Laudator Temporis Acti

Mosaic of a symposium, on display at Musée de la Vigne et du Vin, Chateau de Boudry, Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Katherine M.D. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 64, with note on p. 221:

Occasionally, however, a different method is adopted of alluding to the wealth and variety of food served at a meal: through the representation of its debris. The type of mosaic known as asarotos oikos, or 'unswept room', goes back to a Hellenistic conceit devised, as Pliny tells us, by the mosaicist Sosos at Pergamon.⁶⁵ This original itself is lost, but a handful of later mosaics imitate or adapt the concept, the earliest of the first century BC.

65. Plin. HN 36.184.

Recent discussions:

• Ehud Fathy, "The asarotos oikos Mosaic as an Elite Status Symbol," Potestas. Revista de Estudios del Mundo Clásico e Historia del Arte 10 (2017) 5-30
• Joshua J. Thomas, Art, Science, and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean, 300 BC to AD 100 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 191-197 ("Sosos's Unswept Room")
• Ehud Fathy, "In the Guise of the Popular: the Deceptive Image of the asarotos oikos Mosaics," Eikón Imago 11 (2022) 31-46