Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum has been both exhibited as art and censored as pornography. The Roman cities around the bay of Naples were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, thereby preserving their buildings and artefacts until extensive archaeological excavations began in the 18th century. These digs revealed the cities to be rich in erotic artefacts such as statues, frescoes, and household items decorated with sexual themes. The ubiquity of such imagery and items indicates that the treatment of sexuality in ancient Rome was more relaxed than in current Western culture. However, much of what might strike modern viewers as erotic imagery, such as oversized phalluses, could arguably be fertility imagery. Depictions of the phallus, for example, could be used in gardens to encourage the production of fertile plants. This clash of cultures led to many erotic artefacts from Pompeii being locked away from the public for nearly 200 years.
The Samnites were an ancient Italic people who lived in Samnium, which is located in modern inland Abruzzo, Molise, and Campania in south-central Italy.
The Villa of the Papyri was an ancient Roman villa in Herculaneum, in what is now Ercolano, southern Italy. It is named after its unique library of papyri scrolls, discovered in 1750. The Villa was considered to be one of the most luxurious houses in all of Herculaneum and in the Roman world. Its luxury is shown by its exquisite architecture and by the large number of outstanding works of art discovered, including frescoes, bronzes and marble sculpture which constitute the largest collection of Greek and Roman sculptures ever discovered in a single context.
Dame Winifred Mary Beard, is an English classicist specialising in Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.
The Getty Villa is an educational center and art museum located at the easterly end of the Malibu coast in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. One of two campuses of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Villa is dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The collection has 44,000 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities dating from 6,500 BC to 400 AD, including the Lansdowne Heracles and the Victorious Youth. The UCLA/Getty Master's Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation is housed on this campus.
The Villa of the Mysteries is a well-preserved suburban ancient Roman villa on the outskirts of Pompeii, southern Italy. It is famous for the series of exquisite frescos in Room 5, which are usually interpreted as showing the initiation of a bride into a Greco-Roman mystery cult. These are now among the best known of the relatively rare survivals of Ancient Roman painting from the 1st century BC.
Phoenix Ancient Art, located in Geneva and New York City, is a second-generation antiquities dealer specializing in Greek and Roman ancient art. Its works of art have been purchased by arts and antiquities private collectors as well as museums such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre Museum in Paris. They have historically dealt in antiquities from the Sumerian art and Ancient Roman artistic traditions, as well as from Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian civilizations.
Wilhelmina Mary Feemster Jashemski was an American scholar of the ancient site of Pompeii, where her archaeological investigations focused on the evidence of gardens and horticulture in the ancient city. She is remembered for her contributions to archaeobotany at Pompeiian sites, as she developed methods for preserving the remains of roots from antiquity, known as root casting.
Marion True was the former curator of antiquities for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. True was indicted on April 1, 2005, by an Italian court, on criminal charges accusing her of participating in a conspiracy that laundered stolen artifacts through private collections and creating a fake paper trail; the Greeks later followed suit. The trial brought to light many questions about museum administration, repatriation, and ethics.
Eumachia was a Roman business entrepreneur and priestess. She served as the public priestess of Venus Pompeiana in Pompeii as well as the matron of the Fullers guild. She is known primarily from inscriptions on a large public building which she financed and dedicated to Pietas and Concordia Augusta.
Clothing in ancient Greece refers to clothing starting from the Aegean bronze age to the Hellenistic period. Clothing in ancient Greece included a wide variety of styles but primarily consisted of the chiton, peplos, himation, and chlamys. Ancient Greek civilians typically wore two pieces of clothing draped about the body: an undergarment and a cloak. The people of ancient Greece had many factors that determined what they wore and when they wore it.
A lunula was a crescent moon shaped pendant worn by girls in ancient Rome. Girls ideally wore them as an apotropaic amulet, the equivalent of the boy's bulla. In the popular belief the Romans wore amulets usually as a talisman, to protect themselves against evil forces, demons and sorcery, but especially against the evil eye. Lunulae were common throughout the entire Medditeranean region while their male counterpart, the bulla, was most popular in Italy. In Plautus' play, Epidicus asks the young girl Telestis: "Don't you remember my bringing you a gold lunula on your birthday, and a little gold ring for your finger?" An explicit definition is provided by Isidore of Seville: "Lunulae are female ornaments in the likeness of the moon, little hanging gold bullae." But in Plautus' play Rudens, Palaestra says her father gave her a golden bulla on the day of her birth.
Ettore or Eduardo Ettore Forti was an Italian painter, who was prolific in depicting realistic Neo-Pompeian scenes of Ancient Roman life and events. These subjects were popular in the late-Victorian period, as exemplified by the popularity of Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
The Pompeii Lakshmi is an ivory statuette that was discovered in the ruins of Pompeii, a Roman city destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius 79 CE. It was found by Amedeo Maiuri, an Italian scholar, in 1938. The statuette has been dated to the first-century CE. The statuette is thought of as representing an Indian goddess of feminine beauty and fertility. It is possible that the sculpture originally formed the handle of a mirror. The yakshi is evidence of commercial trade between India and Rome in the first century CE.
Barbara Elisabeth Borg is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. She is known in particular for her work on Roman tombs, the language of classical art, and geoarchaeology.
Miriam Anna Leonard is Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College, London. She is known in particular for her work on the reception of Greek tragedy in modern intellectual thought.
Rubina Raja is a classical archaeologist educated at University of Copenhagen (Denmark), La Sapienza University (Rome) and University of Oxford (England). She is professor (chair) of classical archaeology at Aarhus University and centre director of the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet). She specialises in the cultural, social and religious archaeology and history of past societies. Research foci include urban development and network studies, architecture and urban planning, the materiality of religion as well as iconography from the Hellenistic to Early Medieval periods. Her publications include articles, edited volumes and monographs on historiography, ancient portraiture and urban archaeology as well as themes in the intersecting fields between humanities and natural sciences. Rubina Raja received her DPhil degree from the University of Oxford in 2005 with a thesis on urban development and regional identities in the eastern Roman provinces under the supervision of Professors R.R.R. Smith and Margareta Steinby. Thereafter, she held a post-doctoral position at Hamburg University, Germany, before she in 2007 moved to a second post-doctoral position at Aarhus University, Denmark. In 2011–2016, she was a member of the Young Academy of Denmark, where she was elected chairwoman in 2013.
Several non-native societies had an influence on Ancient Pompeian culture. Historians’ interpretation of artefacts, preserved by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, identify that such foreign influences came largely from Greek and Hellenistic cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt. Greek influences were transmitted to Pompeii via the Greek colonies in Magna Graecia, which were formed in the 8th century BC. Hellenistic influences originated from Roman commerce, and later conquest of Egypt from the 2nd century BC.
Sarah B. Pomeroy is an American Professor of Classics.
Emily Hauser is a British scholar of classics and a historical fiction novelist. She is a lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter and has published three novels in her 'Golden Apple' trilogy: For the Most Beautiful (2016), For the Winner (2017) and For the Immortal (2018).
