Il Mundus Muliebris a Pompei

Ria Berg, Il Mundus Muliebris a Pompei: Specchi e oggetti da toletta in contesti domestici (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2023). 9788891327406.

Reviewed by A. Everett Beek, Case Western Reserve University, aeb222@case.edu.

Ria Berg’s book Il Mundus Muliebris a Pompei is an archaeological study focused around the material culture of mundus muliebris, or feminine personal grooming and hygiene. Principally, the book catalogues and analyzes Pompeian artifacts associated with grooming: mirrors, unguent bottles, hairpins, tweezers, water basins, and more (Chapter 4 delineates all the object categories under discussion). Among the 139 mirrors conserved in Pompeii, Berg focuses on the ninety-one that have documented provenience in a domestic setting, along with their associated assemblages of toilet articles. For these ninety-one mirrors and their paraphernalia, she provides detailed data on where they were found (which house and where within the house) and relevant details from the ambient environment (such as other objects excavated nearby). But the word mundus, like its Greek equivalent κόσμος, can mean either “personal grooming” or “universe.” Accordingly, Berg examines not only the physical space occupied by grooming-oriented artifacts in Pompeiian houses, but also the notional space occupied by femininity in Roman culture and the place of grooming within that.

The book’s focus on Pompeii, with its long history of official excavation and associated records, allows Berg to explore aspects of these artifacts that are almost always unaddressed in similar catalogues. In the general world of Mediterranean material culture, small, flashy, concealable, and saleable artifacts such as handheld mirrors are all too often bought and sold on the art market, and they seldom come with meaningful provenience data. As a result, mirrors on display in museums may be labeled with a date and location, but the data on these labels are typically deduced from the decorative details and not backed up by stratigraphic evidence. By contrast, Berg can discuss with a high level of specificity both the date when these objects were last used and each one’s location, down to the house in which it was found, the room of the house, and its spatial relationship to other artifacts and features of the house. Berg’s data on Pompeian artifacts helps to fill in the blanks around the vast body of unprovenienced mirrors.

This provenience analysis alone makes this book an exciting publication, opening new research possibilities regarding who used mirrors and what for, questions that have barely been explored in the many catalogues of ancient Greek, Etruscan, and Egyptian mirrors published in previous decades. As tools, mirrors are useful for a variety of purposes, from scientific study to religious rituals, and they have been important throughout history for self-examination and self-construction. While there have been a number of influential studies on the significance of mirrors in Greece and Rome (for Roman men, the use of mirrors was a tightrope to walk between philosophical insight and base vanity),1 these studies have generally been based on literary sources—what does Socrates say about the proper use of mirrors?2—rather than archaeological data to examine whether anyone followed Socrates’ advice. From that perspective, Berg’s book is a step into uncharted territory. Moreover, this Pompeian data allows Berg to make a fascinating departure from the study of Etruscan mirrors: whereas Etruscan mirrors are almost always found in funerary contexts and analyzed as grave goods, these domestic mirrors from Pompeii can reveal how the mirrors were used by living people.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of mundus muliebris and provides some necessary background on the complexities of studying gender within archaeology (more on this below). In Chapters 2 and 3, Berg discusses the literary, artistic, and iconographic context for the mundus muliebris and its material culture. Moreover, she approaches the question of why it is valuable to study all these artifacts together. The principal rationale for such is that mundus muliebris is a category of objects established within ancient Roman discourse, notably in legal contexts when a man writing a will wants to guarantee that his wife can retain possession of her mundus muliebris articles after his death. Thus, mundus muliebris had economic as well as social significance in Rome.

The largest part of Berg’s book (Chapter 7) is devoted to cataloging ninety-one Roman mirrors excavated and conserved at Pompeii along with the associated assemblage of toilet articles. This endeavor fills a substantial gap in existing scholarship. Ancient Roman mirrors are neglected within the study of ancient material culture; compared to Greek, Egyptian, and Etruscan mirrors, Roman mirrors have not attracted as much attention in the form of catalogues or monographs. The largest catalogue of Roman mirrors before Berg’s was Glenys Lloyd-Morgan’s slender volume which was restricted to mirrors from the Netherlands.3 Granted, as is evidenced in Berg’s catalogue, the vast majority of Roman mirrors are undecorated metal discs or rectangles and in a museum display do not look as glamorous as a Greek caryatid mirror shaped like a sympathetic girl or an Etruscan mirror engraved with dramatic gods and goddesses. But Berg’s study provides valuable insight into Roman daily life. In particular, it illustrates how the longstanding human preoccupation with mirrors and reflections played out in Pompeii.

In this endeavor, Berg uncovers some surprising results. For example, she reports that of the sixty-nine Pompeiian domestic settings under discussion, the vast majority of the houses contained only one mirror, which implies that everyone in the home who needed a mirror shared the same one. Moreover, these Pompeian mirrors are associated with an assemblage of other mundus muliebris articles, such as unguent bottles, combs, tweezers, hair pins, and cosmetic spoons and applicators—but usually such an assemblage amounts to only five to ten items. (For perspective, I encourage you to tally up the bottles, brushes, hair accessories, tubes, tools, scissors, etcetera surrounding your family’s bathroom mirror and imagine how to cut that number down to five.) The few instances of larger assemblages are not associated with wealthier homes; in fact, larger assemblages tend to be found in smaller houses. Thus, the stereotype of wealthy women assembling an enormous collection of equipment to maintain their appearance is not borne out by the evidence here. On the contrary, Berg suggests that large accumulations of toilet articles were “sub-elite” (p. 226) and connected with the class of liberti. She notes as well (p. 452) that some assemblages were found in association with locking mechanisms from cabinets or armoires, suggesting that these were kept locked up with the house’s valuables. Finally, she notes that Roman society made a significant value distinction between mundus, hygiene and personal grooming, and ornatus, beautification and adornment. Mundus was an essential part of a woman’s self-construction, whereas ornatus was vain, frivolous, and possibly sinister. This is why, Berg argues (p. 453), mirrors are often depicted in Roman women’s funerary monuments—carrying forward into eternity the woman’s ability to construct herself—whereas jewels are not.

Berg also devotes some attention to the larger theory of gender and the choice to construe mirrors and toilet articles as specifically “feminine.” Her introduction is straightforward in raising the question: How can one write a book about the mundus muliebris and its material culture while avoiding an essentialist model of gender? Her answer is a bit equivocal; she initially states that Roman artifacts are multifunctional, that their gender identity is “fuzzy” and artifacts such as mirrors and glass vials can be interpreted on a grayscale of masculinity/femininity (p. 16)—yet she still throughout the rest of the book construes these artifacts in a feminine context.  Gender identities in ancient Rome can be, as Berg notes, fuzzy, with myriad complications to the binary. While mirrors are stereotypically associated with women, ancient sources also encourage men to use mirrors in certain circumstances: for grooming, self-knowledge, and scientific study. Some of these Pompeiian mirrors were likely used by people who are not women, and I would like to see Berg explore those possibilities more. Berg also calls attention (p. 16) to the remarkable correlation between toilet articles (traditionally gendered feminine) and medical objects (traditionally gendered masculine). Small glass phials, she says, might be used to contain either beauty products or medical preparations; in fact, the same mixtures might be used for both purposes. Grooming tools too can be used for medical purposes; Berg includes within the mundus muliebris tweezers, “ear cleaners,” and coticulae (stone palettes for mixing cosmetics or medications). The connection between cosmetics and medicine may not be news to readers of Ovid’s Medicamina, but it deserves more attention in the study of material culture.

Building on this interrogation of gender in artifacts, Chapter 5 gives a detailed discussion of “feminine spaces” within Greek and Roman houses. Berg presents the well-trodden question of whether Greek (Athenian) houses had segregated spaces for men and women and whether Roman houses followed meaningfully different conventions. Chapter 7’s data on where the assemblages were found can be used to answer this question. Here again Berg’s study is useful because it is difficult to obtain archaeological data on the location of feminine-coded objects within occupied houses. Based on her data, she does not adopt a strong conclusion on what space in a Pompeiian house is considered feminine, though she cautiously endorses (p. 452) the Roman oecus (or principal hall) as the place where the daily mundus muliebris rituals may have been conventionally conducted.

Berg is transparent about the limitations of her study. For example, in Chapter 6 she discusses the incomplete or semi-legible state of some of the excavation records of Pompeii and the financial forces that drove the excavations in dubious directions in the early twentieth century. She also acknowledges that, while her study of artifacts in situ implies that the objects under discussion were ordinarily kept and used in the place where they were found, the crisis of the volcanic eruption (and the eighteenth-century amateur excavations of Pompeii) may have reshuffled some movable goods. There are of course larger obstacles to drawing broad conclusions from this limited body of data. The sixty-nine domestic settings under discussion were chosen simply due to the presence of a mirror on the premises and are not intended as a representative sample of Pompeiian households—or of ancient households more generally, across centuries and cultures. Moreover, Berg’s analysis is so strictly focused on mundus muliebris artifacts that the surrounding environment can disappear into the background; Berg’s discussion of the contents and décor of the house in question focuses on the details that seem relevant to the mundus muliebris, to the exclusion of anything else. This is not intended as a general survey of the material culture of Pompeiian houses; it is only about toilet articles and the space they occupy. While this book has a limited scope, it is very successful within that scope.

As a final point in its favor—and it is an important one—the book is lavishly illustrated with color photos, diagrams, and plans of Pompeian buildings. The photos show not only Pompeiian artifacts, but also ancient artworks (wall paintings and mosaics) depicting the use of mirrors and toilet articles. It is enormously valuable to see all these images in one volume. Alongside a wide variety of mundane undecorated metal mirrors and glass vessels, the reader sees little-known or unexpected images. Examples include: fragments of a textile made of gold thread (p. 353), a marble funerary urn carved to look like a reed basket (p. 170), pages from the inventory books of the Pompeii excavation (p. 213), an ithyphallic bronze lamp (p. 230), and a fresco depicting “intimate ablutions” (p. 150). With its profusion of illustrations, this book can be informative even for those with limited Italian, and the writing is accessible even to non-archaeologists.

Table of Contents

Prefazione (xi)
1. Introduzione (3–16)
2. I contesti letterari del mundus muliebris (19–43)
3. Iconografia del mundus muliebris (47–61)
4. I componenti materiali del mundus muliebris (65–175)
5. Mundus muliebris e lo spazio femminile (179–208)
6. Contesti pompeiani con mundus muliebris (211–26)
7. Catalogo dei contesti degli specchi pompeiani (229–445)
8. Conclusione: Il significato dei contesti di mundus muliebris a Pompei (449–53)
Catalogo degli specchi conservati nei depositi del Parco Archeologico di Pompei (457–79)

Notes

1. E.g. Bartsch, Shadi. The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Taylor, Rabun. The Moral Mirror of Roman Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. McCarty, Willard. “The Shape of the Mirror: Metaphorical Catoptrics in Classical Literature.” Arethusa 22, no. 2 (Fall, 1989): 161-95.

2. For Socrates’ reported opinions on the proper usage of mirrors, see e.g. Plato Alcibiades 132c-133b, Plato Phaedrus 255b-d, and Diogenes Laertius 2.33.

3. Glenys Lloyd-Morgan. Description of the Collections in the Rijksmuseum G. M. Kam at  Nijmegen, vol. 9, The Mirrors, Including a Description of the Roman Mirrors Found in the Netherlands, in Other Dutch Museums (Nijmegen: Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Welfare, 1981).