It is extremely common for modern people to misidentify ancient portraits of random people as portraits of famous people. This is partly because many famous authors and historical figures who lived in the ancient world have no surviving portraits and people are eager to find images to represent them. This is especially often the case for ancient women. I will confess that I am partly guilty of this myself; I couldn’t find any decent images to represent Pamphile of Epidauros in my article I wrote about her back in July, so I used a photo of a bust of an unidentified woman in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, paired with a photo of the Ancient Theatre of Epidauros, in an effort to the represent the idea of an ancient Greek woman from Epidauros.
In this article, there is one particular ancient portrait that is especially widely misidentified as a portrait of a famous woman that I want to discuss. The portrait in question is a fresco. It depicts a woman with short, curly brown hair, a gold hairnet, gold earrings, and clothes that are dyed purple and green. She gazes directly at the viewer, holding a set of wax tablets bound with ribbons in her left hand and pressing a writing stylus to her lips with her right hand as though she were in thoughtful contemplation. It dates to between c. 50 and 79 CE and was discovered on 24 May 1760 in the Insula VI region of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.
Classical scholars immediately began to speculate that the fresco might be a portrait of the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE), who is best known today for her poems about love and attraction between women and whose home island is the source for the contemporary word lesbian. (Whether Sappho herself was actually a lesbian is a subject I address in depth in this article I published in August 2021.) The fresco is currently held in the Naples National Archaeological Museum on the first floor in room seventy-six. It is still widely admired as a remarkable portrait of a literate ancient woman. Although the fresco is still widely circulated online as a supposed portrait of Sappho, art historians now generally agree that it actually depicts an unknown upper-class Pompeiian woman.
How we know the fresco isn’t Sappho
The first reason why the fresco from Pompeii probably does not represent Sappho is because there is no evidence to indicate that it is Sappho. The fresco was found with no label or accompanying inscription identifying the woman at all, let alone identifying her as Sappho.
Furthermore, the fresco does not match the known ancient iconography for Sappho. We know how Sappho was usually represented in antiquity because there are surviving depictions of her (based on traditional iconography, not her actual appearance) that are clearly labeled as her.
These labeled depictions of her virtually always depict her with a lyre and a plectrum to indicate that she was a lyric poet who performed with musical accompaniment. The fresco of the woman from Pompeii does not contain a lyre, a plectrum, or any other iconography that might suggest that the woman depicted is supposed to be a poet or a musician.
Additionally, none of the verified ancient depictions of Sappho show her holding a wax writing tablet or a writing stylus. In ancient times, people normally used wax tablets and styli for writing things for the short-term. They commonly used these implements for accounting, making personal notes, making grocery lists, and everyday things of this nature.
When people read and copied literature that was meant to last a long time, by contrast, they generally did so on papyrus rolls. Thus, whenever Sappho is shown with an object associated with writing and literature, she is shown holding a papyrus roll, because this was the medium on which people normally read her poems.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a black-figure kalpis by the Sappho Painter dating to c. 510 BCE, currently held in the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland, showing Sappho holding a lyre
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure kalanthos by the Brygos Painter dating to c. 470 BCE, currently held in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, depicting Sappho holding a lyre and plectrum
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure hydria dating to between c. 440 and c. 430 BCE, depicting Sappho sitting on a chair reading from one of her poems, surrounded by three women, one of whom is holding a lyre
Everything about the portrait of the woman holding the wax tablets and stylus strongly indicates that she is a Pompeiian woman of the first century CE. Her clothing and hair distinctly reflect Roman styles of the mid-first century CE and, as I previously mentioned, the writing stylus and tablets she holds are tools the Romans of the first century CE commonly used for accounting.
The real smoking gun, though, is the fact that the way the woman is shown holding the wax writing tablets and the stylus is almost exactly identical to other portraits of known Pompeiian women from this time period. For instance, as I previously mentioned in this article I wrote in August 2021 about ancient makeup, there is another famous fresco from Pompeii dating to between c. 50 and 79 CE that is known to depict a baker named Terentius Neo and his wife, whose name is unknown.
In the fresco, Terentius Neo himself is shown holding a roll of papyrus, indicating that he is an educated man of culture. Meanwhile, his wife is shown gazing directly at the viewer, holding a set of wax writing tablets in her right hand while pressing a writing stylus to her chin in an almost identical pose to the one of the woman in the fresco that is often claimed to represent Sappho. It is clear that Pompeiian women of this period who were literate were particularly eager to have themselves portrayed in a manner that displays their literacy.
ABOVE: Portrait from the Roman city of Pompeii dating to between c. 50 and 79 CE, depicting a woman holding a set of wax writing tablets and a stylus, with her husband, a baker named Terentius Neo
Conclusion
If anything, the fact that the fresco of the woman with the writing tablets and stylus from Pompeii does not depict Sappho actually makes the fresco even more fascinating. For one thing, it clearly depicts a woman who was literate at a time when the vast majority of women were probably illiterate.
The ancient historian William V. Harris estimates in his book Ancient Literacy, published by Harvard University Press in 1989, that only around ten to fifteen percent of men in the Roman world were literate and less than five percent of women. I suspect that Harris underestimates the prevalence of literacy somewhat, but there’s certainly no question that literacy was far from universal, even among adult men, who were the most likely to be educated, and it was even rarer among women.
Another fascinating detail of the fresco is that the woman is seemingly depicted on her own, without any male authority figure to accompany her—no father, no brother, and no husband. Elite Roman women were nearly always forced by their parents to marry when they were in their mid-to-late teenaged years and the woman in the portrait looks like she is probably in her twenties or thirties, so she is well past the normal marriage age.
It is possible that she may be a widow or an unusual case of an elite woman who never married or a married woman who, for whatever reason, wanted a portrait without her husband. Alternatively, the woman may not be a real individual woman at all, but rather an imaginary woman representing an ideal of some kind. Ultimately, there are far more questions about the woman in the fresco than answers.
I will, however, note that the woman’s thoughtful gaze and her curly hair remind me a bit of the painting Young Woman Drawing, painted in 1801 by the French Neoclassical painter Marie-Denise Villers. It’s another striking example of a painting of an independent woman from more than two hundred years ago and is sometimes thought to be a self-portrait.
ABOVE: Young Woman Drawing, painted in 1801 by the French painter Marie-Denise Villers, possibly as a self-portrait
Wikipedia says the Marie-Denise Villers painting is a portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Charlotte_du_Val_d%27Ognes_(Marie-Denise_Villers)
That’s one attribution, but we don’t actually know for certain whom the portrait depicts.
Spencer, thank you for clarifying that the portrait bust you used in your July article to represent Pamphile of Epidauros is not actually an image of her but does the bust date from first century A.D. the era that Pamphile lived?
It dates from slightly later—the early second century CE.
Roman age paintings and frescos are quite interesting to look, sad that only a handful have survived.
I’m not convinced that southern Italian literacy rates in the nineteenth century necessarily tell us much about literacy in Roman Italy in ancient times. I agree with Harris that the majority of people in Roman Italy were probably illiterate, but I’m not convinced that it was the vast majority. I don’t think Harris adequately addresses the fact that, for a society where nearly everyone was supposedly illiterate, the Roman masses seem to have produced an awful lot of writing. I mean, there’s tons and tons of graffiti all over Pompeii and other Roman cities and I still find it hard to imagine that this all comes from a tiny minority who could write. Harris focuses a lot on the lack of institutional mass education, but the Roman alphabet isn’t that hard to learn and I imagine that a lot of people probably learned to read and write at least to some level without having a formal education.
Probably Harris is too conservative, but Raffaella Cribiore’s estimates aren’t much higher. I don’t think any serious scholar claims that more than 25% of ancient Romans were literate (functional literary included). There’s also a difference in being able to read a shopping list and Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights obviously. I’m not able to make a specific reference but I remember that there was a series of letters whose author was the same (a soldier) but the way each was written changed. The soldier probably dictated his letters to different scribes. As for the graffiti, people know verses of poems by heart, and can write them down, without even understanding what they actually mean. Wasn’t the Roman education system heavily criticized for relying on a “mechanical” mnemonic learning? However, just an opinion, I could be wrong. Great article Spencer.