Pompeii (55 page)

We cannot now know for sure. But there are intriguing consequences for the little Temple of Aesculapius, and a whole web of possible stories follow. That temple contained three terracotta statues: a full length pair, male and female, plus an instantly recognisable and crudely crafted bust of Minerva. For Winckelmann the male figure was Aesculapius (Ill. 105), which made the female Hygeia, his daughter and another healing deity – with Minerva thrown in for good measure. But suppose, for a moment, that the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva really was out of commission at the time of the eruption. Surely the Pompeians would have wanted to lodge its cult images somewhere safe. This trio found in the small temple would make an equally plausible Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. What is against them being those very statues from the Forum, temporarily lodging in the temple down the road?

105. One of the statues found in the Temple of Jupiter Meilichios: a terracotta image of a god who could equally well be Aesculapius or Jupiter.

Well, they are not very grand, and they are made of terracotta not marble. Minerva is only a bust. But in religion, sacred and showy are not always synonymous. Sometimes the most humble objects have the most religious power. Maybe – and it is only maybe – we have been looking in the wrong place for that Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.

Celebrating the gods: in public and private

Carved into an altar also found in the Pompeian Forum is a scene of that most iconic of ancient rituals: animal sacrifice. We see it here in its classic guise, as it was described by Roman writers and plastered across the Roman world in thousands of images from coins to triumphal arches. It repays a closer look. For there are details and distinctions that do not immediately strike the modern eye. In the centre is a tripod, serving here as a portable altar. Next to it, the sacrificer, whether a priest or a political official (for both conducted sacrifices on behalf of their community), is reciting the prayer, while pouring an offering of wine and incense. He is wearing a toga, but has pulled part of the material over his head, as was the rule when sacrificing. A musician in the background plays the double pipes, while behind him some attendants (including a child) carry more equipment, including just the kind of shaped bowls and jugs that you can now see filling the cases of the Naples Museum. On the other side of the tripod, the splendid bull is being led to the scene, by three slaves. These are specially dressed for the killing that they will shortly carry out, naked to the waist. One of them is holding an axe ready for the slaughter.

106. The sacrifice of a bull. This altar from the Forum shows – as is usual in Roman art – the preliminaries to the death of the animal, not the kill itself. The social and political hierarchies are made clearly visible, in the contrast between the semi-naked slaves managing the animal and the heavily-draped elite priest, to the left, reciting the prayer.

This is, of course, a very idealised image of a sacrifice. It is the equivalent of a commemorative group photograph or rather – given that it was sculpted on the front of a marble altar where sacrifice would actually have taken place – it offered to the participants in the ritual a perfect image of what they were doing. The bull is not only very well behaved, he is also very large. It has been estimated that an animal this size (assuming the human participants were of average height) would have carried some 500 kilos of meat on him. My guess is that real-life sacrifice was usually a less well-ordered occasion, and that the animals were smaller, and less expensive. But even so we can get a sense here of the occasion itself: the noise, the music, the imminent spilling of blood. We see too some of the hierarchical and social conventions of the ritual. The official sacrificer himself stands at the altar, heavily clothed. He speaks the ritual words but he is not going to labour at the kill nor bloody his hands. That dirty work is to be done by slaves, bared for the task. Even (or especially) at ritual moments the divisions of the Roman social order were clearly marked.

What was sacrifice for? It was, in part, an offering to the god. When the animal had been killed its meat was divided. Some of it was consumed by the human participants, some of it was sold off, but some was burnt on the altar – its savour wafting up to heaven as a gift to the gods. It could also provide a way of finding out the divine will. After the kill, experts (
haruspices
) would inspect the entrails of the dead animal for signs from the gods. When Julius Caesar, for example, was sacrificing just before his assassination, the story was that the animal was found to have no heart. A bad omen needless to say – though sceptical Romans pointed out that it was impossible for an animal to live with no heart.

But sacrifice also offered a model of how the world was ordered on a much grander scale. The repeated slaughter
of
animals
by
humans
to
gods was an emblem of the hierarchy of the cosmos, with humans in the middle between the beasts on the one hand and the divine on the other. And the sharing of the meat after the sacrifice, and the communal banqueting that sometimes went with it, reaffirmed the human community and its own internal hierarchies. (There were very few civic handouts in the Roman world that did not reassert social rank by giving more to the rich than the poor – an unsettling reversal of our own assumption that more should go to the needy.) Sacrifice was the closest thing the Roman world had to a creed – a creed in
action
. To reject sacrifice, as the Christians did, was tantamount to rejecting traditional Roman religion. Even vegetarianism was more than a moral or lifestyle choice. By not participating in the consumption of meat, vegetarians put themselves dangerously at odds with the social and cosmic order represented by sacrifice.

We would love to know more of the practical details of sacrifice at Pompeii. How was it funded? How many people actually witnessed it? Did the
duoviri
have
haruspices
on their staff, as is mentioned in the Spanish charter? How many shared in the consumption of the meat, and where did that happen? In Rome on some occasions tables were set up in the Forum. Could that have been done in Pompeii as well? How much of the meat was sold off through the butchers? And was it really the case, as some modern historians have claimed, that all meat ever consumed had been part of a sacrifice? I am not convinced. But if the building known as the
macellum
(‘market’) was primarily a meat market, then at least it was conveniently close to the main temples of the town.

We would also like to know more about when, and how often, sacrifice was performed. A sacrifice might be offered to a god in payment of a vow or to appease the gods after some disaster. It might mark major events or anniversaries: the accession of an emperor, the anniversary of a temple’s foundation, the inauguration of new civic officials or a god’s special festival. But exactly how often the distinctive, full-blown animal slaughter took place – rather than the cheaper ‘shorthand’ of wine, incense and grain, thrown onto the flames of an altar – we can only guess.

Interestingly the sculptor who showed the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva tottering in the earthquake depicted a sacrifice in progress right next door to it (Ill. 5). It has proved very hard to match up this large and distinctive altar, apparently decorated with the sculpture of a pig, to any monument anywhere in the Forum. But there is no need to read this literally, and certainly no need to suppose that a sacrifice had been in full swing at the very moment of the tremor. Much more likely the sculptor was attempting to capture the kinds of activities that symbolised the life of the town at the moment of its interruption. In the Forum, next to the temple, what else but a large bull being led to slaughter by a man naked to the waist, carrying an axe?

Ancient religious festivals could also be fun. We have very little idea how the participants, in Pompeii or anywhere else, reacted to the slaughter of the sacrificial animals. The poet Horace had some sentimental reflections on the young goat he intended to sacrifice (‘his head, swollen with horns, / newly grown, gives promise of love and battles; / in vain ...’). But Horace was unlikely to have been typical. And in any case the feasting which followed must surely have been a jolly and celebratory event. Many other ways of honouring the gods involved pleasure for their human worshippers too. We have already looked at shows, theatre and pantomime as part of Pompeian ‘Fun and Games’. Very often these were staged as part of a festival with a religious core. Drama in Italy, no less than in Greece, had its roots in religious celebrations. Many early ‘theatres’ were improvised from the steps of temples, the gods overseeing the performance from within. At Pompeii the Large Theatre is directly linked, by a monumental staircase, to the Triangular Forum and its Temple of Minerva and Hercules – a connection which points to the religious aspect of drama here too.

We happen to know most about Pompeii’s festival of the god Apollo. Almost certainly there were festivals of plenty of other gods too. But thanks to the surviving epitaph of Aulus Clodius Flaccus (p. 198) we have a brief order of ceremonies for the ‘Games of Apollo’ on three occasions when Flaccus, as
duumvir
, was sponsoring the proceedings. We have already discussed some of the range of spectacles he presented: bullfighters, boxers and pantomimes. His epitaph also stresses the ‘procession’ that was a part of all this. Processions were another distinctive element in ancient religion. Priests, officials of various sorts, clubs and the representatives of particular trades paraded through the streets. Sometimes the images of gods came too, even brought from the temples themselves, or other displays transported on floats or those portable platforms carried shoulder-high. Accompanied by music, by the sprinkling of incense and (if there was a generous sponsor) by presents thrown to the spectators, these festivities put the city, its officials, its representatives and its gods on display – to itself.

By definition, processions are transitory affairs and tracking their progress through the town is difficult. How would anyone be able to reconstruct from any material remains the routes of the London Lord Mayor’s procession or of a royal wedding? One theory, as we have already seen, holds that the road which leads from the old temple in the Triangular Forum to the main Forum – largely traffic-free and free of disreputable elements such as bars – was a major processional route in the city, and imagines parades moving between the old religious centre of the Temple of Minerva and Hercules and the new focus in the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. It may have been so. But, whichever precise route they took (and that surely must have differed according to the occasion), we have some evidence in sculpture and painting of what the displays might have looked like.

We glimpsed in the last chapter the procession that led to the games in the Amphitheatre. An extraordinary painting from the façade of what was probably a carpenter’s shop, just opposite the Bar on the Via di Mercurio, captures the style of display even more vividly. Most of the paintings discovered on the outside of this building have been lost. According to early copies, they featured a trio of gods and goddesses – Mercury (often associated with trade and commerce), Fortuna (for good luck), Minerva (who was regularly the patron of crafts and craftsmanship) – plus Daedalus, the mythical craftsman who most famously built the Labyrinth for King Minos and made the wings which brought about the death of his son Icarus. But luckily one scene was long ago removed to the Naples Museum (Plate 5). It shows another of those portable platforms (or
fercula
in Latin), like the one carrying the model blacksmiths in the Amphitheatre procession. This one is also being carried by four bearers. It must be heavy, for the men use sticks to support themselves, and it appears to be rather more elaborate than the earlier one – with a canopy and a frame decorated with flowers and foliage.

Displayed on the
ferculum
are three groups of model figures. At the back is an image of the goddess Minerva. This part of the painting is badly damaged, but part of her dress and her trademark shield are still visible. In the middle three carpenters are at work, one apparently planing a piece of wood, the other two operating a saw between them. At the front is a much more puzzling scene: a man dressed in a short tunic, with a compass in his hands, stands over a naked man lying in the ground. One attractive theory sees the standing figure as Daedalus again, and this part of the scene therefore as some myth of craftmanship and carpentry. But who is the figure on the ground? Is it a statue that Daedalus has crafted? Or is it his nephew Perdix, whom Daedalus killed in jealous rivalry because the clever lad had invented the compasses and saw? Either way, what we are looking at must be a tableau carried in procession by the carpenters – whether representing this one firm, or the whole carpentry trade in the city. It is rare evidence for what Flaccus’ ‘procession’ at the Games of Apollo might have contained.