INV. 020 · Mosaic
Alexander Mosaic (Battle of Issus)
◔ Under review
Alexander appears on the left, partly effaced, riding Bucephalus; Darius, in the center, with his arm outstretched. The mosaic is not contemporary with the battle: it is a Roman work depicting an event from the past.
Editorial note: The holding institution comes from the description of a derivative file on Commons and has not yet been checked against the museum's catalogue.
- Type
- Mosaic
- Nature
- Ancient object, later than the eventAn ancient object depicting events that predate it.
- Date of the object
- first century BCECaption of figure 3.1 in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman (p. 64).
- Depicts
- The Battle of Issus (333 BCE) between Alexander and Darius III, some two and a half centuries before the mosaic was made.
- Institution
- Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli
- Provenance
- Found in the Roman city of Pompeii.
- Image
- Magrippa (Wikipédia em inglês)Transferido da Wikipédia em inglês para o Commons por Piero
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0 ↗
- Retrieved
- Commons API, 2026-10-14
Sourced historical context
In 333 BCE, at Issus, Alexander confronted the Persian king Darius III. Darius survived, but the defeat signaled that Achaemenid power was nearing its end; power. The battle was depicted in a first-century BCE mosaic found at Pompeii.