, to match the weight of his son, Hector. This version of the story is based on the lost play, Phrygians by Aeschylus. Jen Browning from University of Leicester Archaeological Services was able to reconstruct the burnt section by tracing the outline of the tiles. (©ULAS).

The scales changed everything. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles refuses ransom outright, later accepting gifts rather than gold by weight. But ancient historians preserved references to another version of the story, written sometime in the 5th century BCE by the Greek playwright Aeschylus.

The play Phrygians is lost today. What we know about it comes from scattered fragments and notes written by ancient scholars. These second-order sources describe a scene that feels shocking: Hector’s corpse is placed on scales and weighed against gold. Those same scholars point out that Aeschylus borrowed the idea from Homer, but made it brutally literal instead of poetic.

Other clues reinforced the link. Achilles drags Hector’s body around the tomb of Patroclus, not the walls of Troy. A small snake beneath the horses—a strange detail at first—turns out to be an old visual marker for a hero’s burial mound.

The full mosaic, showing panels running from right to left and damage from later phases of use. Credit: Historic England

Taken together, the mosaic preserves a version of the Trojan War that vanished from literature but at least survived in ancient images. As Hella Eckhardt, a Roman archaeologist not involved in the study, noted, the research reveals how myths moved “not just through texts but through a repertoire of images.”

The floor, laid in the fourth century A.D., became an unlikely archive of a fifth-century B.C.E. tragedy.

Roman Britain, Reconsidered

The mosaic also reshapes how historians view Roman Britain itself. Its designs draw on visual templates circulating around the Mediterranean for centuries—Greek pottery, silverware from Gaul, coin imagery from the eastern empire.

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Panel 2 of the Ketton Mosaic shows Achilles dragging the body of Hector behind his chariot, while Hector’s father Priam begs him for mercy. (©ULAS). A Greek vase from ancient Athens uses the same design 800 years before the Ketton mosaic: the waving figure, shield, chariot group, running figure with arms out and even the snake curled beneath the horses all come from the same schematic. (Boston 63.473 © MFA Boston).
Section of Panel 1 of the Ketton Mosaic shows Hector, prince of Troy, in his chariot. (©ULAS). A second-century Roman coin from Ilium in Turkey, labelled ‘Hector’, is an earlier example of the same design. (RPC 4.2.120 @ RPC online).

That suggests the artists, and the villa’s owners, were not culturally isolated. They participated in a shared imperial culture, one that prized classical education and recognized obscure mythic references. Choosing a niche version of the Trojan War would have signaled learning and status.

Hector’s body is weighed against gold, the crucial scene that is not in Homer’s account of the Trojan war. Credit: University of Leichester

Yet the floor’s later fate hints at changing times. Fires were lit directly on its surface. Parts were dug up. Graves were cut through the once-luxurious room. What a pity some might say.

Only a small fraction of the site has been excavated, and more discoveries may follow. But already, the Ketton mosaic has done something rare. It has restored a lost voice to an ancient story—and shown that, at the far edge of the Roman world, people were engaging with myths in ways far richer than historians once imagined.