The arithmetic of the floor is what makes the lettering interesting. The panel field measures about 5 by 3.6 metres [6], roughly 18 square metres [20], and carries 15 panels in three rows [6]. Two of those are mythological, a gorgon that Ozgen reads as possibly Medusa and a winged horse possibly Pegasus [8], which leaves 13 panels of birds, fish and felines [21]. Exactly two of them carry names [11], about one animal in six or seven [22]. The average panel works out near 1.2 square metres [23], so roughly a metre on a side, large enough for lettering a standing guest could read.
Placement carries more of the argument than the words do. Ozgen puts the cat as the first panel a visitor met on the left, with the running dog on the right [12][13], in the room he identifies as the main reception hall, whose floor was the largest and most elaborate in the house and greeted anyone arriving from the courtyard [7]. Two named animals flanking the arrival axis of the most public room fits his reading of them as familiar signs of ownership and household identity [17] better than it fits a private memorial.
He writes that the two were likely familiar to the residents rather than specifically pets [17], and the pet inference for the cat rests on posture: a relaxed animal seated on a blue-green cushion rather than a stray [14][12]. That is a fair reading of an image. Whether either animal ever lived in the house is something the floor itself cannot confirm.
Both proposed etymologies are geography. Ozgen notes that emeralds were mined in the desert of Roman Egypt and suggests the villa's owner may have been a merchant with North African connections [15]; Adramytteion was a harbour city, so Ocean's name may have come from the surroundings [16]. The site is consistent with the merchant idea (a provincial capital in Asia Minor, a trading spot at the head of an Aegean gulf) without evidencing where either name came from [18].
On rarity, the available account of the study offers no count of how often animals in Roman mosaics are labelled at all [24], so calling this unusual is an impression rather than a measurement. What the floor does support is narrower and still worth having: a household in provincial Asia Minor, in the late second or third century AD [2], set two animal names in Greek where guests would read them before anything else in the room [7][12][13].
