Does the great scene in the apse ([Fig. 7.10]) harmonize with the interpretation? In it, on the right, a graceful veiled woman, holding the lyre of a poetess, descends a cliff into the sea. She is pushed by a baby winged figure standing behind her. Beneath, waist deep in the water, a figure with a cloak outspread stands ready to receive her and escort her to the opposite shore. There, on another cliff, stands an imposing naked male figure, in his left hand a bow, his right outstretched in blessing. Behind him sits a young man thoughtfully supporting his head on his hand. Below in the sea yet another figure holds an oar and blows a horn in greeting. Any Roman intellectual would recognize the scene: it is Sappho, encouraged by Cupid, received by Tritons, blessed by Apollo, making the lover’s leap to join her beloved Phaon for eternity. This is not suicide, but liberation from earthly love into an eternity of perfect harmony of the senses with the sublime and the supernatural. The scene is consistent with the others, and provides a further clue to the interpretation of the whole, for Pliny the Elder, in his encyclopaedic Natural History, says that the myth of Sappho and Phaon was made much of by a sect called neo-Pythagoreans, inspired by the number-mysticism, and the belief in immortality, of their founder, Pythagoras of Samos, who flourished in the late sixth century B.C. These beliefs were refined in the Hellenistic Age, and taken up by heterodox Roman intellectuals.
This elegant underground chamber, so restrained and literary in décor, so small in size (it measures less than thirty by thirty-six feet) is just the place for a chapel for such an élite and aristocratic sect of ancient freemasons. The hypothesis is borne out by the discovery beneath the floor of the bones of a puppy and a suckling pig, the preferred pièces de résistance for a neo-Pythagorean cult meal, perhaps the meal that inaugurated the chapel.
And still other motifs in the stucco decoration strengthen the hypothesis, by stressing redemption, salvation, initiation: a winged victory; a soul arriving in the Isles of the Blest; a woman with a flower, symbolizing Hope; a scene of Demeter, the earth goddess, and Triptolemus, the hero of agriculture, of whom much was made in the Eleusinian mysteries. Other reliefs show the reverse of the coin: the punishment of the uninitiate. The satyr Marsyas is flayed alive for presuming to challenge Apollo to a competition in music. The Danaids, for the crime of murdering their husbands, perform forever the useless labor of drawing water in perforated jars. There are other sinners: Medea with her slain sons; Pasiphaë, the monstrously adulterous Cretan queen; Phaedra, trying her wiles on her sinless stepson; Hippolytus, over-chaste votary of the maiden-goddess Artemis; King Pentheus murdered, for scoffing at the Dionysiac mysteries; his mother, Agave, carries his severed head aloft in Bacchic frenzy. To these has not been given the true neo-Pythagorean vision of the truth; they are portrayed here to symbolize their doom to a private Hell of their own making.
Two long panels on either side of the spring of the central vault reinforce the general intellectual tone. In one, schoolboys recite their lessons before a seated schoolmaster with a ferule in his hand. In the other, the Muse of Tragedy attends the coming-of-age ceremony of a Roman adolescent. (Some interpret this scene as a marriage; if so, the sect will have allegorized it in some way.) We know that the sect was open to both sexes; reliefs in the wall-panels of the basilica show men and women making offerings.
The stuccoes of the vault were in excellent condition when found. (They have since suffered from dampness, now being corrected by air-conditioning.) Also, they show no traces of addition or repairs, but the wall-panels were desecrated in antiquity by vandals, the consoles for offerings ripped off, the lamps and chapel gear carried away. It looks as though the chapel had had a short life, and the cult a violent end. Will history provide a date? Tacitus mentions in his Annals a rich Roman, Titus Statilius Taurus, known to have owned property near the basilica, who fell foul of Claudius, was accused of practicing magicas superstitiones, and escaped his sentence by committing suicide in A.D. 53. The style of the stuccoes fits this date, the décor of the basilica fits the cult, its state when found fits Tacitus’ story. We may suppose that everything within reach was looted, the chamber filled in, and probably never seen again until the spring day 1864 years later when the landslide by the railway revealed its existence.
* * * * *
In 1907 the German archaeologist F. Weege, following in the footsteps of Renaissance explorers of 1488, made his way through a hole in the wall of the Baths of Trajan, near the Coliseum, to find himself in a labyrinth of underground vaulted corridors and rooms partly filled with rubble, which had once been part of an Imperial palace, the Golden House of Nero. Setting lighted candles at every turning to guide his way back, he explored as many as he could of the eighty-eight rooms of this small part of the palace-complex, sometimes crawling with lighted candle over rubble that filled a room nearly to the vault, while spiders and centipedes, and other nameless creatures scuttled away from him into the darkness.
The rooms had been filled with rubble by Trajan, with a twofold purpose: to make a firm substructure for his baths, and to continue the work of the Flavians in damning the memory of the conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste of the hated Nero. Thirteen hundred and eighty-four years later, when the underground rooms were rediscovered, among the visitors was Raphael, who decorated a loggia in the Vatican Palace in the style of the fantastic paintings on Nero’s walls. Since the buried rooms were grottoes, the paintings were “grotesques”—as often, the word has survived, while its history has been forgotten. Other visitors were Caravaggio, Velasquez, Michelangelo, and Raphael’s teacher, Perugino. The names of many a famous artist are scrawled right across the face of the ornaments of the vaults. An Italian poem, written not long after the discovery of America, speaks of artists’ underground picnics in the Golden House. The picnickers crawled on their bellies to enjoy their subterranean meal of bread, ham, apples, and wine.
The result of Weege’s more scientific investigation was the working out of a new plan. The western half of the complex ([Fig. 7.11]) proved to be conventional, with the rooms grouped about a peristyle with garden and fountain. Rooms 37 and 43 have alcoves: it is easy to imagine them as the Imperial bedchambers of Nero and his beautiful red-haired wife Poppaea. In Nero’s bedchamber were hung the 1808 gold crowns he won in athletic competitions in Greece, if competitions they can be called, when all the prizes were awarded to Nero in advance, and armed guards drove off all would-be rivals.
The eastern wing ([Fig. 7.12]) is more unorthodox in plan, and more interesting. The main approach opened into Room 60, the Hall of the Gilded Vault, so called from the ornate painted stucco ceiling, divided into round and rectangular fields in gilt, green, red and blue, depicting mythological and erotic scenes, very different in tone from the restraint of the subterranean basilica. Hippolytus, off to the hunt, receives a letter containing incestuous proposals from his stepmother Phaedra. Satyrs rape nymphs, Venus languishes in the arms of Mars, Cupid rides in a chariot drawn by panthers. And yet we are told that the painting in this pleasure dome was done by the solemn dean of Roman artists, Fabullus himself, the John Singer Sargent of his day, who always painted in full dress, wearing his toga.