The Trendall Lecture will take place during the Australasian Society for Classical Studies Conference (ASCS), at the Coombs Lecture Theatre, HC Coombs Building, 8A Fellows Rd, Australian National University in Canberra on Monday 3 February at 5.15 pm. It is a free lecture and open to the public.
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About the lecture
In the Roman empire, the idea of “Egypt” could evoke a dizzying array of associations that included fascination, fear, contempt, religious piety, intellectual curiosity, fetishisation, and beyond – potentially all at once. At the same time, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking material and visual culture became ubiquitous in Roman Italy. In private houses as well as public contexts, people sought to display a wide variety of objects that either came from Egypt, alluded to Egyptian motifs or styles, or both. Among the most common forms of “Aegyptiaca” in household contexts are so-called Nilotic scenes: that is, frescoes, mosaics, and other media depicting imagined Egyptian landscapes, often fantastical in nature. Nilotic scenes can be found throughout the Roman world across many different periods, but the largest surviving corpus of these images comes from Pompeii in the first century CE. As representations of a distant land under Roman rule, these Pompeian images provide an opportunity to explore the ways in which the experience of empire was embedded within everyday life. How did people represent and construct ideas of “Egypt” within domestic space at Pompeii, and how did they understand this imagery – and the imperium that it evoked – as relating to their own lives?
This paper uses a case study to explore the human impact of this “domestication of empire.” In the garden of the large private dwelling known as the “House of the Ephebe” at Pompeii, a series of Nilotic landscapes decorated an outdoor dining installation. These Egyptian riverscapes shared space – and interacted with – a complex assemblage of architecture, wall paintings, statuary, and vegetation. All of these elements worked together to shape the experiences available to the people who used this garden. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, the garden’s imagined landscapes transformed domestic space into a microcosm of empire and encouraged their occupants to engage in open-ended ways with changing constructions of imperial, local, and cultural identities.
Previous work on this assemblage, including my own, has focused on the ways that elite diners would have interacted with these images. This paper seeks to build on that research while also expanding the audience for Pompeian Nilotica. In addition to the house owners and their guests, I explore some of the ways that non-elite and enslaved individuals in the household might have interacted with this imagery. I also consider the affordances that this garden assemblage could have offered to another possible audience within Roman houses: namely, children, for whom these materialisations of an imagined “Egypt” would have participated in their early socialisation.
About the presenter
Caitlín Eilís (Caitie) Barrett is an archaeologist who investigates everyday life, religious experience, and cross-cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. She is currently co-directing an excavation at Pompeii – the Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project , a joint Italian/American project sponsored by the University of Bologna, Cornell University, and Harvard University– and working on a new book about the archaeology of ancient Greek household religion.
Professor Barrett has published extensively on interactions between Egypt and the Greco-Roman world. Her first book, Egyptianizing Figurines from Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion (Brill, 2011), investigated religious change and cultural hybridisation in the household through a study of locally-made “Egyptianizing” terracotta figurines from the Hellenistic trading port of Delos. Her second book, Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019), is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery from Roman domestic contexts. Most recently, her co-edited volume Households in Context: Dwelling in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt (Cornell University Press, 2023) is the first synthetic book-length study of houses and households from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. Her field research has received national and international grants from sources that include the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Geographic Society, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Research Center in Egypt, Dumbarton Oaks, the International Catacomb Society, the Rust Family Foundation, and Sigma Xi.
