How weird was sex at Pompeii?

I’m now on the way back from Chicago: 30,000 feet above a large lake to be precise, with a welcome glass of wine in hand.

As I know from past visits, Chicago is a wonderful city. But this time I saw not much of it except the room I was lecturing in, the inside of a friend’s apartment and some very good restaurants (including a café where I shared coffee with the excellent metrolingua.com). Plus whatever I caught sight of from car or taxi.

The truth is that I spent most of the time in self-imposed exile in the B and B where I was staying – a nice place, with excellent muffins, but a slight tinge of the Hitchcock about it all. You kind of felt that all that muffin-making must be a front for something rather more sinister. And I certainly didn’t venture to the basement floor, just in case.

Sight-seeing was off the agenda, because I was correcting the typescript of my Pompeii book which is due with the copy-editor on Tuesday (thank heavens for the Bank Holiday – or it would have been Monday). I have so far finished 4 chapters out of 10. The idea had been to get it finished before I went to Chicago, but that didn’t happen.

Luckily, in a way, the lecture I was giving was on the same general theme. It was called ‘Reconstructing Pompeii’. And it featured one of my favourite, as well as one of the most curious, erotic paintings from the ancient city.

I had a good time giving it, so I hope the audience enjoyed listening. The basic point I was trying to make was two-fold. First the Pompeii we see and visit is not the simple “city risen from the grave” that we tend to assume. It is the product of centuries of construction, reconstruction and ARTIFICE. I had plenty of pictures of the bomb damage inflicted by the allies in 1943 (plus some “after” shots, showing how the ruined ruins were put back together as if nothing had happened). I also had some nice pictures of the state the buildings were actually excavated in (which looks not all that different from the bombed versions).

But the other theme was how we tend to project our own assumptions and pet theories about the ancient world onto the ruins of Pompeii. There were lots of examples here. But the most memorable for most of the audience was, I am sure, one of the paintings from the walls of the “Bar on the Via di Mercurio”. (Another, tamer, image from the same series is on the right.) This has been almost totally destroyed, but we have an early nineteenth century copy of it. It depicts a couple making love, the man penetrating the women from behind, both of them carrying glasses of wine. Just to complete the performance, they are balancing on a pair of tight-ropes.

The picture at the top of this post shows the husband holding up the nineteenth-century version next to the hole in the wall where the original once was. Click on it to enlarge (as they say).

As you can just about see, enough survives of the bottom right-hand corner (a pair of feet and shins) to make it absolutely certain that the original did not have tight-ropes. Somehow the nineteenth-century artist has mistaken some shadows, or the ancient artist’s scratched guidelines, for the tight-ropes.

So far so good.

But in representing what other culture would the copyist find a couple of guidelines and assume that the original artist must have been intending not just show sex, with a glass of wine in each hand, but to turn the whole business into a circus act on a tight-rope too.

It’s not as if the original wasn’t quite weird enough already. But this is a nice vignette of our (or at least our nineteenth-century predecessors') assumption that Pompeii was full of very eccentric sex indeed – and of their, and our, determination to "find" it.

Comments

[FG]

Mary has the advantage of having seen the remnants of the painting in person. Here's what I see in the enlarged picture:
1. those parts which look like the woman's heel and underfoot may well be just stains or shadows on the wall; so the fragment is at least as likely to belong to the man's right leg -must be, if we go by the copy;
2. if those are the bloke's legs we needn't see more of him above, given the condition of the original (if nearly all of it has been destroyed, it has been destroyed);
3. it's unlikely that the ropes would remain attached to the stool? Perhaps, but then it doesn't have to be a real performance.

So you can either conclude that the Romans were nonsense, or that the 19th-century observers were nonsense. But then what am I doing here? Nonsense? I was thinking, not long before I logged on, how future centuries will marvel and smile at the antiquarian disputes of this small coterie in an age of alienation: whether Caesar's head was found in a river, and whether the two lovemakers were really acrobats....

[Bob Knowles]

Tony's Heathus Robinsonius would presumably have subscribed his picture with something along the lines of "Bona valent ut expectentur" (I'm assuming that by the time of Pompeii they'd have dispensed with the Classical rule about neuter plurals and singular verbs.)

But the various comments on the physical possibility of the tight-ropes seem to have [I've only skimmed - hence the hedging] ignored the magical foot-stool ("scabellum mirabile"?). Perhaps they discovered super-glue earlier than we thought.

b

[Mary]

Thank you Growltiger. I was hoping that someone would raise those queries...because it seems to me that, at the very least, there must be a bigger difference between the original and the copy than is usually assumed. If those are the bloke's legs, then he must be leaning over much more, else we would see a bit of him above.

[growltiger]

If the trace of foot and ankle on the wall corresponds to anything in the C19 fantasy/copy, it has to be the woman's right foot. So where did the man come into it? How do we know that the panel on the wall was ever anything like the copy? When was it obliterated, and how? Far more questions than answers. Alas, I cannot detect any trace of the tight-ropes (or guidelines), let alone any of the anatomical details. How sad.

[Lucy]

Wonderful article! Doggerel, is it possible that heterosexual romantic love was a minority taste - maybe some people (possibly considered either staid or slightly perverted by their neighbours) admitted to actually enjoying sex with women? I've heard (and believe) that most humans (not necessarily all) are geared towards bisexuality, but that society gets in the way and we go with the flow - thus, for example, 1950s Britain was heteronormative and you had to be actively adventurous/ dedicated to pursue (sp?) homosexuality, whereas something like the reverse might have been true in Ancient Greece.

Dunno, but it's a thought...

[doggerel]

On the other hand, is the idea of a "free woman" an oxymoron in classical terms?

[doggerel]

Tony's question about the purpose of sex in the ancient world has also been a puzzle to me. If men preferred sex with boys, as appears to have been true of the ancient Greeks, and also, in both Greece and Rome, could have sex at any time with any slave, male or female, what exactly was the purpose of sex with a free woman?
Has to be procreational and dynastic, and yet there is evidence of romantic love as well. eg the tombstone of Mercatilla, at Roman baths in Bath: Mercatilla, much-loved little toddler who died young, was the daughter of a freed slave whose master had married her. Now, why would he bother to marry his slave, and commemorate their daughter, except for romantic love?
It's all very interesting, and if there are any doctoral theses on the subject, Mary, we'd love a summary.

[FG]

Correction (of my own previous post, that is).
Concerning the Diomedes, when I said "like any other classical... statue" I was forgetting it was neo-classical sculpture I was talking about.
So remove "other", and the argument loses some, but not all its force. After Greek sculpture breaks out of the kouros/kore model, there are still many statues that look straight ahead -and just as many who look down or to the side.
But this then gives rise to two issues of interpretation: (a) whether the downcast or half-turned head is an aesthetic pose or is connected with some particular mythological episode, and (b) whether in the case of neoclassical examples it was the modern sculptor who had mythology in mind, regardless of what the ancients themselves thought.
I suppose what I am saying is that explanations should be tentative and nuanced, with reasons given.
With regard to the picture here, it might be the case that the rest of the series could be relevant to a resolution of the argument.

[anthony alcock]

Of course comparisons can be made, but not of the value-judgement type, which "my money's on".., gently or otherwise, implies. The most obvious comparison is that one site will provide quite detailed information about buildings, the other about institutions.

[Tony Francis]

We have many examples of sex from the ancient world. The predominant positions seem to be front to back (in Egypt and Pompeii) or with the woman on top - from Pompeii. I was told the latter position was extremely dangerous for the male, since certain parts could be dislocated by certain other large parts moving too robustly. It was a Vietnam vet from Desert Storm who said this was true. I shan't go into anatomic details. However, I have seen this unfortunate condition in the ER. Here are the questions: Just when did people turn around and do it face to face? Did this occur with the invention of the concept romantic love in the middle ages? Was a woman's only chance at status to bear the child of a powerful man in the ancient world? If so, was this purely an animal act of mating with no romantic purpose? So many questions - so many doctoral theses to be written attempting to answer them.

[Roger Goodacre]

This is clearly either a long lost sketch by Heathus Robinsonius - the double tightropes are a giveaway - or an early advertisement for Guinness (the picture is on a bar wall, and the glasses are not the right shape for wine), possibly playing on the theme of 'glass half empty or glass half full'. Scratch away a bit and I'm sure you'll uncover 'Guinness is Good for You' somewhere nearby.

[Richard]

Mediobogdum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardknott_Roman_Fort
The photo on the wiki page doesn't quite do justice to its remote location: taken from a different angle, it would have shown better the extent to which it is perched on the side of a hill, commanding the pass in the way a pill box might have done later. Very nice place, but I suspect the soldiers who served there thought otherwise, in winter at any rate.
And of course a great name: it is indeed in the middle of a bog...
All best,
Richard

[Richard]

... which might be a reason to be sceptical of blurbs which state that one is "the best evidence we have of life in the Roman empire" - which was rather what I was gently trying to suggest.

But of course it doesn't necessarily follow that the amount of information cannot be meaningfully compared. After all, it would not seem a silly statement to suggest that Pompeii was a richer source of evidence for the Roman world than e.g. the fort on Hard Knott pass in the Lake District ("Mediobogdum"). There's just more to talk about with regard to one than the other, even though a medium-sized Campanian town is a different sort of place from a northern British fort, just as Oxyrhynchus is a different sort of place from Pompeii (and yields different kinds of evidence).

But of course ranking sites this way is a lot less interesting than other questions to ask about them.

Anyway, since I mentioned Oxyrhynchus, I thought I might as well plug Peter Parsons' book at the same time.

All best,
Richard

[anthony alcock]

The two books (about Pompeii and Oxyrhynchus) will simply offer two quite different packages of information about the Roman Empire: (i) the physical remains of a city vs the written remains fished out of the rubbish dumps of a city that has completely disappeared and (ii) one city was in Italy, the other in Egypt. How one could be more informative than the other is beyond me.

[warmerwoollies]

Wrapped up warm, with a deep ink pen, looking for the original, trapped with a strong dash of Pope! Let's see: Beard translates Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish...Long view down the Minervan nose.

x

[Xjy]

Catalina, notorious wino,
Saw a girl bending drunk on a line, O!
And since her position
Suggested coition
He jumped on her horned like a rhino.

[arindam bandyopadhaya]

There is a remarkable similarity between the man and Lord Byron. Is there a connection?

Regards

[ajm]

Might you re-order the posts so that the comments can be followed in chronological order? Thanks.

[Mary]

richard..oh help..I can think of those rather more deserving of the title (or is it, as another mate said, a bit like 'Britain's leading entymologist?')
yes i am enjoying a large drink (whisky and lemon, for the foul cold!)
proofs, if only! This is the new world of publishing.. it was the basic text that i've just dispatched?

[Richard]

I hope you finished the proofs in time and are now having a drink... The Amazon link you put (with link-text "my Pompeii book" above) calls you "Britain's leading classicist" so don't leave any typos: you'll be letting the whole side down.

But does Pompeii really offer "the best evidence we have of life in the Roman empire"? My money's on Oxyrhynchus. All those letters, bills, tax returns, local government files, census returns, etc. (not to mention literary texts). And there is a recent book on that too, by Peter Parsons (everything translated: v readable). ISBN 13: 978-0753822333 (paperback).

But perhaps the blurb writer had in mind "life in Roman Italy".

It looks very interesting, anyway (and commendably cheap).

All best,
Richard

[anthony alcock]

The nicest detail of the reconstruction is the way the woman is balancing with her right hand on the wine flask. Good material for a bubble competition.

[Jerry Bradford]

This reminds of a discussion I recently had. The conversation was of or petaining to the Ancient Mayan calendar and the circular nature of historical events and their subsequent impact on popular society.

In essence, we are all cheeky monkeys to a greater or lesser degree.

Clearly this is an employer teaching the finer points of employer/employee relations over happy hour. In truth she is taking dicktation while he shares with his fair scribe the blunt truth about getting screwed in business...

[F.Gamberini]

Interesting. But hang on a minute; as you know, I like things to be properly analyzed and explained.
The original is almost entirely lost, so we only have the 19th-c. copy to go by. So little remains even of the pair of feet and shins that you cannot be absolutly certain the ropes weren't there. Not only are the couple holding glasses, they are balancing them on their palms, and the woman is balancing herself against a precariously upright vase on the low table. Perhaps we could suspend judgement: it might well be an acrobatic display, whether real or imaginary; after all, it's a tavern and the other picture shows a game in progress -perhaps you could tell us how the rest of the series compares.
You may be deconstructing too much -you did the same with the Diomedes at the V&A, claiming that he must have spotted treason because his head is half-turned (like almost any other classical and Hellenisistic statue).

[Paul Potts]

Yes, thanks. The first picture I've got and enlarged. But not the second.

And, XYJ, I am aways grateful to have Browning quoted at or to me, so thanks for that. But when I turn to his actual poems, I give up rather quickly. Same with Yeats, except some of the shorter ones. Someone ought to produce a book of bad good poetry - I don't mean the notoriously bad like one or two poets laureate I could mention or Willaim McGonagill or whatever his name was, but real stinkers published by otherwise reputable poets. The perpetrator of the first line of Shelley's Ode to a Skylark should be excluded from the canon forthwith, with much of the rest of his as well, but there's too much of that for my projected volume.

All good poets produced duff stuff on occasion, see Aristophanes on Euripides, and well, it's my idea, not my opinions that should be aired.

Paulo

[Tony Francis]

I think I have been co-corrupted by too many co-collaborators in this co-conspiracy of co-participants, in what is otherwise a wholly immodest display of ancient co-cohabitation. Perhaps the fair maiden from Pompeii was not a go-go girl, but rather a co-co girl. At least it is not a conspiracy of one.