Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum

• 1. Introduction

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  Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum has spent almost as much time locked behind closed doors as it has on public display. In 1819, King Francis I of Naples visited the Pompeii exhibition at the Naples National Archaeological Museum with his wife and daughter. He was embarrassed by what he found. He ordered the most explicit pieces sealed inside a "secret cabinet", accessible only to people of, as the decree put it, "mature age and respected morals". That cabinet would stay shut, with brief exceptions, for nearly a hundred years. It was not finally reopened to the general public until 2000. What did King Francis see that disturbed him so deeply? Why were Roman cities around the Bay of Naples so saturated with sexual imagery that a modern monarch felt compelled to hide it? And what does that gap in reaction tell us about the distance between Roman and modern culture? The answers lie buried beneath volcanic ash, waiting since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

• 2. Buried and Rediscovered

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  Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD, and the cities lay sealed beneath ash and debris until extensive archaeological excavations began in the 18th century. That long entombment turned out to be a kind of preservation. The buildings, frescoes, statues, and household objects the Romans left behind survived largely intact. What archaeologists found when they began digging was unexpected in its scale. The cities were rich in erotic artefacts of every kind. Statues, wall paintings, and even everyday household items carried sexual themes as a matter of course. The creation of erotic art in ancient Rome is thought to have stretched across roughly seven centuries, from the first century BCE to the fifth or sixth century CE. That span suggests this was not a fleeting fashion but a persistent visual tradition woven into ordinary life. The sheer quantity of these artefacts points to something that modern Western culture treats very differently: the Romans appear to have regarded sexual iconography as a normal, unremarkable part of daily existence.

• 3. The Meaning of the Phallus

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  Representations of the phallus show up across Pompeii in forms that confound any simple reading of the imagery as erotic. The erect penis appeared on its own and on deities such as Pan and Priapus, and the Romans did not regard it as threatening or inherently sexual in the modern sense. It was used as a ward against the evil eye. Phalluses were sculpted in bronze as tintinnabula, or wind chimes. Phallus-animals were common household objects. In gardens, phallus imagery was used to encourage the growth of fertile plants. This is where the interpretation becomes genuinely complicated. Much of what strikes modern viewers as erotic may have functioned for Romans as fertility or protective symbolism. A wall fresco depicting Priapus, the god of sex and fertility, was plastered over at some point in antiquity and only rediscovered in 1998 after rainfall exposed it. The Romans believed Priapus was a talisman guarding a household's wealth. In the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, a statuette of Priapus was found in a small room off the kitchen; it is thought the figure once stood in the garden and worked as a fountain, with a hole running through its phallus to allow water to spout.

• 4. The Lupanar and Its Walls

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  The Lupanar is the most famous of Pompeii's brothels and the first to be officially identified. The building had ten rooms, called cubicula, arranged five per floor, along with a balcony and a latrina. Its walls were covered with erotic paintings and graffiti. In 1995, the scholar Andrew Wallace-Hadrill identified three features that mark the Lupanar as a classic ancient brothel: raised stone areas that could serve as beds, erotic art, and erotic graffiti. What those paintings depicted was not gritty realism. The erotic scenes seem to present an idealized vision of sex, at odds with the physical conditions of the building. The Lupanar is not the only such establishment in Pompeii. Graffiti on the wall of the Basilica, the city's civil tribunal, greeted traveling Romans with a loose message to the effect that the town's women were very friendly. Other inscriptions preserved pricing for specific services. Named individuals appear alongside their rates: Athenais and Sabina each at 2 asses, the house slave Logas at 8 asses, and a figure named Maritimus at 4 asses. The prices for the cheaper services were, as the record notes, roughly equivalent to the cost of a loaf of bread. Amounts ranged from one or two asses up to several sesterces.

• 5. The Suburban Baths Puzzle

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  Near the Marine Gate in Pompeii, archaeologists uncovered the Suburban Baths, a two-story building with the baths on the ground floor. When a room believed to be a dressing room was first excavated in 1986, workers found eight wall paintings: seven depicting sexual scenes and one showing a figure with an enlarged scrotum. The paintings date to between 62 and 79 CE. What makes this room unusual is not just the paintings but the objects associated with them. Directly below each sexual scene sat a painted image of a numbered box on a shelf. Holes in the walls suggest wooden shelves once ran along two sides of the room. The only physical remains of the boxes themselves are metal straps. What connects the numbered boxes and the sexual scenes? One leading hypothesis involves spintria tokens, small objects with a numeral on one side and a sexual image on the other. The idea is that a person entering the baths received a token, which then granted access to a numbered storage box for their clothing. The token's image would correspond to the painting above that box in the dressing room. No explanation has yet achieved consensus, though graffiti from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and second-century Ostia Antica often refer to group sex, none of which describe the specific pose depicted in scene VI of the suburban baths.

• 6. Venus Across the City

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  Venus was the divine protector of Pompeii, and her image appeared across the city in frescoes, tavern signs, and political banners. As the goddess of love, sex, and fertility, she was closely tied to eroticism and prostitution in Roman culture. Venus has been counted in Pompeian artwork at least 197 times. The majority of those depictions appear not in bedrooms but in large common rooms and reception areas where guests could enter without a special invitation. Earlier scholarship had assumed she would appear most often in small enclosed chambers given her associations; recent studies have reversed that assumption. Two types of Venus appear almost exclusively in Pompeii. Venus Pompeiana, or "Venus of Pompeii", is shown standing rigidly, typically draped in a mantle with her right arm held across her chest. She tends to appear in highly visible locations, which scholars link to her special religious and ritual importance for the city. Venus Pescatrice, "Venus the Fisherwoman", is always shown sitting, holding a fishing rod, and always semi-naked. The depictions of Venus Pescatrice are structurally consistent across examples, suggesting they all derive from a single original source, though that source has not been identified. The fresco of Mars and Venus in the tablinum of the House of Mars and Venus may point to yet another function: modeling the proper family roles of husband and wife for anyone walking through the door. Roughly one third of all Pompeian Venus imagery involves some kind of love scene, and one fresco may have been a Roman copy of a celebrated painting by Apelles, mentioned by the ancient writer Lucian.

• 7. A Cabinet Locked and Opened

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  The embarrassment King Francis I felt in 1819 set the terms of debate for nearly two centuries. The secret cabinet he ordered created in the Naples National Archaeological Museum became the central battleground over how ancient sexuality should be displayed and discussed. The cabinet was reopened, closed again, reopened, and then shut once more for close to a hundred years. A brief opening came at the end of the 1960s, during the sexual revolution. The full public reopening came in 2000. Even now, minors are admitted only with a guardian or written permission. The tension the cabinet embodies is a real one. The Romans who made and used these objects did not separate erotic, religious, and domestic functions the way modern Western culture tends to. A phallus wind chime and a garden fertility statue and an explicit brothel painting all belonged, for Romans, to the same unremarkable visual environment. The scholar Karl Schefold noted that even a reproduction of the Priapus fresco had been locked away "out of prudishness" and released only on request. The gap between what these objects meant to the Romans who made them and what they have meant to every generation since is itself the most striking thing the ash of Vesuvius preserved.