KITCHENS AND DINING ROOMS AT POMPEII ... - Get a Free Blog

five marble steps into a basin, whence a channel brings the water to a fountain on the top of a
marble table in the center of the outdoor dining-couches. The faces of these couches are covered
with sacro-idyllic paintings, depicting ca. twenty country shrines with statues and altars (and a
variety of gods and goddesses, many Egyptian) in the setting of the Nile. Parts of four broken
statuettes (two of Pan, a goat and deer, and a sleeping satyr) found in DH (17) as well as the life-
size bronze lamp-bearing ephebe stored at the NW corner of (15) are postulated to have
decorated the garden space between DH (17) and the DO. Five circular podia in the same area
might have held some or all of this sculpture. This garden context, with its sculpture, running
water and plantings, creates a new, composite, sacro-idyllic landscape, evoking gods of Egypt,
Greek nature gods, and also the traditional Roman household deities. The whole ensemble is
guarded on the E side by a fence running N-S that divides the garden in two, a fence topped by
four Herms, busts of Zeus, Hera, an unidentified woman, and a Bacchic child. The fence acts as a
temenos to separate the sacred area of the banquet from the utilitarian water basin and storage
area in the NE corner of the garden. The E half of the garden had no ritual material except for a
possible small terracotta altar, located in the vicinity of a marble table and semi-circular bench.
Synthesis
Allison (1992b, 287) has posited:
"the true owners of this house may well have departed from Pompeii long before
the final eruption and left it in the hands of a skeleton staff, while repair was
going on. This would help explain the lack of need for an entertainment area
and account for the occupancy concentrated in the area around atrium A'."
She is correct in seeing the operative division in the house laying between atria (A') and (A"), and
in hinting that the division was based on rank, not gender. 66 Three skeletons were found in the
cenaculum above DR◊(4); it seems possible that they were left behind to keep watch over the
property, either because the owner and family had previously fled, or because (as Allison
believes) they had been absent from Pompeii for some time. Slave quarters are likely centered
here; as Maiuri first suggested, DR/KI (7) seems a good candidate for a combination cooking and
dining area for the household staff. Perhaps even DR◊(4), redecorated in the 4th style, acted as a
reception room for the head of the staff, the procurator, as is hypothesized for the small house #17
in the Casa del Menandro (I.10.4).
66 Maiuri (1954b) mistakenly saw a division based on gender; he postulated that this atrium was the
women's quarters, or gyneceum, and argued that the door was closed at #10 in order to keep the women
secluded from the outside world.
264