‘Saucy secrets’ from Pompeii

There has been plenty of media coverage over the past few days of new paintings discovered in a newly excavated small house at Pompeii. But allow me to say that, beneath such headlines as “Erotic frescos shed light on Pompeii’s saucy secrets”, I didn’t get the feeling that the valiant journalists reporting on the story really understood much of which they wrote! Many of the pieces were loaded with errors, and sometimes curiously mistranslating the Italian press release.

One described the classic Roman atrium, or central hall of a house, as being equipped with “a bathtub and shower” (no, the Italian “vasca”, used in the press release, here means not “bathtub” but “basin for collecting rainwater” … heaven knows where the “shower” came from). And the same culprits, wanting to compare the erotica in the new house with the painting of the man weighing his phallus from the House of the Vettii (pictured), claimed that that famous image had only just been discovered (wrong, it was brought to light in the nineteenth century, but the house has only recently been reopened after a restoration programme). And, in one account, the precise city block (or insula) where the new paintings were excavated was garbled, almost meaninglessly, into “the Amanti island insula”. Sure, it’s complicated, and insula does also mean “island”, but the correct translation would be “the insula, ie. block, of the Casti Amanti” (this city block takes its name from the large house of the so-called “Chaste Lovers” next door to the new excavations).

Fresco of Priapus, House of the Vettii, Pompeii

But enough finger wagging. If you want a reliable account, go to the Pompeii site press release itself, or read on – where I take a slightly different direction.

What first strikes you about these discoveries are the paintings (well illustrated here). They include a satyr (with characteristic dark flesh) assaulting a nymph and a typical, but rather splendid, version of a lararium or household shrine (they almost all have those distinctive snakes … “chthonic”, it is said).  But most intriguing is the painting identified as Phaedra and Hippolytus, clearly shown here. Their story is well known from Euripides’ play, Hippolytus: Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, is induced by the goddess Aphrodite to fall in love with her celibate stepson – the upshot being the death of them both. But no one has been mentioning the third person in the painting, an elderly woman. This must be the nurse of Euripides’ story, who brings about the tragic end by actually telling Hippolytus of his stepmother’s passion (which she had been keeping secret from him). In the painting, the nurse appears symbolically placed between the two of them.

“Hippolytus, Phaedra and nurse”, from Herculaneum | © Carlo Raso, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And no one has been mentioning another relevant fact: other very similar versions of the same scene have been found in Pompeii and Herculaneum (I’ve reproduced one and another you can find here). This raises the complex issue of the “originality” of some of the major mythological paintings at Pompeii. These renderings are not absolutely identical, but they are clearly closely related to one another. Do they all go back to a famous original painting that is lost (in other words, are these the ancient equivalents of the reproductions of famous masterpiece found on our own walls)? Or are we seeing part of the standard repertoire of one particular group of interior decorators in Pompeii, who had come up with a catalogue of scenes to offer their clients? Or some mixture of the two?

The main interest of the press release, though, is the design of the house. It is small but it has high-quality paintings (breaking the common rule that the larger, and by extension richer, the house, the better the decoration). So, it’s a strangely “bijou” residence.  But also unusual is the fact that it has no atrium – the central courtyard-space (minus the bathtub and shower) often seen as integral to Pompeian houses of middling rank and upwards. The atrium is what you enter from a narrow passageway leading from the street; it is around this that some of the main rooms of the house are laid out; and it is through this, with its lofty ceiling partly open to the skies, that visitors (and “clients”) would approach the master. For those of you who did the Cambridge Latin Course, it’s the arrangement exemplified there.

So why no atrium here, even though there would (just) be room for one? Is it merely idiosyncrasy? Or are we witnessing the beginning of a move away from the atrium design (which is certainly evident later) – and is that signalling wider changes in the kind of Roman social life that the atrium design underpinned? It’s a big question, but more interesting than the “saucy secrets”.

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