What’s more? Many of the figures, although not all of them, have the proportions that Roman art often seems to use for indicating pygmaea. Some other figures do have what Romans would’ve understood as more idealised proportions with longer limbs, taller and slimmer bodies and smaller heads. But many of the other figures would probably have been understood by ancient viewers as somatically non-normative. So these features present the landscapes and their inhabitants as a spectacle of difference that is simultaneously geographic, bodily, and cultural, and it positions the scenes within a realm of fantasy. At the same time, other aspects of the imagery, such as the depictions of outdoor banqueting suggest parallels between the imagined scenes and their actual context. So the garden setting is constructing relationships between painted and real landscapes. Real flowing water would’ve formed the context in which diners encountered this imagery bringing the painted Nile to life.

The setting of the triclinium also frames the frescoes as echoes of the real life garden, as the sex scene and the two outdoor banquet scenes place the revellers beneath a trellis or pergola that closely resembles the originally vine shaded structure on which they were painted. So the architectural context invites viewers to imagine themselves among the painted protagonists of the scenes as the viewers themselves also drink, dine, and socialise on the banks of their model Nile. Now, there’s been a lot of debate about how or whether Roman Nile scapes might relate to earlier Egyptian images or practises. Some scholars have argued that these scenes have very little relationship to Egyptian prototypes and instead reflect derogatory Roman stereotypes about Egyptians supposedly being decadent. And the rationale here is that the people in these scenes are often engaging in behaviour that Romans would’ve considered inappropriate like the public sex, and they often have bodies that Romans would’ve understood as physically non-normative. At the same time, there are also actual parallels in earlier Egyptian visual culture. Dating from the Phonic and Ptolemaic periods were a lot of the characteristic motifs of Nilotic scenes. The yearly flooding of the Nile was celebrated in Egypt with festivals in which sexual imagery and alcohol consumption played a ritual role; celebrating the fertility and abundance that came along with the floodwaters. Some other aspects of the iconography do also evoke Egyptian religious practise and imagery. In Egyptian art, battles with river animals represent the conflict of order and chaos. And people who in fact had a achondroplastic dwarfism often played highly valued roles as temple at attendants and ritual performers. And here’s an amulet depicting a deity with achondroplastic proportions standing on top of two crocodiles. The fiance-media and the stylistic qualities of this object come from Egyptian production tradition, not those of Roman art, but the depiction of a figure who appears to have dwarfism standing on top of crocodiles does actually provide a fairly close parallel to some of the depictions in Nile scapes from the Roman world.

And some of the earliest Nilotic mosaics come from Ptolemaic Egypt rather than from Roman Italy. So rather than creating the iconography completely from scratch, Roman artists do appear to some extent to have been repurposing types of imagery that were employed in Egypt itself, but that certainly shouldn’t make us assume that their meanings must have remained static. In other words, I think we can understand these images as testifying to practises of appropriation that are pretty similar to those that Romans also employed with other peoples. Instead of an either or choice between Egyptian prototypes and Roman stereotypes, I think we’re looking at both. Roman artists would’ve been emulating motifs that did often originate in Egyptian context, but they’re also adapting those elements to new styles and settings, and they’re reinterpreting them according to Roman desires and assumptions. And ultimately, those appropriations would’ve functioned among other things, to naturalise and maintain relationships of political and social power.

Moving from the macro scale to the micro scale, given that these often come from domestic context, what would they have been doing for the individual people who lived with them? And the vast majority of Nilotic scenes from Pompeiian houses, 83% either come from gardens or they come from dining rooms that open onto gardens. A lot of recent research on Roman art stresses the importance of contextual appropriateness, decor that is images were supposed to be in some way appropriate to their context. So how is Nilotic imagery appropriate to gardens? Well, for one thing, in Roman houses, gardens are supposed to be places of otium of cultured relaxation. And by evoking Egypt, a place that Romans culturally and stereotypically associated with luxury and easy living Nilotic scenes could have helped create an ambiance for relaxation. They’re also, as we’ve seen, some more specific parallels between the images and their settings, which both confront the viewer with lush environments filled with water and vegetation.

Almost all the gardens with Nilotic scenes at Pompeii also have visible water features, which run in scale from modest cisterns and gutters to large elaborate fountains or miniature canals, like here. In a dry Mediterranean environment where water is a limited resource, displaying water in such a way would’ve been, among other things, an effective way to show off wealth and representations of the Nile, one of the most famous water sources in the ancient world would’ve helped reinforce visitors’ perception of these gardens as lush environments, especially in those cases with model Niles constituted by real life canals. But we can also go beyond this general observation to look at activities that took place in gardens. If we set aside some of the more exoticising indications of setting, these are essentially depictions of people banqueting, outdoors by the water, listening to music, carousing and performing religious rituals. And all of those were also common activities in real life Roman gardens. So the painted landscapes and their real world settings seem to be distorted mirrors of each other, potentially even commentaries on each other. One of the most common activities depicted in melodic landscapes is outdoor banqueting. And in Pompeii gardens we’re often among other things, dining spaces, we’ve got lots of ancient literary references to dining outdoors and good weather. Some gardens contain permanent facilities for dining, like the masonry triclinium here.

But permanent built structures aren’t necessary for garden dining because most furniture was portable. In some gardens, excavators have found faunal remains, animal bones from meals that actually took place there. And dining rooms were frequently located next to gardens opening onto them so that the diners could view the greenery. And what’s more, Roman dinner parties often involve mealtime entertainment, which might include music, dancing, dramatic performances, literary readings, or much else besides. So when the scenes depict characters reclining drinking and listening to music, they’re presenting their viewers with a scene that’s not just distant, but in some ways also very close at hand. The foreign setting and the frequent representation of the characters is physically non-normative, are distancing and othering, but the activities they’re performing are in many ways familiar. So they’re mirroring what their viewers might be doing at the same time that they’re being distanced from those viewers.

And as for the more salacious goings, on Roman art and literature are full of evidence that people perceive banquets as potentially full of sexual tension and intrigue. Latin love poems speak of flirtation, jealousy and secret signals between lovers at banquets and a number of non-Egyptianising domestic wall paintings like these here depict men and women flirting or kissing over dinner. That said, any actual sex was supposed to happen in private, not out in the open. So the outdoor sex in Nile scapes probably is supposed to stripe Roman viewers as comical, excessive, and inappropriate at the same time, it represents figures acting on impulses that the banquets themselves would’ve expected at least potentially to experience. So these images might be making fun not just of Egyptians or quasi-mythical pygmeae, but also at the viewer’s own attempts to present themselves as refined self-controlled diners. And so if we put this all together, DIC scenes at Pompei have really strong contextual associations with water gardens, and almost all of them are associated with either gardens, dining or water features.

And about half have associations with all three. So the context are creating parallels between two dimensional landscapes and three-dimensional settings, challenging viewers to consider how they might relate to these figures and these environments and playfully provoking them to consider their own social performances. What type of social identity would the visitor choose to project in response to the invitations and provocations of the setting? And the specific implications could potentially vary quite a lot depending on viewer choice. Are viewers supposed to identify with the carnivalesque exuberance of the pygmeae, or are they supposed to treat them as negative examples? This is what not to do at a dinner party. To some degree, it may be up to the diners themselves because their own behaviour then becomes their response to their commentary on the imagery. And even as the Egyptian landscapes introduce a seemingly exotic element into domestic space, other aspects of the garden settings of many of these houses familiarise and domesticate these images at the same time. In the House of the Ephebe, Egyptian landscapes were juxtaposed with images of, among other things, Roman deities, Mars and Venus, who are depicted on a water tower in the corner of the garden, the God Pan and satyrs depicted as marble statues and a fountain sculpture depicting a goddess or nymph from whom the waters actually flowed. There was also a poorly preserved stucco embellishment on the fountain, which depicted the goddess Diana. And some of these figures had specifically local resonance as well, and that at this point, Venus was the patron deity of Pompeii. Behind the fountain was a fresco depicting a game park evocative of the estates of Hellenistic rulers, and reinforcing that theme, other statues from the garden depicted wild animals associated with hunting other garden statuary recalls Greek art of different periods from the Arkaizic head and the centre of slide.

It was originally attached to a herm and the classic izing bronze Ephebe that gives the house its name. And finally, the canal that flowed between the painted riverbanks. The model Nile itself originally served to water what’s been archaeologically identified as a planted vegetable garden. So it would’ve contributed productively and quite concretely to the real life household economy. So in other words, the images of Egypt don’t appear in isolation. They’re rubbing shoulders with material culture that also creates associations with Greek and italic art. God’s landscapes, cultural practises, and creates a complicated mixture of trans-Mediterranean and temporal references. And some features of that imagery reinforce the trope of Egypt as a distant and exotic place. Other aspects of the garden literally domesticate this unusual set of images. The owners of this house could trace their own personal Nile to a fountain and water tank guarded by Venus, the protective divinity of their own home city.

So we’re faced with an image of Egypt that’s simultaneously foreign and familiar. It occupies an uneasy borderland between self and other rather than falling fully on one side or the other. On a social level simple, just like this one, it could have enabled individuals to present themselves in ways that their contemporaries could have understood as sophisticated or cosmopolitan by showing off their knowledge of those ancient Mediterranean societies, Greek, but also Egyptian, that Romans associated with intellectual and cultural prestige. At the same time, given that both Greeks and Egyptians were now part of the Roman Empire, these domestic assemblages would’ve given Pompeians away not just to think about, but also participate in the ongoing creation and maintenance of empire. So the house becomes a miniature version of the Roman world, or at least the eastern half of it, and a workshop where individuals could figure out through practise what it meant to them to be part of this sprawling polity.

Going further, framing these images just in terms of interactions between Romans and Egyptians, may oversimplify matters because it risks the lighting distinctions between Italy and Rome. Pompeii entered the Roman Empire through conquest no less than Egypt before the Social War in the 1st-century BCE Pompeii was governed by a different italic group whom Roman sources identify with the so-called Samnites and whose dominant language was Oscan rather than Latin. And evidence suggests that pre-Roman Pompeii was a cosmopolitan society with a multi-ethnic multicultural population and a long history of international interactions. The Bay of Naples had a huge extensive history of Greek settlement going back to the 8th-century BCE, and also close to Pompeii was the major international port of Trioli, which drew merchants and travellers from all over much of the Mediterranean. So even before the Roman conquest, this area was already a pales of many different phases of immigration, colonisation, and cultural contact.

And the material culture of free Roman Pompeii suggests active, ongoing ties to people, societies, and practises throughout a lot of the Mediterranean basin. At the time of the eruption 79 CE Pompeii had been a Roman colonia, a colony for over 150 years, and Egypt had been a province for over a hundred years. Legally, the people of Pompeii were now Roman citizens, but as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill had has stressed, that doesn’t have to mean that local identities necessarily vanished. So for Pompeii, that local history would’ve formed part of the background for the ways the Roman world is represented in domestic material culture. And rather than presenting a narrative of straightforward, violent domination provincial groups, a lot of Pompeian and other contemporary Italian domestic art seems to present them to at least some extent as participating in the creation of a shared imperial culture. Now, from today’s standpoint, this looks like a coverup. It’s glossing over all the violence, all the inequalities of imperial rule. But if we want to imagine how people at Pompeii would’ve responded to these depictions, it may be relevant that the people whose relationship to the Roman Empire required negotiation weren’t just Egyptians, real or imagined, but also Italians including the inhabitants of Pompeii itself and even the inhabitants of Rome. Recent genetic studies, in fact, suggest that at the time of the eruption, the people of Pompeii came from a pretty wide range of ancestral and geographic backgrounds.

The acquisition of empire entailed vast social, political, and economic upheavals. And the long-term effects of those changes were still playing out. In Italy, in the late first century politically, the provinces were subject to Rome. Rome was also increasingly dependent on the provinces for its supply and maintenance. So when we find territories of the empire represented in Italian houses, they may not just be self-congratulatory hymns to the would be glories of imperialism, although they surely are also trying to be that.

But they also represent attempts to work through what it meant to live in this changing and increasingly interdependent world. And one way that people seem to be trying to do this is through material culture that evokes an idea of a shared trans-Mediterranean elite culture. Now, houses with Nilotic scenes at Pompeii didn’t all belong to people who were wealthy or elite. The House of the Ephebe is pretty large, pretty well appointed, but one of the closest parallels to its assemblage with melodic scenes painted directly onto a garden triclinium comes from a different dwelling that we can understand as sub elite, let’s say the so-called House of the Jeweller, which was a mixed use structure. It was probably both a shop and the shopkeeper’s residence. And so people who came from a range of socioeconomic context seem to have shared an interest in imagery that’s evoking cultural associations with ideas of elite or sophistication or leisure or luxury.

So, domestic images of Egyptian landscapes seem to be, among other things, ways that individuals could appropriate and transform imperial ideology for their own purposes. The visual culture of Pompeian houses is giving opportunities to individuals from a range of social strata to try to perform what they understood as the roles of cosmopolitan, sophisticated citizens of empire. And in doing so, they would be performing not just ethnic or legal identities, but also claiming socioeconomic and cultural status, presenting themselves as elite or wealthy or educated or worldly. So the objects and images with which people are sharing their houses come across as not just illustrations to discourses on identity that are really happening in some other sphere, whether that’s political or literary. The domestic environment is where we undergo socialisation that shapes the rest of our lives., and household material culture forms our daily practises through constant interaction.

On one level, the material culture people lived with was enabling and facilitating their goals and choices. It was a tool that people could use for social performance and self presentation. At the same time, it’s also affecting those people because these objects would’ve been confronting the people who lived with them on a daily basis attracting their gaze as a matter of routine. Now, I don’t think a fresco like these would’ve been telling people what to think about it, but it is insisting in a certain way on people’s attention by demanding engagement with the imagined world it constructed. Now, at the same time, the house owners and their invited guests wouldn’t have been the only people who used this garden. And since 2019, one of the ways I’ve been trying to expand this project involves more sustained exploration of non-elite and sub-elite viewership, and so that’s what brought me to looking at the House of the Jeweller, as we’ve already seen.

And even at a wealthy house like the House of the Ephebe, the people present at banquets would’ve included not just the diners themselves, but also the enslaved workers who attended on them. Probably also present on some occasions were entertainers as well as gardeners who were typically either enslaved or formerly enslaved. And performing any of those roles could have required people to get close enough to the triclinium to see its paintings. What’s more, it seems likely that the people who actually lived in this household, both free and unfree, would’ve interacted much more frequently with the garden’s visual culture and would’ve noted in far more detail than any occasional visitor. So to be sure, banqueting and the reception of guests certainly appears to be one of the most important intended uses of the garden space. But banquets and socialising also would’ve taken place only at certain times during the rest of the day.

The garden would’ve been available for other uses. Some of those uses might’ve involved the recreation or leisure of the house owners. Others would’ve pertained to labour. The ongoing maintenance required to keep this garden assemblage functioning, the large open area appears to have contained both decorative and horticultural plantings. Mairuri’s original excavation report notes the presence of furrows in the eastern side of the garden and the garden archaeologist. Wilhelmina Jashemski has proposed to identify a vegetable garden here, as I’ve mentioned before. Now, whatever the specific plantings may have been, gardeners would’ve then had to perform regular work here. That’s the subject of garden labour is one that my other current project at Pompeii, the Casa Della Regina Carolina project is trying to explore. Other workers within this household probably also performed a lot of domestic tasks in the garden. It’s a large, mostly open outdoor space with access to running water.

And that makes it a convenient location, not just for socialising, but also for daily activities like food cleaning or preparation. Even if those tasks didn’t actively require participation with the triclinium, it would’ve presented a lot of useful affordances. The benches and the flat shelf that runs along their edges would’ve been logical places for people to rest, any objects that they were carrying or manipulating. And the water channel would’ve been not just an attractive entertainment feature, but also useful for washing hands, foods or tools. And when the owner of the house was absent, the enslaved inhabitants might have taken the opportunity to use domestic spaces like this garden for their own purposes. As Sandra Joshel and Lauren Petersen have pointed out occasions like that would’ve made it possible to take a moment’s respite from other more unpleasant spaces and activities. And if the banquet at a house like this one might’ve seen their own activities reflected in the frescoes, so too would the people waiting on them have seen versions of their own activities.

In fact, some of the images or objects in this space can themselves be understood as serving and waiting on the diners. So take this set of tray holding statues as well as the bronze statue whose hands held one held functional supports. These are often described as candelabra, but Ruth Bielfeldt has recently proposed, they were actually supports for a tray which could have held a range of things, including though not limited to lamps for nocturnal gatherings. Anthropomorphic stands like this one in the form of classicising or archae-ising idealised youths seem to have been pretty widespread in Roman elite context. We have at least 10 other archaeological examples, including three from Pompeii. And the poet and philosopher Lucretius refers to statues of lamp holding youths as a standard way for elites to light nocturnal banquets.

And in this house, the statue is likely the showpiece of the garden. If indeed, it originally stood on the base near the garden triclinium, which seems likely it would’ve been one of the first things that visitors saw when coming into this space. Now, for invited guests participating in the banquet, this statue probably would’ve conveyed a whole range of messages about the wealth, but also the cultivation and education of the host. And this particular means of constructing and displaying knowledge of classicising art is profoundly entangled with ancient understandings of empire. The transformation of a classicising statue into a banquet attendant effectively renders the artwork as itself enslaved. A concrete embodiment of Avid’s boast about a defeated Greece, surrendering its conquered arts to the Romans, as well as maybe an echo of the international origins of many of the real life enslaved workers in Roman households. The idealised figure of the nude youth would’ve also suggested other attractions.

Elizabeth Bartman has shown that this figure belongs to the genre of Roman statuary that she calls “sexy boys”. That is no, this sort of self-explanatory images of adolescent boys whose beauty was supposed to attract adult male viewers. Another factor affecting viewers encounters with this statue, could have been scale. It’s just under life size. The Ephebe statue is about a metre and a half high, and there’s a whole body of archaeological theory on the subject of scale. Most of it deals with extremes of miniaturisation or of gigantic scale. But as Stephanie Langin- Hooper has pointed out, the choice to make an image just slightly over or under life size also conveys messages. In this case, the youth is close enough to visitors size that they can interact with him. I keep doing that as though he belonged to the same world that they belong to.

So he’s not like the pygmaea in the Nilotic frescoes who have a genuinely diminutive scale in the fresco images, the painted figures about this high. So that emphasises their distance from their viewers. But the Ephebe really is designed to interact directly with people. He carries equipment to support their banquets, but his slightly diminutive appearance also reinforces the impression of a disempowered role, recalling the convention in Roman art of depicting lower status people as slightly shorter than higher status people. So here’s a fresco, recently excavated at Pompeii depicting the meeting of Paris and Helen and Helen’s companion, who is probably to be understood as an enslaved attendant is a little bit shorter than the two royal figures. More dramatically miniature and scale are the tray holding statues about 20 centimetres high of gilded bronze and silver. They’re twisted and emaciated forms, and they’re oversized Genitals are inspired by Hellenistic period grotesque figures, as they’re conventionally called. I have issues with the label grotesque, but that’s what they’re often called. And these statues have often been identified in the past as caricatures of either cake cellars or enslaved domestic workers. But interestingly, the best parallels for their gesture of clutching their throats and their gaunt appearance come from descriptions and depictions of envy personified as an emaciated self-choking man. So they probably serve among other things, to ward off the evil eye, the deleterious effects of envy, even though their presence and their precious metals are paradoxically proclaiming to everybody that this is a household that very well might attract envy.

So even if the tray holding statues don’t necessarily depict enslaved people, though they still like the bronze youth implicitly take on the roles of enslaved people because they’re carrying objects for visitors. And as Ruth Bielfeldt has shown there is literary and artistic evidence suggesting that ancient Romans expected enslaved workers to notice the parallels between themselves and statues like this one. Petronius portrays the fictional freedman Trimalchio while he was still an enslaved adolescent, he explicitly comparing himself to a lamp holder. So here’s an excerpt from the famous banquet episode in the Satyricon, Petronius is talking about his life. He says he was brought over in slavery to Italy as a young boy, and he compares his body to a nearby lampstand, which Bielfeldt felt relates to statues like this one. And he uses it as a measure for his own body, even uses it to try to supplement his body, trying to create a moustache with the lamp oil.

Now obviously, the representations of freedmen and enslaved people in this Roman novel famously, this is satirical. Famously, these reflect elite Roman perceptions and not lived realities. But the passage does suggest that elite Romans did perceive a relationship between furniture like the statue and the real people whose role it takes on. And they expected that those real people would notice this too. So these sculptures invite us to revisit the figures in the Nilotic scenes too. Are the pygmaea here to serve and entertain elite viewers in real life? Dancers with dwarfism were sometimes exploited as entertainment in Roman banquets and such spectacles surely would’ve influenced the way that people perceived such figures. But reading the pygmaea solely as objects of entertainment and spectacle also oversimplifies the composition in which they appear because in the frescoes, they’re depicted not as banquet entertainment, but as banquet themselves, they’re consuming rather than providing entertainment and service.

So what opportunities do the paintings provide for the people who had to serve the diners? Once the frescoes existed, they would’ve been there for everyone in the household to encounter whether they were the intended audience or not. And the activities expected of Roman waitstaff, such as pouring drinks, serving food, and cleaning people’s hands and feet, would’ve involved close proximity to the triclinium and would’ve afforded views of the frescoes vividly juxtaposed with real life diners right on top of them.

So from this perspective, the structural parallels between the real banquets and the fantastic Nilotic images and any humour those images might’ve communicated could have hit pretty differently. If any of the banquets overindulged or behaved in ways that could be perceived as foolish, the people in attendance might’ve enjoyed the opportunity to surreptitiously look down on this behaviour. At the same time, they might equally have taken these images and corresponding real life performances of and leisure as aspirational and shaping their own fantasies of what the “good life” might look like.

And justice with elite viewers, people could have responded to these images in their own ways, depending on their own backgrounds, through their own performances.

Also, besides enslaved workers, other house residents might include children, adolescents and aged relatives and dependents among others. And so given the importance of the household as a space of early socialisation, I want to conclude with a short excursus on how children might’ve experienced this space. And of course, like with any other identity category, we have to think about age related identities, intersectionally. A lot of factors would’ve differentiated children within the same domestic space, freeborn children, that the house owners would’ve experienced this space in a very different way than any enslaved children in the household. And other variables like gender, abilities, disabilities and relative age would’ve impacted what people would children in this household could have done too.

Now within Roman houses, children appear to have had access to a wide variety of domestic areas.

When the triclinium wasn’t in use for adult socialising, it was probably one of the garden features that a younger child would’ve found most attractive. The benches would’ve provided opportunities for climbing, jumping, and hiding the trellis that once covered the columns would’ve been pleasantly shady, and the artificial canal would’ve provided a chance to play with running water. And in addition to those children who were fortunate enough to have opportunities to play, any enslaved children probably would’ve performed many domestic tasks here during dinner parties. Enslaved older children or adolescents might’ve been required to serve food or drinks or to hold lamps, much like the statue here, which represents an idealised adolescent boy. So there’s every reason to imagine that any children who lived in this house of any status probably spent time in this space and would’ve been among the viewers of the Nilotic landscapes. So what would they have made of it?

Well, we probably can’t know what any Pompeiian child would’ve individually made of specific Nilotic motifs, but I think we can reflect on the general implication of what it would’ve been like to grow up surrounded by images of empire. As we’ve seen, the Egyptian scenes were just one of many manifestations of Roman expansion in this garden, which also had visual references to Greek and italic imagery styles and landscapes, both at home and beyond the inhabitants of Roman Pompeii, which itself had been a non Roman italic city, not that long before, would’ve seen appropriations and re-imaginings of other cultures practically everywhere they looked so surrounded by Hellenising, Egyptianing, Punising, and more children growing up in this environment could have been socialised to accept what Matthew Loar, Carolyn MacDonald, Dan-el Padilla Peralta call “the Empire of Plunder” as a natural and unquestioned givens, is just the way things are.

So ultimately, I think these assemblages were pretty profoundly entangled with human lives by naturalising empire, embedding it in the rhythms of daily life and framing its appropriations as a way for individual people to claim personal status. Domestic material culture could have real implications, not just for the people who grew up with it, but also the larger communities in which they went on to play a role as adults. One of the most powerful ways in which practises and social systems can reproduce themselves is through their own mundanity. So thank you very much. Thanks for listening.

Questions followed.