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The other couple ignores this moment of tenderness. The man rises, although he still

rests his left elbow on the bolster; he is looking intently to the left side of the picture,

raising his right arm to point at the standing girl or—more likely—to rouse the tibia-

player from her self-indulgent drinking so that she will get up and make more music.

His companion, crowned like him with grape leaves, holds a large kantharos in bothhands and looks at the servant pouring wine at the lower right of the picture. This figure

completes the composition’s arc from left to right. She pours the wine from an amphora

into a silver mixing-bowl or crater that sits within a larger vessel of gold or bronze sup-

ported on three legs. This basin-bowl unit, specially constructed to keep the wine cool,

appears in three other wall paintings.20 Silver drinking-vessels rest on the tall three-legged

table.

The final figure in the composition is the most enigmatic, and, unfortunately, quite

faded. It is a bearded man dressed in a long tunic who holds a gnarled stick with both

hands. He stands in the background, his head crowned with vine leaves, at the centerof the picture. All the others ignore him. Discussion of this figure’s identity began long

ago, thanks to another version of this same composition that has appeared in inventories

of the Naples Museum since 1819 (plate 19).21 (The Naples painting omits the servant

pouring wine at the right.) Scholars have oªered various explanations of the standing man

with a stick. It seems unlikely that he is the god Priapus, armed with a club to punish

trespassers in the garden, since there exist no representations of this guardian of the gar-

den with anything but his huge phallus as a weapon.22 Equally untenable is the notion

that he is the father of one of the men coming to punish his son for wasting his money

on wine and hetairai, since he himself is crowned like the banqueters.23

A similar figure—almost always identifiable as a statue of Dionysus—appears in other paintings at Pom-

peii showing scenes of the symposium beneath an awning.24 One possible explanation

is that the painter has misunderstood the meaning of the statue, who should be Diony-

sus in this context;25 another, more likely, one is that he has intentionally made Diony-

sus’s thyrsus (or wand) into a stick and animated the statue to introduce a note of levity

to the picture.

Things are, in a sense, already out of control. One couple is getting intimate, and the

flute player has given up her entertaining and turned her back on her employers: she

looks out of the scene as she takes a drink—despite the summons of the man on the right-hand couch.

The painter created another scenario of the symposium gone awry with the painting

on the west wall (plate 20). Here two couples, each on a beautifully draped couch, are in

the midst of drinking. Behind them appear walls and partitions painted in perspective,

with a door at the left edge of the painting. The servants have placed the couches at right

angles to each other, and on the two round, three-legged tables are drinking vessels. As

the viewer’s eye moves from left to right, she sees a story unfolding. At the doorway a

woman with her mantle pulled over her head, as if dressed to leave, holds up a kantharos

in her right hand while a servant boy behind her grasps her upper arm and leans into her

M I N D I N G Y O U R M A N N E R S • 231