( fl c. 200 BC). Ancient Greek mosaicist active in Egypt. His work is known from a signed floor at Tell Timai in the Nile Delta (now Alexandria, Gr.–Rom. Mus.), in which SOPHILOS EPOIEI (Gk: ‘Sophilos made’) is set in two lines in black tesserae on a white floor. It appears to date to c. 200 BC or possibly a little before. At the edge of the rectangular floor is a frame of black crenellations; in the centre is an emblema in opus vermiculatum framed in isometric meander, with the inscription and a bust of a woman wearing a headdress in the form of a ship’s prow (see ALEXANDRIA, §2(iii) and fig. 2). This representation also appears in a circular emblema of coarser execution and apparently later date from the same site (now Alexandria, Gr.–Rom. Mus.). The figure has usually been interpreted as a personification of Alexandria, but Daszewski pointed out that figures that certainly represent the city are quite differently conceived and suggested that these are portraits of a Ptolemaic queen, probably Berenike II (reg 246–221 BC), and speculated that the mosaics derived from a contemporary painting. Strips of lead are used to contour forms in the headdress in Sophilos’s panel as well as in the pattern border. These were a regular feature of figurework in pebble mosaic from the later 4th century BC onwards, but this is their latest appearance on a tessera figure, although they continued to be used in borders.

• Sophilos (fl c. 200 BC)
  • Alexandria, §2(iii): Hellenistic and Roman mosaics
  • Greece, ancient, §VII, 1(iii): Mosaicists
  • works
    • Greece, ancient, §VII, 1(iv)(a): Mosaic motifs and subject-matter: Patternwork
    • Greece, ancient, §VII, 2(iii)(c): Mosaics: Tessera
    • Mendes
    • Mosaic, §II, 1(i): Historical survey: Ancient Greece