At the entrance to Pompeii’s House of the Vettii, visitors encountered a painting of Priapus. The god lifts his clothing to expose an exaggerated phallus, which he weighs against a purse of money on a set of scales. Fruit sits below him. The picture joined fertility, wealth and sexual humour at the entrance to a prosperous home. Before Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE, the painting greeted people entering the house and displayed the owners’ hopes for abundance.
Elsewhere in the city, people saw explicit paintings in a brothel corridor, small bronze phallic charms and mythological scenes involving sexual encounters on the walls of expensive houses. Museums now group such objects as erotic art, although their ancient uses varied. Its location, audience and use all mattered, whether it hung as a protective ornament, decorated a room used for entertaining guests or appeared where sexual services were sold.
Pompeii’s evidence is unusually abundant because volcanic destruction preserved paintings and objects that would ordinarily have disappeared. The number of surviving images, however, tells us little about how much freedom people had in sexual matters. A charm might be intended to ward off harm, a mythological scene might demonstrate a patron’s education, and decoration in a place of prostitution could coexist with the exploitation of enslaved people. The objects need to be understood within those different settings before their meaning can be assessed.
Why a phallus could protect a Roman household
Romans used the term invidia for envy and the harmful attention often described as the evil eye. A wealthy household, successful business or healthy child might attract the jealousy of others, and protective objects were meant to counter it. An apotropaic sign was understood to repel danger; its name comes from a Greek expression meaning to turn away. A conspicuous phallic image could serve that purpose. In Roman contexts, the protective phallus was frequently known as the fascinum, a symbol whose meaning extended well beyond sexual activity.
Pliny the Elder gives explicit evidence of this association in Natural History 28.39. He writes that the fascinus guarded infants and was suspended beneath the chariot carrying a victorious general in a Roman triumph. The same symbol could protect a child and accompany one of Rome’s highest public honours. Pliny cannot tell us what every Pompeian meant by a particular carving, but his account demonstrates that such images had a recognised protective meaning during the first century CE.
A phallic image might guard against harm and express hopes for prosperity in the same setting. Beside a workshop, its connection with reproduction and abundance could fit a wish for business success, while the exaggerated shape invited laughter. Claudia Moser’s 2006 study of phallic images in Roman Italy examines the various settings in which such objects appeared. The archaeological reappraisal by Emma-Jayne Graham and subsequent scholarship on the Campanian phallus also challenges the habit of labelling every example an evil-eye charm without examining its context. The position of an object, from workshop entrance to household interior, can therefore change how its imagery is interpreted.
The tintinnabulum was one of the most elaborate everyday variations: a bronze hanging ornament carrying little bells. Some examples take the form of a winged phallus, sometimes provided with legs, other animal parts or small dangling figures. They moved when disturbed and could ring in a breeze. Researchers have suggested that the startling shapes and sounds contributed to their protective effect, though there is no basis for treating the bell’s noise as a universally recognised magical defence. The object could also serve as decoration or provoke a joke among visitors.
Bronze ornaments could be moved or worn, unlike images fixed on a commissioned wall. Such objects brought sexual symbolism into the furnishings of ordinary homes and workplaces. That does not tell us how all viewers responded. An enslaved servant working beneath a hanging charm and a guest who could afford such objects occupied different positions, even if both saw the same bronze figure. The social circumstances of its use belong to its history as much as its shape.
Priapus and the wealth of the House of the Vettii
The House of the Vettii is among Pompeii’s richest surviving domestic complexes. Excavated in 1894–1895 in Regio VI, Insula 15, it is associated through inscriptions with Aulus Vettius Conviva and Aulus Vettius Restitutus. Both are generally regarded as freedmen, men who had previously been enslaved. Some accounts call the two men brothers, although their shared name does not prove that relationship. Conviva was an Augustalis, a holder of a civic religious office connected with the imperial cult. For a wealthy freedman, that position offered an important form of public standing.
Wealth was apparent to guests entering the house. Strongboxes occupied prominent positions in the atrium, the central reception area, while a columned garden beyond it was decorated with fountains and sculpture. Rooms around the garden contained elaborate wall paintings in the Fourth Style. The architectural account published by Smarthistory describes the rooms and the positions of the strongboxes. Priapus appeared at the threshold of a house whose owners wanted visitors to recognise the scale of their resources. The image’s association with money and fertility becomes more intelligible when seen against that setting.
Priapus weighs his enormous member against the purse, with fruit placed below. The objects made fertility and material plenty visible, while the exposed phallus may also have guarded against envy. We cannot calculate what the Vettii owned from the image, and no inscription records precisely what its patrons told the painter to communicate. Scholars infer its possible meanings from the objects shown, the placement beside the entrance and other ancient uses of the same symbols.
Thomas R. Blanton IV’s 2022 study in Archimède offers a more specific explanation of the joke. Blanton observes that Priapus is semi-erect rather than shown in the expected fully erect pose, and that the clothing has features associated with a matron. Even the usually intimidating body part is being measured against money like a commodity. In his reading, these visual incongruities provoke laughter, which might reinforce the image’s protective force. The argument rests on Blanton’s reading of the image; the patrons left no explanation of their intent.
The Vettii house drew fresh attention when it reopened to visitors in January 2023 after lengthy conservation. The Archaeological Park’s conservation account explains the repairs to the roof and the restoration of decorated floors and walls. The repairs protected the surviving frescoes and enabled visitors to see them again. Their conservation history must be distinguished from evidence about the paintings’ original use.
The same house also had a smaller room near the kitchen decorated with explicit scenes. A graffito beside the entrance named Eutychis or Eutychus and advertised a small payment. The site’s interpretation of the servant’s quarters associates the room with sexual labour while recognising that the person’s circumstances cannot be reconstructed in full. The room’s position near the kitchen places it in a different social world from the formal reception rooms. The owners displayed status and wealth before guests, while other parts of the building were workplaces for enslaved people. Sexual imagery in the house cannot be separated from the unequal power of the people who lived and worked there.
The Lupanar and its painted corridor
The Lupanar, Pompeii’s best-known brothel, stood in Regio VII, Insula 12. Its two-storey building had five small ground-floor rooms opening onto a passage. Each contained a masonry platform that could be used as a bed; a latrine lay at the end of the corridor. Above the passage walls were paintings of couples, positioned where people arriving or waiting would see them. Archaeologists excavated the building in 1862. The floor plan and decoration are described in the Archaeological Park’s guide to Pompeii. The images belonged to a building arranged for commercial sex.
The paintings are sometimes explained as a menu of sexual positions, with each scene representing a service that customers could purchase. The evidence for such a menu is thin. No surviving record securely matches individual pictures to transactions in the neighbouring rooms. The images might have made the nature of the establishment obvious, helped create an atmosphere, provoked comments among visitors or offered idealised scenes for viewers to imagine. We know where the pictures were displayed, but not how customers or workers used them.
Sarah Levin-Richardson examined the Lupanar’s rooms, artefacts, wall images and graffiti in The Brothel of Pompeii (2019). Objects from the building suggest activities beyond sexual transactions, perhaps including drinking or exchanging gifts. Almost 150 scratched or written messages and drawings remain on the walls. They record sexual remarks and boasts, but it is often impossible to identify their authors or decide whether their claims are literal. The walls became surfaces on which visitors left messages for others. This practice belonged to the city’s broader tradition of Pompeian wall writing, found in political messages, jokes and names far beyond the brothel.
The corridor pictures generally depict male–female couples in relatively conventional arrangements. The written graffiti refer to a greater variety of sexual practices and identities. Neither the paintings nor the graffiti provides a complete account of activities in the rooms. Painters selected scenes to present to viewers, while graffiti preserve the changing remarks of people who passed through. Both belonged to a society in which citizenship, gender, age, wealth and slavery shaped the opportunities and restrictions that accompanied sexual activity.
The people working in the Lupanar had very different legal rights. A free customer had choices that a person enslaved and forced into prostitution might have had no power to make. A recent study of prostitution-related Pompeian graffiti explores the use of verna, a word often referring to a person born enslaved in a household, within the language of commercial sex. Such inscriptions can reveal categories and relationships, though they cannot recover a worker’s private experiences or feelings. They make clear why images of apparent sexual pleasure cannot be taken as proof that everyone involved could consent or refuse on equal terms.
Explicit paintings also decorated the changing area of Pompeii’s Suburban Baths. Researchers have proposed that the images served as jokes, displayed different sexual acts or helped distinguish the places where bathers left their belongings. Those suggestions remain interpretations rather than documented instructions from the patron. The paintings appeared in a public bathing facility, with a layout and purpose quite different from the brothel. Levin-Richardson uses that difference to challenge assumptions that an explicit image must be connected with selling sexual services.
The scenes selected for these buildings differed as well. Lupanar scenes concentrate on a narrower range of acts, while the bath paintings present a wider selection of bodies and activities. That difference tells us about the decoration, not the range of sexual behaviour among the people using either building. Patrons and artists chose images suited, in their judgement, to the different spaces. A provocative picture could entertain or decorate without operating as a literal advertisement for something occurring nearby.
The Lupanar’s plan and corridor paintings provide unusually detailed evidence for sexual imagery in a commercial setting. But a fresco in a private reception room or a phallic relief outside a bakery had other functions and audiences. The Lupanar tells us little about why a baker installed a phallic relief or why a wealthy patron commissioned a reception-room fresco.
Mythological desire in Roman dining rooms
Large Pompeian houses often decorated their reception rooms with stories from Greek mythology. A triclinium was a dining room whose couches allowed guests to recline through a meal, leaving painted walls in view during conversation. Fourth Style schemes combined richly coloured fields, imaginary architecture and framed scenes drawn from familiar stories. Commissioning such work required trained painters and money; recognising the references could also demonstrate a household’s education in Greek culture. The pigments and lime-plaster techniques behind those schemes are explained in Spoken Past’s separate account of Roman fresco painting.
Ariadne was a frequent subject. She was the Cretan king Minos’s daughter who helped Theseus find his way out of the Labyrinth. Theseus subsequently left her on the island of Naxos, where Dionysus discovered her. Ancient authors gave different weight and outcomes to those events. Artists could depict an exposed, sleeping Ariadne being watched by a male figure, or choose the moment of desertion or the arrival of Dionysus. A viewer familiar with the story might recognise its wider emotional and moral implications in a single scene.
Other painted myths in the House of the Vettii included the punishment of Pentheus and the sufferings of Dirce and Ixion. They dealt with violence, humiliation and vulnerability as well as desire. In her full study of the Vettii wall paintings, Beth Severy-Hoven examines these scenes alongside relationships of mastery and enslavement. Her interpretation shifts attention to the status of people depicted and the viewers who could see them. The violence and coercion in several episodes make a uniformly romantic interpretation untenable.
A room’s decoration could have worked differently for different people. A guest familiar with Greek poetry could recognise a particular episode, while the owner might regard the collection as a display of cultivated taste. An enslaved attendant saw the same scenes while carrying food or cleaning the room, from a very different social position. Those different experiences are plausible, although no surviving testimony records the reactions of these particular viewers. We know what patrons had painted; we generally cannot recover the individual reactions of everyone who entered.
The Archaeological Park’s 2022 exhibition, Art and Sensuality in the Houses of Pompeii examined sexual imagery in houses and villas as well as more familiar brothel settings. Its examples included a painted series from a villa near Stabiae and a ceiling showing Leda with the swan. In the Greek myth, Zeus approaches Leda in the form of a swan, an episode bound up with divine power and sexual violence. Displaying it in a bedroom tells us that the owners chose this myth as decoration. The bedroom setting provides no evidence for prostitution or for the occupants’ personal interpretation of the myth.
A Roman viewer might encounter a figure such as Dionysus in worship, in poetry and in an erotic painting without insisting that the three contexts exclude one another. Stories about the gods could be religious traditions and subjects for cultivated discussion while also furnishing attractive decoration. The range of subjects cautions against treating Roman attitudes towards desire as uniform.
Sexual images beyond the house and brothel
Phallic motifs were not confined to brothels and rich interiors. People wore or hung small amulets, and carvings appeared near businesses or in the streets. The fascinum could offer protection from the evil eye, but the presence of a bronze or stone phallus does not always reveal precisely why it was made. It might be intended as a joke, a protective charm, a symbol of prosperity or a statement tied to ownership. Tourist claims that every Pompeian phallic sign pointed to a brothel ignore the distinct contexts in which these objects appeared.
A famous example carries the Latin words hic habitat felicitas, meaning that happiness or good fortune lives here. The inscription accompanies a phallic relief associated with a bakery in the insula of the House of Pansa, and the object is now held by the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Accounts of the findspot have sometimes confused that bakery with the bakery of Modestus, which contained different phallic decorations. The museum photograph and its catalogue description assign the relief with this inscription to the House of Pansa. Its words express a desire for prosperity, whatever additional protective or humorous meaning visitors brought to the image.
For a bakery, the promise of abundance had a practical economic meaning. Workers milled grain, made dough and baked bread that customers would buy. Production had to continue, and the success of the business affected the people who depended upon it. The relief can be understood against those ordinary activities without imagining a specific ritual being carried out at the oven. A statement that good fortune resided there addressed the practical hope that the workshop and its trade would prosper.
Museum display preserves the objects while separating them from the spaces in which Romans encountered them. An amulet once carried on someone’s body, a bakery relief seen by workers and customers and a doorway fresco observed by arriving guests are now viewed as objects in a collection. Their materials and subjects remain, while movement, sound, labour and the original sequence of rooms may be lost. Understanding where an object stood or how it was worn is therefore a necessary part of interpreting what it did.
How the Secret Cabinet changed what visitors could see
Pompeii and Herculaneum were excavated under the Bourbon monarchy of Naples from the eighteenth century onward. When excavators uncovered explicit paintings and objects, later museum officials considered many of them unsuitable for ordinary visitors. Pieces were separated from the rest of the antiquities into a restricted collection. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rules for seeing them changed repeatedly, sometimes allowing access and sometimes removing it. Those restrictions helped create the modern idea that Pompeii concealed a uniquely scandalous sexual world behind closed doors.
The restricted collection became the Gabinetto Segreto, the Secret Cabinet. The National Archaeological Museum of Naples explains that its holdings number around 250 erotic objects, mostly recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and that it reopened definitively to the public in 2000. Present displays distinguish the circumstances in which the objects were used. They include frescoes from houses, garden ornaments, scenes from brothels, banquet furnishings, phallic amulets and street signs. Those categories return some of the physical and social context lost when all the pieces were first collected simply as indecent material.
The Secret Cabinet shaped which ancient objects later visitors and historians were able to study. A visitor might have been permitted to see conventional mythological sculpture in one room while related sexual imagery was kept out of sight. Historians working from such a selection could easily inherit the moral categories of nineteenth-century curators. Recovering a fuller picture of ancient Pompeii means recognising the decisions that governed what was displayed and who could study it.
Modern viewers risk another error when they assume that visible sexual images meant universal sexual tolerance. Roman law and custom assigned very different privileges to free citizens and enslaved people, and distinguished respectable domestic roles from commercial sex and behaviour considered shameful. A familiar phallic joke might coexist with strong condemnation of particular sexual acts or the people associated with them. Public imagery alone cannot erase those legal and social divisions.
The relief inscribed hic habitat felicitas illustrates the difference between ancient use and modern collection. In its bakery setting, it joined a working business to wishes for good fortune and perhaps protection; after removal, its phallus could make it a museum curiosity judged too indecent for general view. Studying the relief in both settings restores its place in everyday work, unequal social relations and the later history of collecting.
