Contents - Musée Maillol

with blind loggias that seem to appear like a trompe-l’oeil. Other scenes describe such and
such adventure of the gods or ancient heroes, modernised and made popular by poets of
the time. Here you can see the tools needed for writing and for doing accounts, such as a
stylet, wax tablets and a roll of papyrus. Our visitor then goes past the cubicula, dimly-lit
bedrooms and, next to the back entrance, he notices the venereum, a bedroom where
slaves were prostituted (a source of income for the household), on the walls of which are
pictures of lovers in positions that don’t need to be explained here.
Our man waits for the master of the house in one of the large rooms that open on to the
colonnade that surrounds the private garden. Walking across it, he stops for a moment to
see if the peacock on the railing is real or if it’s part of the fresco on the back wall, behind
bushes that actually are real. On the wall there’s also a niche decorated with mosaics, and a
fountain, or rather a nymphaeum. The fantastic world of nymphs – who lived in waters and
woods – is also evoked by the group of marble statues representing Pan and a satyr, as well
as by the oscilla, these mobile discs featuring satyrs and Silenus. And finally let’s not forget
the masks of marble and clay hanging between two columns of the peristyle, or the little
statues of animals with jets of water coming out of them.
At last we enter the triclinium, the dining room with beds in it, where they lie back to eat their
meals. The bedheads are shaped like young satyrs, or heads of swans or mules. On the low
brass tables there are finest ceramic plates with a reddish-orange sheen. Glass plates are
more ordinary but lighter, too, in an infinite variety of colours, from blue to lemon yellow and
iridescent green. In the Satyricon by Petronius, Trimalchio states that it’s better to eat and
drink out of glass than metal because glass has no smell; he even preferred it to gold,
though he did complain about its fragility, but then this mythical chef didn’t have to think
about money…. Still in the dining room we can see bronze meat skewers and precious silver
cups in ancient designs of unparalleled luxury. And then there are the little spoons with their
pointed handles designed to remove shellfish and other crustaceans from their shells. There
was plenty of technical progress in Pompeii, especially in the two appliances that could be
used for either heating or cooling drinks, depending on whether you put in a piece of coal or
snow – and in southern Italy it was more often the latter. As the evening begins to draw on,
we see the lighting of beautiful bronze lanterns (the luxury version of clay ones), either
perched high above the candelabras, hung from the trees or from some motionless youth,
also made of bronze.
Our visitor has other ways of observing the calibre of the people whose house he’s in: by
looking at the jewellery of the mistress of the house; or even just from the frescoes. In this
other triclinium, for example, the one showing Dionysis discovering Ariadne is so subtle that
it must have been painted by craftsmen who’d come from Rome. Elsewhere you can even
recognise the Emperor Nero in the guise of Orestes beside his cousin Pylades.
So the stranger knows that he is in a fashionable house and that his hosts no longer need to
go to the public baths to wash themselves, as they did not too long ago, because they have
a private balneum where you only need to turn on the tap to get running water from lead
8