Introduction

In a series of paintings from the walls of a bar in Pompeii – painted sometime in the ten years before Vesuvius erupted in ad 79 – is a scene of two Roman men playing a game of chance (Figure 5.1). They have a board between them balanced on their knees, and we can just about make out some counters on it. The man on the left has just been shaking the dice in a shaker, and, in the ‘speech bubble’ above his head, he is claiming a winning throw. ‘I’ve won’, he shouts (‘Exsi’ in Latin). ‘No’, says his partner and opponent, ‘it's not a three, it's a two’ (‘Non tria, duas est’).

The other paintings in the series show other activities you might expect to find going on in a bar: drinking, brawling, sex and flirtation (Figure 5.2). In fact, it is a line-up of exactly the kind of things that Roman puritans (who saw an obvious connection between alcohol, sex and dice-games) were very keen on deploring. It is perhaps hardly surprising that in the next painting (and so in the final episode of this little visual narrative), the game is leading to blows. Although the panel is badly damaged, it is clear enough that the two men have left the table and are trading insults in some almost incomprehensible speech bubbles. What we can understand is predictably rude: ‘Look here cock-sucker (fellator) I was the winner.’ Almost completely lost is the figure of the long-suffering landlord (or alternatively the hard-nosed supremo of the gambling den, depending on how we choose to see him). But his speech bubble survives. He is saying, as landlords have said for thousands of years: ‘If you want to fight, get outside’ (‘itis foras rixsatis’).