CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.

In the Roman Period, theatrical themes were fashionable for domestic and public decoration. Theater masks are found all over Pompeii, in both public and private settings, including wall paintings and peristyle reliefs, many of which portray Dionysiac figures. See, for example, nos. 64-67 in Ward-Perkins and Claridge, Pompeii AD 79, vol. II. According to the authors (op. cit., vol. I, p. 89), although a Greek invention, classical theater continued to evolve through the early Roman period, "but it retained an extraordinarily durable hard core of continuity, as one sees very clearly, for example, in the visual conventions of the Roman theater, which were still steeped in Dionysiac symbolic imagery - an association that goes right back to the very origins of Greek drama, in the dances and sacred rituals connected with the cult of Dionysus." For a mosaic from Hadrian's Villa, now in the Vatican Museums, also depicting masks on a bench, see fig. 808 in M. Bieber, The History of The Greek and Roman Theater, Princeton, 1961.