The Judgment of Paris in Roman Painting

The Judgment of Paris is one of a handful of extremely popular mythological narratives that dominate the corpus of extant Roman wall paintings. A recurring feature of the Roman compositions is a broad water channel that separates Paris from the goddesses. These intrusive channels, more than mere streams, can be seen as miniature, quasi-cartographic representations of the Hellespont, the famous strait that separates Europe from Asia. The arrangement may allude to the fact that the judgment indirectly caused the Trojan War, an event that in turn set in motion a permanent cycle of violence between East and West.