Rhetorical education – specifically, the advent of the progymnasmata, or preliminary rhetorical exercises – taught students how to be Greek, and it appears to have been the root of many Hellenistic innovations in both art and literature. The wealthy and elite backgrounds of some Greek artists enabled them to be well educated, and their intellectualism aided their adult pursuits in oratory, teaching, and scholarship, not to mention art. Kings and courtiers, too, received Greek rhetorical educations, which allowed them to appreciate the rhetorically informed art in the courts. The courts also played a role in Hellenistic artistic production by drawing Greek artists around the ancient Mediterranean. The result of all this seems to be a standardization of Greek art that is analogous to a linguistic koine.

The modern spectator’s first contact with Sosos’s now lost Unswept Room mosaic whets her appetite. Many handbooks illustrate it with a detail of a mosaic in the Vatican’s collections (Pl. I). Decontextualized, this close-up looks like a distinct composition, and it seems divorced from the rest of the mosaic in the Vatican Museums (Pl. II); from its ancient context in a Roman house; and from the lost mosaic in Pergamon on which the whole Vatican mosaic is based. What is more, this close-up contains modern restorations and additions – including its most famous and memorable feature, a mouse nibbling on a cracked nut. Yet it is intriguing. Here, the spectator sees hyperrealistic representations of all manner of discarded scraps from the table, complete with the shadows that they cast: a lobster shell, a crab leg, grapes, grape stalks, chicken bones, sea shells, nuts, and a fig. This small excerpt, then, leaves her hungry for more.