Achilles on Skyros in the Emblema from the House of Poseidon at Zeugma: Caracalla and the Power of Images
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This iconographic and iconological analysis has shown the existence of a long tradition about this subject, that is Achilles on Skyros in the emblema from the House of Poseidon at Zeugma. This tradition dates back to the 1st century AD and it concerns the Roman mosaic and painting. The model of Achilles on Skyros travelled from the West to the East, especially from Italy (Rome and Pompeii) towards the eastern part of the Roman Empire. This model arrived in Zeugma on the Euphrates at the beginning of the third century AD, under Caracalla (211-217 CE). The rich owner (dominus) and client of the Poseidon Villa was to be a high officer of Caracalla belonging to Legio IV Scythica or Parthica. In fact Zeugma became the settlement of this Roman legion and the outpost against the Parthians, above all during the reign of Septimius Severus (193-211 CE) and under his successor Caracalla. The dominus of the Poseidon Villa made the imperial propaganda his own by choosing the subject of Achilles on Skyros, which was very favourite by Caracalla on the ideological level, as the subject of Alexander the Great (Cfr. Cassius Dio, Herodian, Scriptores Historiae Augustae). The myth of Achilles on Skyros is very ancient (Cfr. Cypria, Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides) and privileged by Roman (Domus Aurea) and Pompeian painting and mosaic dating back to the emperor Nero, ardent admirer both Achilles and Alexander the Great, as Caracalla.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".