Pompeii Pygmies: The weirdest fresco in Ancient Rome

I try very hard not to judge other cultures, and to avoid using the term “weird” when discussing them. Even when we’re talking about Pompeii pygmies. After all, “weird” is subjective. I went to Catholic school growing up, and I’m sure if I had to explain Catholicism to someone who was unfamiliar with it, it would sound monumentally weird. 

“Wait, they eat bread, but it’s actually someone’s body? Like human flesh? Then you drink wine, but it’s blood? Is this a vampire cult? And you’re telling me this guy died and came back to life and let someone poke their fingers in the holes in his hands? What? Weird.”

I can hear about the practices of other religions and other cultures and have a knee jerk reaction. I can watch a YouTube video of people riding in boats on the Ganges at Varanasi, watching burning bodies — all the while, trying not to judge. 

Even little things can seem strange. I’m sure there’s plenty of people in the world who think it’s “weird” that Americans drive everywhere and build massive parking lots and don’t even want to get out of their cars to buy bags of processed food. 

So I try to correct my brain when I hear something about another culture. I try to consider all of these variables and avoid the word “weird.”

That being said…this piece of art is one of the weirdest things ever. 

Taters, Dinos, and the Pompeii Pygmies

This piece of art is a fresco: paint applied to wet plaster. It was found on the lower portion of a wall connecting the columns of a peristyle. For those who aren’t familiar, a “peristyle” is kind of like a columned porch. You see a lot of them surrounding the internal courtyards of homes in Pompeii. 

Not the homes of the “regular folk,” mind you. I mean the wealthy homes. This particular one is known as the “House of the Physician.” Like most every building in Pompeii, nearly everything of interest has been taken away. Statues are gone, mosaics are carted away, frescos are cut out of the walls. 

So this particular fresco is on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. You’ll wander around, looking at little scenes showing Roman goddesses, or a bakery selling bread, or maybe a poet scribbling his latest work on a scroll. 

Then there’s this.

I don’t even know where to start. It looks like there’s a bobblehead standing on a hippo with horse legs, using a stick to poke it. There’s another one riding what looks to be a Dimetrodon. And then there’s a guy throwing a potato at a komodo dragon. 

Turns out, this is what’s called a “Nilotic scene.” Meaning, a scene depicting life on the Nile River. Now, I’ve been to the Nile and I’ve never seen anything close to this sort of fever dream. So how’d we get to this idea?

Naval Love Triangle

In 31 BCE, Octavian — the nephew of Julius Caesar, who’d later become Augustus, the first Roman Emperor — defeated the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. It was the culmination of the most significant love triangle in human history. Well…that’s a simplification. And it’s not entirely accurate. And there’s probably equally bad love triangles in reality shows, I’m sure. 

Anyway (I say “anyway” a lot, huh?) picture this: an unbelievably massive naval battle off the western coast of Greece. Hundreds of galleys. Ballista catapults blasting holes in ships. Splinters of wood impaling people. The sun blotted out by arrows. Machines being cranked and shooting harpoons, grappling ships and pulling them close enough to board. Fully armored soldiers hacking each other to pieces on the decks. 

Ships on fire. Blood painting the water. The air thick with smoke. Eyes burning. People screaming. Men jumping overboard, getting dragged under while trying to strip off their armor. 

The end result: Octavian marches into Egypt. Mark Antony stabs himself and dies. Cleopatra kills herself with a snakebite. Octavian has Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar killed, cementing his claim to the throne. 

Rome rules Egypt. 

For most people in Egypt, things would continue more or less as they did. Sure, there were changes — but on the whole, Rome tended to just let people go about their business as long as they weren’t causing trouble. 

Nevertheless, Egyptians weren’t granted the same status in the Roman Empire as others. Unlike the Greeks, I think many Romans tended to see Egyptians as too “different.” Here’s that word again: weird. Romans saw Egyptians as weird. Not all of them, not necessarily in a racist or derogatory way, and not always, but sometimes. 

So, here we are: Pompeii. Roughly 150 years or so into the Roman rule of Egypt, someone paints scenes of little Egyptian pygmies in the courtyard of their home. 

Crane Your Necks to the Skies

So let’s get one thing out of the way: There are actual pygmies. They’re real-life ethnic groups, made up of people who are shorter than average. There’s a lot of debate about why, but most seem to agree it may have something to do with a lack of sunlight under the canopies of forests, and/or a lack of nutrition, adaptation to heat and humidity, and so on. 

You see pygmy peoples around the world. In Africa, they’re mainly in the central part: the Congo Basin. 

There were pygmies in Ancient Egypt, though it seems they came from the Congo Basin area — brought as captives, where they’d dance at parties. There were dwarves as well, but those are different. There’s an entire topic about dwarves in Ancient Egypt, but you probably don’t want me to get into that. Or maybe you do. I’m not judging.

Certainly, the rest of the world would have heard of these pygmies in Egypt. And thus: Pygmy Tales. 

So this is a whole thing: Tales of the Pygmies. It goes back as far as Homer. You remember him, right? Odysseus, the Trojan War, yada yada yada. Yes, I just yada’d Homer. 

This, from the Iliad:

“Marshalled together under their leaders, the Trojans advanced with cries and clamor, a clamor like birds, cranes in the sky, flying from winter’s storm and unending rain, flowing towards the streams of Ocean, bringing the clamor of death and destruction to Pygmy tribes, bringing evil and strife at the break of day.”

So he’s comparing the Trojan advance to cranes attacking the pygmies. Which…yeah. Weird. 

The story of the cranes is probably the most famous one about the pygmies, and it clearly goes back at least to the Greek Dark Ages. The pygmies disguise themselves as rams, or they ride on rams or goats. They organize teensy little military operations to attack the cranes, smashing their eggs and eating their young, presumably as a preemptive assault to protect themselves and their crops.

There’s an entire realm of study in the ancient world about the pygmies and the cranes. It seems like many were trying to determine what was truth, and what was fiction. Aristotle wrote about the migration of the cranes, and said of the pygmies:

“…for they are no myth, but there truly exists a kind that is small, as reported — both the people and their horses — and they spend their life in caves.”

The Greek historian Herodotus called them “little men of stature smaller than common.” Even Pliny the Elder wrote extensively about the pygmies.

This goes on and on and on — kind of like this story — but I think you get the gist. There were actual pygmies, and there was also an Ancient Greek myth about one and a half foot tall pygmies fighting cranes.

Oh So Sophisticated: Not Like Those Pygmies!

What did it mean to be a Roman? There are many who know more than I and are far more qualified to answer that question.

But for the means of this topic, let’s think of it like this: If you were a Roman, you were the magnificent. You ruled the entire known world. You called the Mediterranean “Mare Nostrum,” meaning “Our Sea.”

You’d crushed your enemies, and brought them the bounty of civilization. The Monty Python bit about “What have the Romans ever done for us?” comes to mind.

But part of being Roman also involved what you weren’t. And this, I think, is a core part of every society: Otherness.

What weren’t you? Well, you weren’t a pygmy. You weren’t a tiny little person battling crocodiles. Isn’t that weird? Look at my painting! Look at all that weirdness. We aren’t like that at all. We aren’t animals. We don’t have to fight hippos. We don’t have to fight anything at all. Where’s the slaves? Slaves! Bring us some dates! We’re going to lounge on my couches next to my fountain and look at my scenes of the hillbilly Egyptians on the Nile and pretend we’re there, relishing in all the bounties our Roman life offers!

I’m sure you can draw parallels to whatever country you’re from. What makes us who we are is also often defined by what we aren’t. Look at those weird people from those other countries! We aren’t like that. We’re number one. Our religion is best. Look at those weirdos burning bodies! Our state is better than California. Can you believe what they do over there? Our neighborhood is better than that one. Stupid weirdos across town in their rusty cars with their bobble heads, taming dinosaurs.