Yup, you are seeing what you think you are seeing: it’s a sex scene, and it comes from the Lupanar of Pompeii, the largest brothel discovered in the famous Ancient Roman city.
“Lupanar” translates both as “brothel” and “wolf-den,” and another name for a prostitute is “lupa”. Calling a sex worker a wolf is indicative of the value placed on prostitutes in Ancient Roman society. The ultra-rich would mostly avoid such establishments because they could afford their own sex slaves. But Pompeii, which was a wealthy trading city, had a large number of brothels. The Lupanar, though, was the grandest.
It had five upstairs and five downstairs rooms for patrons, which had stone beds built into their walls that survived the volcanic eruption. Also surviving are eight erotic frescoes painted above the door lintels to the various rooms, like the one you see here. Scholars debate whether these paintings were meant to titillate the patrons or were a sort of menu option for the various services. Most of the eight frescoes show a man and a woman in some type of sexual intercourse.
As Sarah Levin-Richardson notes in her book, _The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, Class, and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society_ (Cambridge, 2019), most of the prostitutes were slaves, and would have been expected not only to have sex with their clients, but also to make flattering conversation with them, bring them drinks, and even to shave them. These sex workers didn’t have choices about their line of work, and many were physically abused at different points in their jobs.
The Lupanar is also famous for its Ancient Roman graffiti — there are 150 different messages, often having to do with sex. (The more things change . . .) For instance, “Hic ego puellas multas futui”, (“Here I f**ked many girls”), or “Felix bene futuis” (“Lucky guy f**cks well” — a message from a prostitute about her client).
Source(s): Review of Levin-Richardson’s book in _History Today_ bySarah E. Bond, vol. 69 (it would be lol), issue 10, Oct 2019.
