Pompeii excavation

This house owes its name to a mosaic found in the tablinum, representing a care’go an instructor of theatrical actors, and its notoriety to a series of beautiful frescoes showing heroic and mythical subjects like the famous Sacrifice of Iphigenia, which decorated the walls of the atrium and the peristyle now in the Museum of Naples. It is perhaps the most typical house of the middle-class which began to prosper during the last years of Pompeii. Two shops at the sides of the door, in communication with the vestibule show that the owner of this elegant dwelling was also a merchant. On the floor of the entrance hall is the mosaic of a dog attached to a chain, with the motto cave canem beware of the dog. Around the small atrium with its marble basin are the various rooms of the ground floor. A tablinum is decorated with a picture showing Admeto and Alcesti and with a theatrical mosaic. At the rear of the building is the Lararium, in the form of a small tempie. After a narrow, rustie kitchen, there is a large triclinium, with pictures of Venus contemplating a nest of Cupids, of Ariadne abandoned and the myth of Diana. To the left of the peristyle are two other rooms with small pictures showing Ariadne and Theseus, Venus the Fisherwoman and Narcissus at the foun-tain. In the north-west corner there is a second entrance to the house leading onto the Strada della Fullonica.