The “Villa of the Mysteries” has been discovered in the ancient city of Pompeii
A new Villa of the Mysteries has emerged from the excavations of Pompeii. A large banquet hall frescoed with a cycle of paintings that tell the initiation of the Dionysian mysteries has come to light.
Yet another exceptional discovery in the excavations of Pompeii has emerged: a new Villa of the Mysteries. The “Villa of the Mysteries” was brought to light during excavations in the ancient city. In the villa, there is a fresco depicting scenes from the life of Dionysus, one of the gods of Greek mythology. The Villa of the Mysteries and the large fresco shed new light on the mysteries of Dionysus in the classical world.
It is said that the residence had a large banquet hall. In this hall, there was a large fresco depicting scenes from the life of Dionysus, the god of wine, harvest, entertainment, and theatre in Greek mythology. A frieze of almost life-size dimensions, a “megalography,” was found in the room, just as in the Villa of the Mysteries and more than 100 years after its discovery.
Archaeologists have named the house with the frieze “house of the Thiasos” about the procession of Dionysus. The fresco decorates this large room on all three sides that does not overlook the garden and represents in almost life-size the procession of Dionysus, with the bacchantes, dancers and hunters and the young satyrs with pointed ears. At the centre of the representation appears a ‘Tiziana, that is to say, a mortal woman who, through a nocturnal ritual, is about to be initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus, the god who dies and is reborn, promising the same to his followers. “For the ancients, the bacchante expressed the wild and untamable side of women; the opposite of the ‘pretty’ woman, who emulates Venus, goddess of love and marriage, the woman who looks at herself in the mirror, who ‘makes herself beautiful’. Both the frieze of the House of the Thiasos and that of the Mysteries show women as suspended, as oscillating between these two extremes, two ways of being feminine at that time,” explains the archaeological park director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel.