Currently, the sun sets at 4:30 p.m. in Pompeii. 2000 years ago, the twelve-hour day from sunrise to sunset was over, which varied in length depending on the season. The longest hour in summer lasted 76 minutes, and the shortest hour in winter 46 minutes. Those who had enough money usually ended earlier, preferably at the ninth hour, i.e. between 1.36 p.m. and 2.30 p.m. Then it was off to dine, drink and chat in the triclinium. A triclinium is a room with three noble bunks, vulgo: klinen, on which up to nine party-goers could have fun with extreme physical contact. The archaeologist Ruth Bielfeldt and her team are now presenting two such triclinia in their grandiose exhibition “New Light from Pompeii”, which performs the miracle of adding a new aspect to a topic that has already been researched hundreds of times (Pompeii – wow!) and also attracting the public.
180 bronze lamps of various sizes and shapes, which were once expensive, ensure that the visitor sees the light in the collection of antiquities on Königsplatz. There’s everything from a phallus holder, a glow-in-the-dark shoe and a twin lamp with a bat reflector, to a life-size lad figure with a light tray whose upper body is brightly lit while the rest remains shrouded in mysterious darkness. All of these treasures were buried during the legendary Vesuvius eruption 1943 years ago, were dug up, and some were never exhibited. Finally, Bielfeldt and yours have shed light on the matter.
But the visitor has to help. In the replica of the largest of the three adjacent Triclinia from the huge house (700 square meters!) of the Pompeian local politician Julius Polybius, she gropes around as a slave with VR glasses on her nose and a lighter in her hand and has to light the three lamps that make the windowless dark room, which faces an inner garden and is painted in the red that is typical of Pompeii, illuminates it with a dim atmosphere. Now the guests can come.
This is one of the showpieces of the exhibition, the head of a young man, maybe it’s Apollo. The rest of the naked body can also be seen in the show, but the tray on which the boy carried a lamp, so that his upper body was illuminated, but his legs were shrouded in mythical darkness, is no longer preserved.
(Photo: Johannes Eber)
Measurements showed a daytime brightness of 100,000 lux in Pompeii, in the houses it was often only 10 lux. So lamps were necessary even during the day, mostly operated with olive oil, which was quickly burned. At the home of Julius Polybius, archaeologists found 69 lamps, most of them made of terracotta, a few made of bronze. At the beginning of the exhibition, the visitor gets hold of four bronze pieces, marvels at their great weight and the different appearance, which is due to the proportions: a lot of copper, little tin and cheap lead as needed. Tin tints the reddish copper golden, lead makes it dull and gray.
The night was not only reserved for the crooks, the thinkers (Cicero, Pliny, Seneca) also took up the stylus and scratched their thoughts on papyrus. When they were not presenting their wisdom over wine in the triclinium, which (as Petron says) was served with dormice coated in honey and poppy seeds, Syrian plums and fig thrushes with peppered egg yolks in batter. In the lux-reduced flickering light of the oil lamps, it must have tasted a hundred times as good.
This is also a lamp: such a giant phallus can be found everywhere in Roman everyday life, it was supposed to ward off evil.
(Photo: Johannes Eber)
In every showcase, on every wall of the harmoniously dimly lit show, the viewer discovers something new. Eros is present everywhere. Also in the glockenspiels, the tintinnabula, which banish evil and are often attached to a fascinus, an erect phallus, which also banishes evil. If an everyday life was over-eroticized, then certainly not today’s, but that of the Romans, which was stuffed with phalli and fascinii. So it is quite probable that late at night a few guests of Julius Polybius, if they could still get up from their kline, moved a few streets further into Pompeii’s whorehouse, the archaeologists say nobly Lupanar. Small frescoes above the entrances to the rooms showed mini porn including a floor lamp. In Munich, however, one has to go out into the uncomfortable night, and every visitor, like the Romans of old, wishes for a lamp so that they are reasonably safe from speeding motorists and cyclists.
“New Light from Pompeii”, exhibition in the Munich Collection of Antiquities, until April 2nd, the catalogue, written in a way that is easy to understand and worth reading, costs 30 euros.