Roman Domestic Art and Early House Churches (review)

David Balch has collected six of his previous studies and added an introduction and seventh chapter. To his earlier interest in the social setting of the Pauline house churches, he has now paid attention to the pictorial decoration of Roman houses, especially as known from Pompeii.

The result involves considerable repetition, some of which may be useful for the uninitiated to Roman houses and Roman art, but much of which seems unnecessary. An egregious example is identical beginnings and conclusions of several paragraphs to Chapters Two and Three. There is even the repetition of a picture (69, 154). Petronius, Satyricon 39.4 is quoted twice (60, 84) in different translations. The reprinting includes the abstract in German of Chapter Four. The content belies the claim in the foreword to "have revised all the essays and coordinated them" (vi).

The introduction describes Roman houses at Pompeii and elsewhere. Balch picks up the important observation that the Romans had a different view from moderns about public and private space: extensive parts of houses (vestibules, atria, courtyards, peristyles) were open to uninvited persons (3ff.). He makes the further point that many houses could accommodate meetings of forty to eighty persons, many more than the twenty to forty usually assumed for the size of house churches (15–16).

Chapter One discusses houses, three-story insula, and city neighborhoods. Rich and poor dwellings were crowded together, and contrary to expectations in philosophical literature and legal texts women owned houses and businesses.

Chapters Two and Three take off from Galatians 3.1 about word pictures with a discussion of visual symbols of suffering in Pompeian and Roman culture. Greeks and Romans identified the Greek Io with Egyptian Isis, and Balch raises the question of a relationship between her suffering and that of Jesus. Other examples of violence depicted in domestic settings were Iphigenia, who gave her body for her country, Laocoon (priest of Apollo at Troy), and the dying Gauls. In this context Balch takes note of the graffito found on the Palatine Hill that caricatures a man on a cross with the head of an ass.

Chapter Four examines six myths represented in two triclinia of the House of the Vettii presenting Zeus as the vengeful protector of the political and domestic order. There was much more violence depicted in Roman houses than one might expect.

Chapter Five considers the myths of the pregnant Io, Isis giving birth to Horus, and Leto giving birth to Apollo and Artemis on Delos as providing a context for understanding Revelation 12, in which the author subverted the stories of divine mothers giving birth to divine children and their use by the imperial cult.

Chapter Six looks at the figure of Endymion in domestic and funerary art as a representation of death, a subject not avoided in Roman domestic art.

Chapter Seven summarizes the most frequent motifs in the decoration of dining rooms at Pompeii: Roman imperial ideology, the divine will for human obedience, the Isis cult (and things Egyptian), fascination with Greek theater, portraits, and banquet scenes.

The book contains 307 black and white reproductions—most of poor quality—of scenes discussed. The visual limitations of these pictures are more than compensated by the CD that accompanies the book, on which may be seen 393 fine color pictures. Since so few of these pictures from the houses of Pompeii have been seen by American scholars (even those who have visited Pompeii), this feature is the great bonus of the book.

Balch is a New Testament scholar, and he writes especially for those in his discipline, but the book has relevance for those who study other early Christian literature. For instance, as an example of amphitheater scenes in domestic art, the pictures of Dirce and a bull (her story on 128–31) mean that 1 Clement 6 had an immediate resonance for persecuted Christian women (134–36). The use of Endymion as a model for Jonah at rest under the...