House of the Centenary

[2] Built in the mid-2nd century BC,[3] it is among the largest houses in the city, with private baths, a nymphaeum,[4] a fish pond (piscina),[5] and two atria.

[8] Among the varied paintings preserved in the House of the Centenary is the earliest known depiction of Vesuvius,[9] as well as explicit erotic scenes in a room that may have been designed as a private "sex club".

[19] Another records a slave's bid for freedom: "Officiosus escaped on November 6 in the consulate of Drusus Caesar and M. Junius Silanus" (15 AD).

[23] Other scholars categorize Room 43 simply as a bedroom (cubiculum), which often featured erotic imagery,[24] and find it unnecessary to conclude that sexual entertainment was offered to guests there.

[26] A body of water filled with a variety of fish and marine animals was "dramatically" painted on the parapet that encircled the four walls of the nymphaeum; several species are represented accurately enough to identify.

"[38] A painting in the house's lararium, a shrine to the household gods the Lares, depicts Vesuvius as it may have looked before the eruption,[39] with a single vineyard-covered peak instead of the double-peak profile of today.

Although some scholars reject the single-peak hypothesis,[40] the painting is generally regarded as the earliest known representation of the volcano,[41] even if it should not be taken as a record of what Vesuvius actually looked like.

Plutarch says that vines had grown on it in the 1st century BC, when Spartacus and his fellow slaves had taken refuge there and cut them down to make rope ladders.

Here Vesuvius is shaded green with vines; here the noble grape had exuded its juices in vats: these are the ridges which Bacchus loved more than the hills of Nysa.

[44]The unusual depiction of Bacchus gives him a body composed of grapes,[45] which may represent either the Aminaea variety grown in the area or the eponymous Pompeianum.

One bedroom at the Centenary features a pair of scenes referring to love affairs between a mortal and a divinity: Selene and Endymion, and Cassandra with a laurel branch symbolizing her rejection of Apollo as a lover and his revenge.