Pompeii, Part 2
In my previous post, I focused on the Lupanar in Pompeii and what it reveals of Roman attitudes toward sex. More intriguing even, at least for me, was the Villa dei Misteri or ‘Villa of the Mysteries.’ This well-preserved ancient Roman villa sits at the suburban fringe of Pompeii and is especially notable for a series of stunning life-sized frescoes that unfold like a graphic novel on its interior walls.
Wall mural, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii
The tragic irony here, as in all of Pompeii, is that the destruction of Vesuvius preserved what would otherwise have been lost to the millennia. Buried under several meters of volcanic material for almost 2000 years, the Villa dei Misteri and its frescoes survived virtually intact. As a result, these frescoes are now considered the best surviving examples of Roman painting we have (precious few examples of Roman painting have survived to modern times).
Silenius and Satyrs, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii
Even more, the images here are thought to be depictions of something historians know little about: Roman mystery cults. Running the length of one wall then turning the corner and continuing on another, we get a glimpse of Roman affluence, religion and pagan rituals. The murals reveal a narrative that most historians think is a depiction of the initiation of a young woman into the rites of a Greco-Roman mystery cult.
And that’s where the actual mystery in the Villa dei Misteri comes in: no one knows for sure exactly what those rituals actually involved. The initiation rites of ancient Roman mystery cults have been lost to the ages, partly because strict secrecy was usually imposed on participants and, also, because the rise of Christianity brought about the systematic destruction of all things pagan.
Wall mural, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii
In spite of this, scholars have, over the centuries, been able to piece together some general knowledge of these pagan cults, referring to them as ‘Dionysian’ or ‘Bacchian’ because of various thematic elements associated with the Greek god, Dionysus.
Dionysus, of course, was the god of wine, freedom, intoxication and ecstasy—the latter I’ll leave to your imagination… The Romans preferred the name ‘Bacchus’ rather than Dionysus, but they are essentially the same. The frescoes in the Villa dei Misteri are thought to portray what have come to be known as ‘The Dionysian Mysteries.’
One of the main features of these mystery cults was the use of intoxicants like wine and other botanicals, along with dance and music to induce altered states in participants so they might shed their inhibitions and return to a more ‘natural’ state. Not so different from a Grateful Dead concert or something like the Coachella festival.
Of the seven panels of frescoes in the Villa, my favorite had to be the fourth. On this panel a young satyr is offered a bowl of wine by Silenius, tutor and sidekick to Bacchus (…satyrs were ‘nature spirits’, with ears and tails something like a horse, and a usually supremely erect member very much like a horse…of course, satyrs were notoriously randy…)
Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii
Behind them, another mischievous satyr holds up the terrifying mask of a demon so that it’s reflected in the bowl of wine the first satyr is drinking from. Sprawled out near them, a drunken and barely clothed (post-coital?) Bacchus lays across the lap of a goddess (unfortunately, the mural suffered some damage here as her upper body is lost…)
One other aspect of the Villa that bears mentioning here is the discovery of bodies of victims found during excavations. More precisely, these were the cavities left behind from victims buried by the pyroclastic flow of Mt. Vesuvius. In the mid-nineteenth century, Giuseppe Fiorelli, archaeologist in charge of the excavations at Pompeii, realized that one could fill these cavities with plaster-of-Paris as if they were sculptor’s molds to produce casts of these victims at the moment of death. The technique is still used today, though resin is used instead of plaster-of-Paris as it preserves any remaining bones.
Buried victim, Pompeii
The resulting casts are both poignant and horrific as they depict the last terrifying seconds of the victims’ lives. You can almost imagine what they must have felt as they saw a wall of pyroclastic lava and debris racing at over one-hundred miles an hour toward them. In some of the casts, victims are crouching in horror, while in others they appear to throw their arms up in the manner of Fay Wray cowering before King Kong. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by these casts.
(A recent article in The Guardian online discusses how the intense heat of the pyroclastic flow, about 900 degrees Fahrenheit, turned victims’ brains to glass: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/22/mount-vesuvius-eruption-victim-brain-glass)
As I left the Villa and continued wandering Pompeii’s streets and ruins, I thought about those victims, their identities lost to eternity, and the idea that we are all history in the end, some that will be remembered, most forgotten. But it also seemed useful to view Pompeii in a more contemporary context.
Buried victim, Pompeii
For over a thousand years, Rome was the colossus of Western civilization, first as a republic, then as an empire, and ultimately, becoming Byzantium, which lasted until the fifteenth century. All told, that’s almost two millennia of Roman civilization existing without significant degradation of the land, air and seas upon which it depended.
Contrast that history with ours and try to imagine what some future visitor might find walking among the ruins we would ultimately leave behind. In only two centuries we’ve managed to degrade the land, air and seas vastly more than the Romans had in almost two millennia.