Fresco depicting a bar fight

[Epictetus]

Mary Beard mentions an interesting fresco in the British Museum Pompeii Exhibition which I didn't know about before.

So it evidently depicts two guys playing dice. One gets angry, yells some names, and they both get tossed out by the landlord.

Now if you look at the bottom of the chair legs, what is that? Is it supposed to depict shadows? Shadows seem to be very rare in frescoes or any other sort of image, so this would be unusual. Or does this show chairs with some flat portion at the ends, almost like feet at the end of legs? I remember seeing some ornamental feet on Roman furniture, but these seem to be pretty big. How do you interpret this?

[attachment=8063]Pompeiifrescobarfight.jpg[/attachment]

[richsc]

Those were in one of the traveling Pompeii exhibits too. I think of them as shadows. Roman concepts of perspective and foreshortening were all over the place. The best perspective I have seen were depictions of a stage at Pompeii.

Interesting to think of this as one of the first multi panel cartoons in the world.

[richsc]

These I took from the actual frescoes

[richsc]

One more

[Epictetus]

Excellent pictures. Thanks!

I was still wondering if those marks at the bottom were meant to be some sort of feet-like construction or something besides shadows, but in DSC02405.JPG the people have them. So I think you're right: those are shadows, or perhaps meant to depict the ground so it doesn't look they are floating.

[Alec]

Any translation of the text around these images?

[popularis]

Roughly, in the first image, the two statements are:

'exsi' (I'm out [i.e. I've won]) and 'non tria duas est' (that's not a three, its a two!)

In the second,

noxsi, a me tria, eco fui (nonsense, I had a three, I won)
orte, fellator,eco fui (I'm telling you, cocks****r, *I* won)
itis foras rixsatis (get out! fight outside!)

For the interested, it's CIL IV 3494 = AE 1940, 52. There's a long discussion here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/706251 presumably there have been many others since, translation mostly from Alison Cooley, The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy, 106 (do a search on google books for 'CIL IV 3494').

[Flavivs Aetivs]

Wow, sounds just like modern day America.