Nearly everything that archaeologists and other scholars have found in Pompeii has presented the world with important information about the daily life in Rome in the first century: As tragic and terrible as was the volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. that killed so many citizens of this city, the result was a trove of information for scholars since the first excavations in the mid-18th century. Often the record of a past civilization that archaeologists come across is one that is carefully arranged. A grave, for example, presents a view of a culture that is highly managed, that presents the inhabitants in the way that is most likely to please the gods (which is often very different from the ways in which people actually live.) But Pompeii presents us - under the disorder of those last terrible few hours and minutes - with an ordinary city. But even within the archaeological richness of quotidian life, there are some elements of the discoveries that are especially illuminating about life in Pompeii. Among these are the murals that have come to be called the "Mysteries of Pompeii".
These "mysterious" murals comprise four panels, and their title (although it is derived from the type of religious ceremony that may be pictured) also reminds us that even when there is as much archaeological evidence about a time and a place as there is about Pompeii in 79 A.D., there is still much that is lost to time. We do not yet know exactly what the artist intended in creating these murals nor what the contemporaneous audiences saw in them. Part of the reason that these murals have been so hard to decipher is that they are - up to the present - unique. No comparable murals like them have been found anywhere else in Pompeii. This does not mean that they are in fact unique, that no other similar murals were ever created, as Amery and Curran (p. 49) note, but rather that they have not been preserved or discovered. Murals are in fact rather fragile: Their large...