* * * * *
Pompeii has enriched, too, our knowledge of the ancient Italian’s relation to his gods. The archaeological documents for Pompeian religion include the temples, innumerable household shrines, wayside altars, frescoes, inscriptions, and graffiti. Of the ten temples, three, ruined in the earthquake, had not been repaired at the time of the final débacle, seventeen years later. One had reverted to the use of a private association, and two were dedicated to the Imperial cult, to which generally only lip service was paid. One piece of evidence on this is the cynical graffito from a farm in nearby Boscotrecase: “Augustus Caesar’s mother was only a woman.” Of the rest, only the temple of the Egyptian Isis shows real signs of the prosperity that comes from devout support. The truth is that the real god of Pompeii—as of most other cities ancient and modern—was the God of Gain. The state religion, cold and formal, offered little comfort: the warmth and promise came from Oriental religions, of which Isis-worship was one and Christianity another. There is no evidence of Christianity’s having penetrated Pompeii by A.D. 79, unless the ominous graffito, “SODOMA, GOMORA,” be taken as a sign. But Pompeii, close to the Italian end of the trade-route from Alexandria, is permeated with things Egyptian, and there is much evidence of enthusiasm for the cult of Isis. The earliest building stones of the temple (VII.vii) belong to the end of the second century B.C., and were thrown down in the earthquake of A.D. 62. But this temple was not left derelict: it was immediately reconstructed from the ground up in the name of a six-year-old boy, who was rewarded for his piety by honorary membership in the town council. The cult, with its promise of personal immortality, received rich gifts from its votaries. Its marble lustral basin, for holy water; statues and statuettes, including of course the goddess herself, with her rattle that kept off evil spirits; the striking bronze bust of an actor-donor; lamps; sacrificial knives; the ornamental marble curb of a well; candelabra, and rich frescoes, some with likenesses of white-robed, shaven-headed priests, which decorated the precinct and the walls, are now among the treasures of the National Museum in Naples.
Family cults flourished in Pompeii more than the official religion, to judge by the fact that nearly every house and workshop has its private shrine, usually housing busts of ancestors (for in this the Romans were downright Japanese), and adorned with a picture of a snake, representing the family’s Genius, or guardian spirit. Sometimes, as in the House of the Cryptoporticus, there is a handsomely decorated private shrine to one of the Olympian deities, in this case Diana. The trades had their patron saints: Mercury (god also of thieves) for commerce; Minerva, who invented weaving, for the clothmakers; the hearth goddess Vesta for the bakers. The front of the felter’s shop described above is emblazoned with a magnificent Venus in a chariot drawn by four elephants. Sex, too, had its enthusiastic worshipers: a dyer’s vat (IX.vii.2) bears a relief of an enormous winged phallus, set in a temple whose acroteria are also phalluses, of smaller size. But perhaps the perfect symbol of the religion of this tradesmen’s town is a fresco in the House of the Cryptoporticus, in which the family of Aeneas (the symbol of Rome) is shown guided to its destiny by Mercury, the god of trade.
* * * * *
Is all this great art? A fair answer to the question should come from an analysis of what is usually regarded as the masterpiece of Pompeian painting, the fresco in Room 5 of the Villa of the Mysteries.
This analysis must be prefaced by a word about the four more or less successive styles into which archaeologists have succeeded in dividing the vast corpus of Pompeian painting. The First (or “incrustation”) Style, found in buildings (e.g., at Palestrina) dated by their fabric and technique from 150 to 80 B.C., uses colored stucco to imitate marble dadoes, rusticated blocks, and revetments. The Second (or “architectural”) Style (80 B.C.-A.D. 14) imitates architectural forms, uses perspective, and throws the field to be painted open to mythical or religious subjects. The Third (or “Egyptianizing”) Style (A.D. 14–62) flattens out painted architectural detail into painted “surrounds” or frames for panels which look like hanging tapestries, worked out with fine detail in a miniaturist’s technique. The Fourth (or “ornamental”) Style (A.D. 62–79) features infinite vistas, with figures moving amid fantastic architecture. Examples of the last three styles are frequent in the Villa of the Mysteries, but the great sequence from which the Villa takes its name is of the Second Style and Augustus’ reign.
Fig. 8.15 Pompeii, Villa of the Mysteries, fresco: woman being scourged. (MPI)
In this sequence, against a background of brilliant Pompeian red, are painted, almost life-size, a series of twenty-nine figures subdivided into ten groups. At the left of the door in the northwest corner (as one enters from Room 4) a boy reads what is apparently a ritual from a papyrus roll; a woman, perhaps his mother, points to the words with a stylus. Next is a scene of ritual washing of a myrtle branch; one of the servers, in deep décolleté, and with pointed ears, carries the papyrus ritual roll at her waist in a fold of her stola. In the next group a fat, blonde-bearded, naked old Silenus plays a lyre, a faun plays his pipe, and his consort gives suck to a goat. Then comes the figure of a woman in motion so violent that her drapery swirls about her as she raises a hand in horror at one of the scenes that follows. But between her and the scene that repels her are three other groups. First, another trio, of a Silenus and two fauns. The Silenus is giving one of the fauns a drink out of a silver bowl; the other faun frightens the drinker with a Silenus mask held so as to be reflected in the surface of the wine. Second, the central scene, in the center of the east wall: a naked god, identified as Bacchus by the thyrsus (the staff tipped with a pine cone) which lies athwart his body, and by the vine leaves in his hair, leans back in the lap of a figure who must be his bride, Ariadne. Third, a kneeling woman unveils an erect purple-draped object, surely the Mystery of Mysteries, a phallus. Beyond her is the scene of horror ([Fig. 8.15]): a half-naked female figure with huge black wings raises a whip to scourge a woman, surely the candidate for initiation, who cowers, her back bare, her face buried, in the lap of a seated woman who strokes the victim’s dishevelled hair to comfort her. Beyond her a naked Bacchante whirls in an orgiastic dance, clicking castanets high in the air above her head. In the last two scenes a woman in bridal yellow, on an elegant ivory stool, does her hair while a Cupid holds a mirror. Another Cupid, with his bow, looks on. And finally, a matron, with her mantle draped over her head like a priestess, sits, leaning on a cushion of purple and gold, on a chair with a footstool, and watches gravely.
This fresco, which clearly portrays a Dionysiac ritual, and connects it with marriage and fertility, has undeniable power. It packs into a confined space—it is less than sixty feet long, on three sides of a room measuring only 16 × 23 feet—movement, rest, fear, horror, magic, abandon, and orgy. It illustrates better than anything else from Pompeii how the Augustan age assimilated Hellenistic Greek art into an Italian idiom. Yet somehow the final impression, here and in lesser examples of Pompeian painting, is that the artist is working from a memory of great paintings seen in collections or museums, from a repertory, or from sketch books of famous works of art. His work is well above the inn-sign or wallpaper level, he is competent and sophisticated; no hack, but no genius either. And so, with all respect for the natural enthusiasm of the excavator, the question with which this section began must be answered in the negative. This is not great art, but it is the next thing to it, and no modern bourgeoisie since the sixteenth-century Dutch has had the taste to fill its houses with such able work. But we must conclude that the great value of Pompeian art is in documentation, of the practical taste of ordinary people.