thresholds throughout Pompeii. 8 In fact, a pebble mosaic on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the House of t he F aun, just across the street, spells out have. Such greetings at entr yways were necessary to e nsure the visitor’ s good luck as he passed from the realm protected by the city gods and into the house, under the dual protection of the household gods and the owner himself. 9 In this context, the image of the owner’s wife greeting the visitor takes on special meaning. It is a way of fulfilling her duty to greet the visitor while protecting him from harm, and it fits with the man y novel schemes for surprising some- one entering a house’s vestibule and thefauces—the deep tunnel-like space leading into the atrium. 10 Dress as well as gesture distinguishes the materfamilias. Unlike the Maenads, she wears a short-sleeved tunic and has her veil pulled modestly over her head. If the Maenads and Satyrs on the street sides of the two capitals look at each other drunkenly and with de- sire, the woman of the house looks out soberly toward he r guests. As th e Maenad on the outer face of this capital looks at the Satyr, so the head of the house looks at his wife—a visual parallel the astute viewer may have noticed. Like the Sat yr , he wears a banqueter’s crown on his head and is nude to the waist, but his hand on her shoulder is a gesture ofsolidarity or partnership, not of sexual advance. If the couple on the right-hand capital are the owners of the house, who are the cou- ple on the left ? They may be the owner’s heir with his wife; this oldest son, although cur- rently under the power of the his father, would assume his duties at his father’s death. Another plausible alternative is that the couple represent guests—following the hosts in celebrating the pleasures of the Dionysian banquet. A viewer looking at these capitals in 120 b.c., when they were freshly carved, would have spoken Oscan and Greek—not Latin—and would have felt at home with the Hel- lenistic culture that predominated in the area, thanks to trade and conquest. 11 Despite the fact that the Romans had by then brought the Mediterranean under their control, many of them were still resisting the luxurious lifestyle that the successors of Alexander the Great had cultivated in centers like Pergamon and Alexandria. We read in Athenaeus ofthe splendid banquets and pageants in Ptolemaic Alexand ria that featured Dionysus and his retinue; yet at Rome the many elites avoided such excesses— or avoided admitting to them. 12 Oscan Pompeii, on the other hand, riding on a wave of prosperit y that came from successful trade with these very areas of the Mediterranean, had no such scruples. The owners of the House of the Figured Capitals addressed viewers who, like themselves, saw in the wine-drinking party a way to make some part of that world of luxuria (the Greek tryphe) their own. By placing themselves visually in Dionysus’s retinue they announced to all that they valued and embraced the luxury of the banquet, one of the pleasures that money could buy . The use of self-portraits in the capitals anticipates their use in the paint- ings of the owner and his friends that decorated the House of the Triclinium (see plates 21 and 22, and fig. 140). Yet the contrast between the abandon of the Sat yrs and Maenads with their own controlled poses told the viewer that the owners’ revelry was of a diªer- ent sort, a sophisticated hospitality with rational limits. In its contrasts between the world 2 5 0 • NON-ELITES IN THE DOMESTIC SPHERE
