As dusk settled over Pompeii, guests strolled into the grand home of one of the city’s wealthiest families for an evening of drinks and delights. Household staff led these privileged Pompeians through a doorway into a portico along the edge of an interior garden surrounded by columns. At the far end, glowing light and the persistent thrum of music beckoned. The partygoers stepped into the vaulted space of a dining room where they were greeted warmly by their hosts. The room’s three walls and the fluted stuccoed columns lining them were painted a rich crimson. Along the tops of the walls, vignettes featured ducks and wild boar hanging by their feet, lifeless thrushes and splayed squid, and fresh oysters and lobsters, offering a preview of the sumptuous feast awaiting those fortunate enough to have secured an invitation.
Darkness fell as the banqueters reclined on wooden couches set in front of the columns and began the night’s festivities. Between the columns, frescoes depicting female and male revelers, each positioned on a painted statue base, caught the guests’ attention. One lively satyr played a double flute and another jauntily tossed libations of wine over his shoulder into a shallow bowl. A dancing woman, her hands clashing cymbals above her head, twirled in such ecstasy that her flowing garment exposed her naked body. The guests recognized these figures as participants in a thiasus, a procession of followers of the wine god, Dionysus, whom Romans called Liber or Bacchus. Gazing out at the diners from the center of the back wall was a cloaked woman preparing to be initiated into the god’s mystery cult. She was led by an elderly, torch-bearing silenus, a woodland deity who had educated Dionysus in his youth. For a few of the guests, this scene—and the wine that had already begun to take effect—must have conjured joyful yet hazy memories of their own initiations into the secret rites of Dionysus.
Beneath these scenes of revelry, however, the banqueters saw a hint of something more violent. In one panel, a maenad—a frenzied female follower of Dionysus—with a crazed glint in her eye brandished a sword in one hand and the freshly cut entrails of an animal in the other. A young satyr to her left looked on nervously. These figures stood in stark contrast to those the visitors had seen in the exquisite painting of a Dionysian initiation at a recent party in an opulent seaside villa.
Holding a wine glass in one hand, a diner propped her head against her other hand and peered out toward the garden. She noticed a curious figure in a decorated panel on the wall across from her. There, she saw a woman leaping off her pedestal and running in the direction of the real garden, as if fleeing into the night.
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