Pompeii

by Mary Beard

  In Pompeii we come face to face with this issue, in practice, in a set of baths situated just outside the city walls, next to the Marine Gate, and known now as the Suburban Baths. Excavated in the 1980s, these baths were a private commercial operation, located on the ground floor of a building which had domestic and other accommodation above. Much smaller than the public bathing complexes in the town centre, and with no sign of a women’s section, their attraction must have been the wonderful views they commanded over the sea, which bathers could enjoy from a spacious sun terrace (this was not the place to come to exercise). First built in the early first century CE, these too were undergoing repairs at the time of the eruption.

  85. The men’s changing room from the Stabian Baths, before its restoration. Clearly visible are the stuccoed ceiling and, on the right, the ‘lockers’ for leaving clothes.

  Their modern claim to fame is the changing room. High up on one wall you can still see eight scenes of athletic sexual intercourse, mostly couples (one of which may be two women), but also a trio and a foursome enjoying group sex (Ill. 86). These now survive on one wall only, but originally they would have appeared on two other walls, adding up to perhaps twenty-four different varieties of sexual position in all. Under the erotic scenes themselves, we find paintings of a series of wooden boxes or baskets, each one numbered (I–XVI still survive). Why the pictures of sex, and why combine them with pictures of numbered boxes?

  The most likely answer lies in the simple fact that this was the changing room. Unlike the equivalent in the Stabian Baths, there were no built-in niches to leave your clothes, but still visible are the traces of a shelf running round the room under the paintings – on which individual boxes or baskets would have been placed. The paintings above serve to number the various baskets and to give the bather an amusing aide mémoire for remembering where he had left his kit: ‘number VI – that’s the threesome’. Others have wanted to push the interpretation further and suggest that these paintings acted as an advertisement for a brothel on the upper floor, or even as a menu of options for sale (‘Half an hour of number VII, please’). Perhaps this is also a case (as ‘in certain provinces’ ) where the slave girls in the changing room were doubling as prostitutes. Perhaps the graffito near one of the entrances to the upper floor, apparently advertising the services of Attice for the (high) price of 16 asses, is to be connected to these paintings.

  Figure 19. The Suburban Baths. This small set of privately owned, commercial baths, was arranged around a large central terrace overlooking the sea. The notorious erotic paintings come from the changing room.

  86. The changing room of the Suburban Baths. The details of the design may now be hard to make out, but on the lower register a series of numbered boxes is shown, in perspective (here III to VI). Above each one is a scene of love making.

  We do not know. But there is a curious sting in the tail to the story of these paintings. Although we can now see eight of them in quite good condition, they all seem to have been painted over sometime before the eruption. The decoration of the rest of the room was left untouched: someone wanted to cover up just these. Why? One argument suggests that there had been a change in baths manager (and no longer one with an investment in the supposed brothel upstairs). But maybe it was an even simpler explanation.

  Maybe even some Pompeians had occasionally had enough of pictures of sex.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FUN AND GAMES

  The throw of the dice

  A fourth-century CE Roman historian, with little time for the poor, referred disdainfully to the strange snorting noise that you might hear, late at night, in the taverns of the city of Rome. It was nothing to do with any sexual fun and games; it came instead from the gaming tables. The players were so intent on their dice that they produced this disgusting sound, as they drew breath into their rattling nostrils. This is one of the rare occasions where we can instantly reconstruct the sound of Roman life – a sound that would no doubt have been heard loud in the bars of Pompeii where, to judge from the paintings we looked at in the last chapter, gaming and dicing were a major accompaniment to the food and drink.

  We do not know exactly what game the men in the paintings were playing. Roman board games, like our own, came in many different varieties, with different titles. ‘Little Robbers’ or, perhaps, ‘Little Soldiers’ (latrunculi) was one of the favourites, and was certainly played at Pompeii; for one election poster offers a candidate the support – unwanted maybe – of the ‘latrunculi players’. Another which is often mentioned in Roman literature was called ‘Twelve Writings’ (duodecim scripta). No rulebook survives for any of these games, and there have been all kinds of scholarly attempts to reconstruct the play from casual references. Latrunculi, for example, may have involved trying to blockade or hem in your opponent’s pieces in a way somewhat reminiscent of modern draughts. But most of them, then as now, followed the same basic principle: a dice throw allowed the player to move his counter or counters on the board, or towards the winning goal; the sheer chance of the fall of the dice was the crucial element in success, but varying amounts of skill could no doubt be deployed in the movement of the pieces. There was certainly enough skill involved for the emperor Claudius to write a book (sadly lost) on the art of alea, a generic term for such dice games.

  Gambling on the outcome was also a crucial element. Tavern games could win the contestants a lot of money, or lose it. One graffito from Pompeii boasts of a particularly spectacular win: ‘I won at Nuceria playing alea, 855½ denarii – honestly, it’s true’. This was a grand sum, amounting to 3422 sesterces, which was almost four times the annual pay of a legionary soldier. Most prizes must have been much lower, as the lucky winner at Nuceria hints with his insistence on the truth of his claim. All the same, it helps us get a little closer to understanding the social level of Pompeian café culture. These men may have been humble, and very poor by the standards of the local elite, but they still had a bit of time and cash to spare. Gambling is not, and was not, an occupation of the destitute.

  The Roman authorities legislated against games and gambling of this sort with an enthusiasm that they never showed for regulating prostitution. Ineffectually no doubt, and with glaring double standards. For it is clear that all these games (as the emperor Claudius’ passion for them shows) were played right across the social spectrum. Gambling was such a distinctively Roman habit that one eccentric theorist in the first century BCE could argue that Homer must have been a Roman, because he depicts the suitors of Penelope in the Odyssey playing dice. No gaming boards actually survive from Pompeii, though they have been found elsewhere in the Roman world. The Pompeians presumably played on wood. And there is a good deal of debate about whether the objects sometimes identified as dice throwers are not in fact small cups. But gaming counters and dice have been found right across the town, including in the very richest houses: a couple of lovely dice, and a handful of counters, were discovered in the House of the Menander for example.

  It was tavern, rather than domestic, gaming that the Romans wanted to restrict. Why? Partly, no doubt, because it risked destabilising the social and economic hierarchies. A culture which ranked its members so strictly by the amount of wealth they owned would almost inevitably resist the idea that the mere throw of the dice could change a person’s status. Seen in those terms, the man who had his windfall at Nuceria was not simply lucky but a dangerous disruption of the social order. But an interesting recent suggestion is that the problems of the Roman elite with tavern gaming also related to more general questions in Roman culture about the use of leisure (otium). How was leisure properly to be spent? What was the right time for leisure? Were particular leisure activities suited to particular contexts only? Was gaming acceptable within the confines of a rich private house but not in a bar?

  But proper or decidedly improper, dice and gaming were a favourite leisure activity in Pompeii. As we move on now to consider other ways of using otium – the shows and spectacles which, with th
eir theatres and Amphitheatres, have left a much bigger imprint in the archaeological record than a humble game of dice – it is worth reflecting that more man-hours were spent (or wasted) at Pompeii at the gaming board than were ever spent in front of actors or gladiators.

  Starstruck?

  Pompeii was a theatrical town. In 79 CE it had two permanent stone theatres, though in varying states of disrepair. One went back to the second century BCE but was refurbished and enlarged by Marcus Holconius Rufus so that it would seat some 5000 people (Ill. 87). Parts of the permanent brick stage set are still visible, as well as the fittings for the curtain (in Rome the curtain did not fall, as in the modern theatre; it was pulled up from the ground). The other, directly next to it, was a smaller Covered Theatre seating up to 2000 people, erected in the early years of the Roman colony by the same men who built the Amphitheatre (Ill. 69). By the time the first permanent stone theatre was put up in the city of Rome in the 50s BCE, financed from the spoils of Pompey the Great’s Eastern wars, little Pompeii had had two theatres for almost two decades.

  More than this, if you walk through the richer houses of the town, or through the galleries of paintings and mosaics now in the museum at Naples, you are repeatedly confronted with images of the stage, drama and theatrical performance. The name of the House of the Menander, as we have seen, is taken from the painting of the fourth-century BCE Greek comic dramatist in the central niche of the peristyle, directly aligned with the main entrance to the house (Ill. 44). Menander is shown seated holding a papyrus roll; he is clearly named both under the chair and on the roll. Opposite him was another similar figure, now barely visible, but almost certainly representing another dramatist: Euripides is one guess.

  A nice complement to the Menander are two mosaics from the Villa of Cicero just outside the city walls. Made out of exquisitely small tesserae, they are ‘signed’ by their artist: Dioskourides of Samos. One shows three women seated drinking round a table, the other a group of musicians playing tambourine, cymbals and flute (Plate 1). All the figures wear theatrical masks (one of the women is an impressive ‘old hag’), showing that these are scenes from plays, not real life. But which? A lucky find of similar mosaics on the Greek island of Lesbos, but this time with titles, makes it almost certain that they are intended to be scenes from comedies of Menander: the women are taken from his Women at Breakfast; the musicians probably from his Girl Possessed by the Gods (in which music is used to test out whether a girl who says she is possessed really is). Meanwhile a scene from a tragedy of Euripides, The Children Heracles, has been identified in a painting in the House of Casca Longus. Again the characters are shown fully masked, and the painting makes a companion piece to a scene taken from some unidentified comedy, featuring a wonderfully pot-bellied old slave holding forth in front of a young couple.

  87. The view towards the stage of the Large Theatre – and towards the more spacious seats for the elite on the front rows. The wooden stage in this photograph has been inserted for a modern performance.

  There is an interest in the backstage world too. The mosaic that held pride of place in the centre of the tablinum in the House of the Tragic Poet showed actors getting ready to go on stage (Plate 17). The performance for which they were preparing was neither a traditional tragedy or comedy, but a ‘satyr play’ – a kind of lusty burlesque that in the fifth-century BCE Athenian theatre had followed a series of three tragedies, offering the audience some much-needed light relief. In this scene the couple on the far left are already wearing the distinctive goat costumes of the chorus in this style of show (a chorus made up of satyrs – half-goats, half-men). The rest of the company is not entirely ready yet. The actor at the back is still squeezing into his costume (another goaty-outfit), the flautist is practising his tunes, while the director in the centre is giving his final instructions. At his feet and on the table behind are masks waiting to be put on – though these also serve as a signal to us of the theatrical nature of the scene. In fact, throughout the repertoire of Pompeian domestic decoration, masks such as these are one of the commonest elements, perched on those fantastic painted architectural extravaganzas or floating in the middle of walls. It as almost as if the theatre provided a model for the whole spectacle of Pompeian wall-painting itself: painting made a theatre out of a house.

  The big question is how we put these paintings and mosaics together with the surviving remains of the theatres themselves. We have seen on other occasions that the decoration of house or bar may reflect, in idealised or humorous form, the activities of the residents and the painting’s viewers – whether drinking, dining, or gambling. Do these scenes of the classics of Greek drama on the floors and walls of Pompeian houses suggest that the local theatres were the venues for revival performances of this kind of play. When the duoviri sponsored dramatic performances as part of their required munificence to the town, did they choose reruns of old and rather upmarket favourites, such as Menander and Euripides, in Greek or in Latin translation?

  A few modern scholars have thought so. But the short answer is that we have little hard, direct information on what was performed in either of these theatres, nor how often performances in them would have taken place. Unlike the gladiatorial fights, for which we have almost the ancient equivalent of programmes, no playbills or painted advertisements for shows in the theatres survive. Most historians have been unconvinced by the idea that classic Greek drama was much in evidence on the Pompeian stage. There are, after all, no examples of it in the literary quotations scrawled on Pompeian walls (in fact, these include no recognisable quote from any play at all, except for a single line from a tragedy of Seneca). And many of the paintings and mosaics which depicted classical drama were no doubt based on famous works of Greek art and were intended as a more general symbolic reflection of the cultural world of ancient Greece and its symbols. They were not a direct reference to local performances.

  The favourite candidates for the Pompeian stage have usually been various Italian genres. Often cited have been so-called ‘Atellan farces’, a type of comedy of which only a few fragments survive, but is supposed to have been originally an Oscan invention. Featuring stock characters such as Manducus, the glutton, or Bucco, the braggart, they have been compared to the Morality Plays of the Middle Ages. Also in the frame are other styles of Roman comedy, such as survive in the plays of Plautus and Terence, and even performances that are not theatrical in our sense of the word. One idea is that the Covered Theatre was not designed for drama at all, but was built to be the assembly hall of the early colonists.

  All of these suggestions are perfectly possible, but no more than that. Some careful detective work, however, does allow us to get a little closer to the staples of the Pompeian stage. Scholars have only recently turned their attention to two genres of theatrical performance, again very largely lost, that were hugely popular, among emperors as well as paupers, in Italy during Pompeii’s last hundred years or so. They are mime and pantomime. Mime came in many forms, performed as street entertainment, in private houses, as short interval entertainment in the theatre and as the main feature. Ribald comedy, going under such titles as ‘The Wedding’, ‘The Fuller’ or ‘The Weaving Girls’ (perhaps, as one scholar has suggested, the ancient equivalent of a play called ‘The Swedish Masseuses’), it was played by both male and female actors who, unusually, did not wear masks. Sometimes it was improvised according to the lines of a plot invented by the Archimimus (‘chief mime’); sometimes it was scripted. Despite the title and our own understanding of ‘mime’, it was not silent – but a mixture of words, music and dance.

  Pantomime was a different genre, usually tragic rather than comic, and certainly not to be confused with the modern performances of the same name. Ancient pantomime is more the ancestor of modern ballet than of our ‘pantomime’. Said to have been introduced to Rome in the first century BCE, it featured a star performer who gave a virtuoso display of dance and mime (in our sense of the word ‘mime’) to a libretto that was sung
by the supporting members of the troupe, male and female. These formed a vocal ‘backing group’, along with others who provided the music. The scabellum, or large castanets, was a distinctive, and noisy, part of the show. The star alone took all the different roles in the plot, hence the title: ‘panto – mime’, or ‘miming everything’. In the process, he changed his mask (which had a closed rather than an open mouth, as in conventional ancient theatre) to indicate the different parts he was adopting. All kinds of themes were performed, drawn from the repertoire of classic Greek tragedy, Euripides’ Bacchae, for example, or the story of Iphigeneia. Historians now reckon that there was more to pantomime than just degenerate theatre. It was probably one of the main ways that the general population in the Roman world picked up their knowledge of Greek myth and literature.

  There are clear signs that mime and, especially, pantomime were major attractions at Pompeii, in the theatre and at other venues. A portrait set up in the Temple of Isis commemorates a man called Caius Norbanus Sorex ‘a player of second parts’. Another statue of the same man stood in the Building of Eumachia in the Forum (the inscribed base, though not the portrait itself, survives), and another in the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi, just outside Rome, where he is called ‘mime actor in second parts’. He was presumably a member of a travelling mime company who worked in various places in central and southern Italy. Though not the lead player in his troupe, he had done enough in Pompeii (maybe he contributed to the restoration of the Temple of Isis after the earthquake) to be honoured by two bronze portraits. The fact that, as an actor, he was legally infamis (‘disgraceful’) did not seem to get in the way of public commemoration, ‘on land given by decision of the town council’, in the centre of Pompeii.