House of the Faun

Start at the doorway, and look down. Under your feet, set into the pavement, small coloured stones spell out a single Latin word: HAVE. It means welcome. Two thousand years ago, a visitor stepping in from the street read that same greeting. The ground here is uneven, worn smooth in places, warm in the afternoon sun. Ahead of you the house opens up, room after room, courtyard after courtyard. This is the House of the Faun, and it was one of the largest private homes in all of Pompeii.

The scale is the first surprise. This house does not sit on a city block. It is the city block. It fills an entire insula, the Roman word for a block of buildings surrounded by streets on every side. Its floor area covers roughly 3,000 square metres. That is larger than many palaces of the time in the Greek world. Whoever lived here was not simply wealthy. They wanted every person walking along this street to know it.

The house is older than most visitors expect. Its main form dates to the second century before the common era. At that time Pompeii was not yet a Roman city. It belonged to the Samnites, an Italic people of the southern mountains who spoke a language called Oscan. Rome took full control of Pompeii only in the early first century before the common era. So this home was built by a local elite who looked east, toward the Greek kingdoms, for their sense of taste and luxury.

Now walk into the first large hall, the atrium. In the centre you will see a shallow rectangular basin, called an impluvium. Rainwater fell through an opening in the roof above and collected here. Standing in the basin is a small bronze figure, mid-dance, arms raised, head tilted back. This is the faun that gives the house its name. More precisely, he is a satyr, a wild companion of Bacchus, the god of wine. The figure you see is a copy. The original bronze was found here during excavations in 1830 and now lives in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

Look at the faun for a moment. His body twists. His weight shifts onto one foot. Even in copy, he seems caught in the middle of music you cannot hear. It is a strange choice for the formal heart of a grand house. Most Roman families placed images of ancestors in this kind of space. Here, instead, a guest met a joyful, slightly drunken spirit. That choice may tell us something about the owners, or it may simply show the fashion of Greek-style art. Nobody knows for certain.

Here is a second surprise. This house has not one atrium but two. Beside the main hall sits a second atrium, built with four columns holding up the roof. Historians often read this as a division of space. One hall served public business, where clients and visitors came to see the master of the house. The other may have been more private, for the family. Doubling the most important room of a Roman house was a statement. Very few homes in Pompeii could afford the space to do it.

Notice the walls as you walk. Much of the decoration here belongs to what scholars call the First Style of Pompeian wall painting. It does not show landscapes or figures. Instead, plaster was shaped and painted to look like large blocks of coloured marble. The idea was to suggest a palace built of costly stone. Look closely and you can still see the raised edges of these false blocks, their faded reds, yellows and blacks. It is decoration made to imitate wealth with plaster.

Beyond the atria, the house opens into a garden courtyard ringed with columns. This is a peristyle, a colonnaded garden in the Greek fashion. Then, further back, comes a second peristyle, larger still. Walk slowly here. Listen. The sounds of the modern site, footsteps and distant voices, drop away between the columns. In the first century, these gardens held plants, perhaps fountains, and shaded walkways where the household could move out of the sun.

Between the two gardens sits a small, open room called an exedra. This is where the most famous discovery in the house was made. In 1831, excavators uncovered a vast floor mosaic here. It shows Alexander the Great charging into battle against Darius the Third, the king of Persia. Most scholars connect it with the Battle of Issus, fought in 333 before the common era. Alexander rides bareheaded on the left. Darius turns in his chariot, his face full of alarm, as his army breaks around him.

The mosaic on the floor today is a modern replica. The original was lifted and taken to Naples, where it hangs in the archaeological museum. But the replica helps you understand the scale. The work was built from well over a million tiny stone pieces, called tesserae, each one placed by hand. Many experts think it copies a lost Greek painting. Imagine the owners of this house, walking past one of the great battle scenes of the ancient world every day, on their way to the garden.

The Alexander scene was not alone. Other floors in the house held smaller, finer mosaics, now also in Naples. One shows a cat catching a bird. Another shows fish and sea creatures in remarkable detail. Another shows life along the river Nile. These pictures were not only beautiful. They showed that the family had the money and the connections to hire artists trained in the Greek traditions of the eastern Mediterranean. In this house, the floors were a kind of library of images.

All of this ended in 79 of the common era, when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Ash and pumice buried Pompeii, and the House of the Faun disappeared under the ground for almost eighteen centuries. When excavators reached it in the early nineteenth century, much of the house was still there to find. We do not know the names of the families who lived here at the end. The house stands as its own record, without a signature.

Before you leave, turn around once more and look back along the length of the house. From the entrance, the line of sight runs through the atrium, past the columns, toward the gardens beyond. The builders planned this view. A visitor at the door was meant to see depth, space, and order, one room opening into the next. Take a moment to stand where they stood.

As you step back onto the street, look down at that word in the pavement once more. HAVE. Welcome. The greeting still works. Behind you, the small bronze dancer keeps his place in the empty basin, arms raised toward an open sky. Ahead of you, the stone street runs on through the quiet city. Notice how the light falls across it, and how many doorways line the way.