There is a long-running story about the “returns” of stolen material to the site of Pompeii. Earlier in the year a tourist returned a few pieces of volcanic debris she had taken from the site (she apparently feared that the cancer she had developed was punishment for the theft). In 2022 a woman from Canada returned a few fragments of pottery, marble and mosaic, after a run of bad luck. The latest is more surprising. It is a small mosaic panel, apparently looted in the Second World War by a German officer, and recently given back to Pompeii by the family to whom the looter had given it,
It was, very likely, once the centrepiece of a mosaic floor, and shows a man and woman on a couch/bed (she is almost naked with her back to us; he is on the couch, largely obscured by the coverings). We have no idea where exactly it came from, neither which kind of room, nor which house in the town. To say that it must have been a “bedroom”, as some early reports have suggested is a bit misleading, for the simple reason that the Romans didn’t really have bedrooms. (An erotic mosaic from the House of the Faun was on the floor of a small room off the main “atrium” (“hall”), which may have been used for sleeping, among many other things.) But, whatever the uncertainties, at first sight it looks like a standard bit of erotica. One of the best set of photographs is here.
I haven’t seen the real thing. I have just been looking at the pictures online. They are more puzzling than you might think. The first is: what is the skin colour of the guy? Answer is “not sure”. This is a classic case where it is impossible to distinguish between the ancient convention of men being depicted with brown/black skin and the literal version that the guy was brown-skinned (we don’t know: but it’s a good case of that interpretative dilemma).
But I am also interested in what this pair are up to. It is called an “erotic mosaic”, but how erotic, or in what way? None of the reports have been at all explicit. So far as I know, there are no other Roman mosaics or paintings quite like this (and generally, they do run to type, variations on very similar themes). Is this, as it might be, a fairly modest preparation for a sexual encounter? Maybe. But as I read the photographs, it looks to me as if she is taking off the covers, in order to enjoy some oral sex (the tip of the man’s penis seems to be highlighted in white?).
If so, it is an interesting rediscovery. There is plenty of oral sex in Roman literature, and some in Roman art too. But not much Roman art celebrates it in quite this way.
I shall have to go and get a closer look.
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