One of the coolest benefits to being a RuneSoup Premium Member is that you are part of a worldwide network of magical weirdos. So when I booked the trip to Rome, I went and checked out the map and discovered that there’s a member there! I reached out and now I have a cool new friend (hi there Victoria! love ya!).
She agreed to go with me as a local guide to Pompeii to see the Villa of the Mysteries. Now, this visit was particularly meaningful for me because Dionysos is a primary member of my posse and closely linked to my first initiation (as if the name Ivy wasn’t a spoiler). When the trip was first scheduled, I purchased a copy of Mystai but then the trip was caught up in the great cancellation of 2020. So two years later when the trip was finally rescheduled, I pulled the (large, heavy) book off the shelf and tucked it into my luggage for the trip to Rome.
Pompeii was a revelation. I’d seen the traveling exhibit before, so the artifacts and figures weren’t new to me. But nothing could compare to wandering the city proper. Because Pompeii was caught in time and untouched since the eruption, there’s something very immediate about it. It doesn’t feel like history. You can really get a sense of who the people were who lived there and how they lived. I appreciate that historians and archeologists who study the past deeply probably have this capability, but for those of us who are just visiting the past as brief tourists, it’s harder to get a sense of it.
Like we saw a bakery — we didn’t need a placard explain it to us. Three small conical stone grain mills ran along the side and there was a large brick bread oven at the back. You could absolutely imagine the bakers there and the people of the city going to buy bread. And I suddenly really felt the importance bread to those people as a staple of their economy and diet and community (and get a sense that the current state of bread in the US indicates a failure of our society). There were food stands and taverns with counters that would keep food pots warm for serving hungry customers and storefront shops no different from the neighborhoods in Rome (I’m sure every third one sold leather purses and shoes).
The mosaics and decorative / religious objects are very impressive! They cared about their houses, they loved beautiful things, they worshiped their gods in immediate and physically present ways. As Victoria pointed out, save for electricity, they were just like us. We can look at their city and it makes sense. The cart tracks worn in the stone, the stepping stones that would allow you to cross muddy streets, the shrines, the courtyards. All of it felt deeply familiar, despite only bits of it surviving the fire and ash. The fact that my maternal great grandfather was Italian makes this connection even deeper.
And the Villa! On the outskirts of town where the wealthy had their palatial homes, the Villa is impressive by any standard. A maze of rooms of cool thick stone with an impluvium providing natural air conditioning. Windows that would have looked out out over gardens and fountains and fields. A place of peaceful prosperity where the Matriarch had the time and resources to host the secret mysteries of Dionysos and create a room specifically for initiation. We spent a good long time peering at the mosaics and then sitting on the rock wall and talking about it.
The information I got from Mystai helped me place what I was seeing in both a larger religious as well as cultural context. I could imagine the Domina, a carnelian ring of initiation on her finger, hosting the wider meetings, festivals, parades, good works, as well as the Bakkhic telete that the traveling lineage holders would provide. She’d make sure the household engaged in the appropriate euergetism and clientela that would demonstrate the family’s wealth and status to the community (while her husband would do so politically).
There’d be donations to the temples (that would end up in the mouths of the less fortunate) and the bestowing of gifts and honors. In early Roman society, like the Greek, social standing and soft power was based not on what you made or had, but what you could afford to give. This wasn’t just virtue signaling though. The Roman’s believed that if you did well, it was because the Goddess Fortuna (in Pompeii it might have been Isis-Fortuna) had blessed you. But like the mandate of heaven, if you behaved wrongly (without virtue, selfishly) She could revoke Her blessing. So while Fortuna was sometimes blind, She also rewarded those who were deserving.
In Pompeii, I could peer across time to a world that’s so similar to mine and yet so different. Not necessarily better (certainly not if you were a slave) but still with aspects that I can appreciate and admire as well as connections that resonate deeply. I can see how my own fortune comes with obligation as well as gratitude for the things that I have (not all or even primarily material things either).
Post-script: This post was sitting in my drafts when a discussion about gratitude sparked by a post from Gordon made me re-visit my thoughts at that lovely Roman villa (at least until the proctor came and shooed us off the stone wall). Sharing it with my new friend (with whom I left my copy of Mystai), in a magical place that honors Mr. D that I’d dreamed about seeing for years, I felt — and still feel — profound gratitude. Whatever happens in the future, I will have had that experience. We don’t honor Fortune when we deny that we have it any more than when we selfishly cling to it and refuse to share it.
