Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

Last week we introduced the Megetto Mosaic, and we are returning this week to the Megetto

Mosaic to talk about five things.

There's probably 50 things we can say about this. Find, but let's limit

ourselves to five. First, it is signed by the artist. Quote, Bruchus has carried out the work,

it says. So far, only about a hundred or so mosaics have been uncovered that have been signed by their work.

Of course, there were thousands of these mosaics created.

It was quite a process.

You'd first have to prepare the ground.

You'd have to make sure that it was perfectly level.

And then they'd come in and put a layer of plaster over that ground floor, and then someone

would come along and draw the designs into the plaster, and then you would have the final piece

of the puzzle. You would arrange the tiles. These tiles were called tesseri, and a tessalarius was a mosaic floor maker.

And so the maker of the Megetto mosaic was Bruchus.

The second thing about this mosaic is that it mentions a centurion.

One of the panels says,

Gyanus, also called Porphorus Centurion, our brother, has made the mosaic at his own expense as an act of generosity.

Let's pause here for a moment. It's 230. Christianity is illegal. Gyanus, that's his Latin Latin name, Porfirius, that's his Greek name.

He is a centurion and he funded.

He is the donor behind this mosaic and he's called our brother.

He's a Christian.

So that's remarkable.

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