NAPLES, Italy – The Archaeological Sites of Pompeii have announced the discovery of a banquet room with walls decorated with friezes depicting the procession of Dionysus, part of the mystery religion dedicated to the god of wine, ecstasy, madness, and theater. The paintings resemble those found a century ago in the Villa of the Mysteries, located on the outskirts of Pompeii.
Overview of the banquet hall of the House of Thiasus, Pompeii [Archeological Sites of Pompeii]
According to the Archeological Sites of Pompeii’s press release, the frieze “depicts the procession of Dionysus, the god of wine: the bacchantes (also known as maenads) are portrayed as dancers, but also as ferocious hunters with slaughtered kid goats on their shoulders or holding a sword and the innards of an animal; young satyrs with pointed ears play the double flute, while another performs a sacrifice of wine (libation) in acrobatic style, squirting wine behind him from a drinking horn into a patera (shallow bowl). At the centre of the composition, there is a woman with an old Silenus who holds a torch, indicating that she is an initiate, a mortal woman who, through a nocturnal ritual, is about to be initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus, the god who dies and is reborn and who promises the same destiny to his followers.”
The paintings are nearly life-size, for which they are described as “megalography,” from the Greek term for a “large painting.”
Like some modern Pagan religions, many ancient cults of deities were based on initiation rites and secret knowledge. To be a member of this cult of Dionysus required undergoing the initiation rituals referenced in these paintings. Due to the presence of these paintings, the archaeological team has named this residence the “House of Thiasus,” after the Greek name for the Dionysiac procession.
Although the paintings depict a religious mystery, they also served a more mundane function as decoration for a busy banquet room. “These frescoes have a profoundly religious meaning, which, however, was also designed to decorate areas for holding banquets and feasts,” says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, “rather like when we find a copy of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the wall of an Italian restaurant in New York to create a little bit of atmosphere.”
The most famous literary depiction of the Dionysiac procession is the playwright Euripedes’s Bacchae, in which the god appears in Thebes, his mortal mother’s home, to take revenge on his family for denying his godhood. In the climax of the play, Dionysus lures the Theban king Pentheus to the mountains, where he is ripped limb from limb by Dionysus’s orgiastic female followers, the Bacchae or Maenads.
Detail from the Dionysiac Procession friezes at the House of Thiasus, Pompeii [Archeological Sites of Pompeii]
The Dionysiac depiction of women as Maenads was in stark contrast to the expected classical ideal of a woman as Venus. These Dionysiac women were, as Zuchtriegel notes, expressions “of the wild, untameable side of women; the woman who abandons her children, the house and the city, who breaks free from male order to dance freely, go hunting and eat raw meat in the mountains and the woods.”
Zuchtriegel argues that the Dionysiac friezes, both the newly discovered paintings in the House of Thiasus and the well-known works in the Villa of the Mysteries, display women moving between these two identities, the woman as Venus and the woman as Maenad: “Both the frieze in the House of Thiasus and in the Villa of the Mysteries show a woman as suspended, as oscillating between these two extremes, two forms of the female being at the time.”
Detail from the Procession of Dionysus at the House of Thiasus, Pompeii [Archeological Sites of Pompeii]
The newly-discovered friezes, like their counterparts in the Villa of the Mysteries, belong to the Second Style of Pompeiian painting, which can be dated to the 40s through 30s B.C.E. (Pompeii was famously buried in ash from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E., which simultaneously destroyed the city and left much of it remarkably preserved for archeologists to later excavate.) As such the paintings were already more than a century old before they were buried.
Unlike the Villa of the Mysteries, however, the friezes in the House of Thiasus introduce a new theme into the Dionysiac procession: hunting. “[Hunting is] evoked by the bacchantes as huntresses,” the Archeological Park’s statement says, “but also by a second smaller frieze that runs above the one with bacchantes and satyrs: this frieze depicts living and dead animals, including a fawn and a wild boar that has just been gutted, cockerels, various types of birds but also fish and seafood.”
Detail of the frieze at the House of Thiasus, Pompeii [Archeological Sites of Pompeii]
The House of Thiasus is just one component of a larger dig of the area, insula 10 of region IX of the archeological park. (The city is divided into nine districts, and from there into insulae, similar to city blocks.) Among other recent discoveries in the vicinity are a laundry; a bakery; two living rooms; a reception room decorated with images from the Trojan War; a bath complex; and a shrine, decorated with symbols of agriculture and the four seasons.
The House of Thiasus and the Dionysiac procession friezes will be available for visitors to see immediately as part of tours of the complex, although according to the press release, only two groups of 15 visitors will be able to see the friezes each day.
“In 100 years, today will be seen as historic,” said the Italian Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli, “because the discovery we are showing is historic.
“It is an exceptional historical document,” he continued, “and, together with the fresco of the Villa of the Mysteries, constitutes a one-of-a-kind, making Pompeii an extraordinary testimony to an aspect of life in classical Mediterranean life that is largely unknown.”
And as for the Dionysiac Procession: while glimpses of its past life remain in these newly-discovered friezes, its present life continues. Modern polytheist groups like Labrys in Athens don the guise of maenads and satyrs to welcome the coming of spring in the Falliforia parade. As our correspondent in Greece, Elyse Welles, noted in her coverage of last year’s Falliforia, “The ecstasy, freedom, excitement, and pure liberation is hard to put into words. Like a specter moving through the crowd, Dionysus’s energy was palpable: a pure, unadulterated joy that inspired even the quietest, most reserved participants to cheer and yell along with us.”
One imagines the residents of the House of Thiasus felt the same energy in their day.
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