Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T02:19:14.899Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ignorance and Search in the Villa of the Mysteries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Karl Lehmann
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

During the fifty years that have elapsed since the great cycle of Dionysiac paintings was unearthed in the villa named after them at Pompeii, the search for their understanding has made reassuring progress. This search will never lead us out of ultimate ignorance about the deepest meaning which such visual imagery had within the context of an ancient mystery religion and we may resign ourselves to awareness of our own limitations in this respect. The best we can hope for is that we may learn to understand the surface meaning of images, whose full significance was only made clear to the initiated, to the degree to which, in antiquity, an uninitiated person could understand them. The last two published extensive discussions of this cycle of murals show clearly, however, that we are still far from having achieved even that degree of understanding. The impasse that has been reached can be overcome only by introducing new evidence and it is my hope that some progress can be made by doing so in the following pages.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1-2 , November 1962 , pp. 62 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Karl Lehmann 1962. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Nilsson, Martin P., The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age (Acta Instituti Atheniensis Regni Sueciae, V), Lund, 1957, 66 ff., 128 ff.Google Scholar; Herbig, Reinhard, Neue Beobachtungen am Fries der Mysterien-Villa in Pompeji (Deutsche Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft, 10), Baden-Baden, 1958Google Scholar, with a comprehensive bibliography, 70 ff.

2 Herbig, o.c., 20 ff., 65 ff.

3 Lehmann, Phyllis Williams, Roman Wall Paintings from Boscoreale in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, 26 ff.Google Scholar

4 Not eight as Herbig maintains: cf. the correction of this point by Lehmann, Phyllis Williams, Gnomon, XXXIII, 1961, 80.Google Scholar

5 See, Herbig, o.c. (n. 1), fig. 8.

6 Leschi, L., Monuments Piot, 1935/1936, 139 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pl. VIII–IX. Further bibliography listed by Herbig, o.c. (n. 1), 75 ff.

7 ibid. 49 ff.

8 Illust. Lond. News, vol. 184, April 21, 1934, 598 f., fig. 6; Gabra, S., Bulletin de l'assocation des amis des églises et de l'art Coptes I, 1935, 37 ff.Google Scholar; idem, Rapport sur les fouilles d'Hermoupolis Ouest (Touna El-Gebel), Cairo, 1941, 98 f., pl. XLVI; Gabra, S.-Drioton, E., Peintures à fresques et scènes peintes à Hermoupolis-Ouest (Touna El-Gebel), Services des Antiquités de l'Egypte, Cairo, 1954, 10, pl. 15.Google Scholar

9 Leschi, l.c. (n. 6) recognizes the tip of a wing in a small remnant above the right shoulder. But it would be an awkward place for such a tip. Is it the end of a strand of hair blown sidewise? Or the ends of a fillet?7

10 Not Mt. Olympos, as Gabra called it, Bulletin, p. 40.

11 For example, in the famous painting of the Childhood of Dionysos in the Villa near the Villa Farnesina: Lessing, J.-Mau, A., Wand- und Deckenschmuck eines römischen Hauses aus der Zeit des Augustus, Berlin, 1891, pl. VIIIGoogle Scholar, and often reproduced.

Gabra, Rapport 99 f. and Peintures 10, interpreted the precinct wall at Hermoupolis as theatrical décor and the high pillar as the ‘stèle funéraire’ of Laios!

12 See, for example, for customary combinations of Ignorance and Sin, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. Kittel, , 1933, 1, 117 ff.Google Scholar

13 A remarkable case has been made for this theory by Toynbee, Jocelyn, ‘The Villa Item and a Bride's Ordeal,’ JRS XIX (1929), 77 ff.Google Scholar But the evidence submitted here forces us to abandon it.

14 For ἄγνοια as a technical term for the lack of knowledge of things divine see, for example, Plutarch, Moralia 164, E, 167 A. For the figure of speech which uses ‘torment’ as it is used today referring to states of mind, see, for example: ‘In … caecae suspicionis tormento’ (Cicero, Fam. 6, 7, 4); μάστιξ Πειθοῦς (the lash of Eloquence as here ‘the lash of Ignorance’, Pindar, Pyth. IV, 390); the θεῖα μάστιξ which drives on the mad 10 (Aeschylos, Prom. 682); Ἠδοναί (as here Ἄγνοια) drive on the young to excesses in the manner in which, on the stage, the Eumenides use the whip (Stobaeus, Flor. 3, p. 447); Rizzo, , Memorie della Reale Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belli Arti di Napoli III, 1914, 86Google Scholar, approached a correct understanding more closely than any later interpreter: ‘Credo cioè, che sia rappresentata una misteriosa personificazione di una potenza avversa al fine supremo dei Misteri dionysiaci, invida della beatitudine eterna agognata dai mortali.’ And on p. 87, ‘un daimon … il quale si oppone a che si compia il mistico rito …’

15 Notizie degli scavi, 1928, 158, fig. 19. Most surprisingly, this key monument remains completely unmentioned in Nilsson's book.

16 Several critics (already Rizzo, l.c. (n. 14) 71; and recently Nilsson, o.c. (n. 1) 75, and Herbig, o.c. (n. 1) 29) relate the maiden's flight to her witnessing with terror the scene of flagellation across the room. But in a frieze, which carefully leads the composition around the corner, such a relationship cutting across the actual physical space in which the spectator stands is unthinkable. It is further admitted that the Silenus across the corner looks angrily at her, as Herbig says, because of the noise she makes. How is that expressed? Certainly not by her slightly opened lips. Her eyes look upward to her left in the direction of the mask and not across the room. Nilsson, after illogically denying that the mask could frighten her, later, on p. 97, interprets the scene on the sarcophagus from Carthage (fig. 24) in exactly this sense.

17 For the bibliography, see Herbig, o.c. (n. 1).

18 For the ancient testimonia, see: P-W, s.v. ‘Hydromanteia’ (Boehm); Κατοπτρομαντεία (Ganschinietz); Λεκανομαντεία (Ganszyniec).

19 P-W, Suppl. VII, col. 769 f.

20 Robert, Carl, Oidipus, Berlin, 1915, 508 f.Google Scholar

21 Moralia 522, B–C.

22 Sophokles, Oed. Col. 681 ff.

23 Robert, o.c. (n.20) 1 ff., 44.

24 Gabra, Bulletin, l.c. (n. 8).

25 Above, p . 67, n. 18; Eitrem, P-W, s.v. Narkissos, col. 1728 f.