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House of the Ceii, Pompeii

The House of the Ceii, also referred to as the House of Lucius Ceius Secundus, is a well-preserved Roman domus in Pompeii, exemplifying residential architecture from the late Samnite period around the 2nd century BC. This era predates full Roman dominance in the region, making the house a rare surviving example of pre-colonial Italic dwellings in the city. Located in Regio I, Insula 6, Entrance 15, it sits along a side lane off Via dell'Abbondanza, opposite the larger House of the Menander and near the Temple of Jupiter Meilichios. Excavated between 1913 and 1914, the house derives its name from one of nine electoral inscriptions painted on its exterior walls, which urged support for Lucius Ceius Secundus as a magistrate. These slogans, a common feature in Pompeian politics, suggest Secundus as the likely owner, positioning the house as belonging to a mid-level elite family involved in local governance.
As a small to mid-sized domus, it reflects the social dynamics of Pompeii's merchant and magisterial class, blending functionality with aesthetic ambition. Unlike grander villas, it emphasizes practicality while incorporating decorative elements that hint at cultural influences, such as Egyptian motifs possibly tied to the owner's affiliation with the cult of Isis—a religion that gained popularity in Pompeii during its final decades before the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius.

History

The House of the Ceii (also called Casa dei Ceii, House of L. Ceius Secundus, House of the Hunt, or House of Fabia and Tyrannus) stands at I.6.15 on Vicolo del Menandro, opposite the larger House of Menander. It covers about 288 square meters and follows the compact urban row-house plan typical of this quarter.
Builders raised it in the late 2nd century BC, at the close of Samnite control in Pompeii. The facade still shows those older traditions: two pilasters with cubic capitals framing the entrance, a dentil cornice and projecting canopy over the doorway, white stucco laid out as imitation opus quadratum, and two street-facing windows. Nine painted electoral slogans (programmata) covered the exterior when excavators first uncovered it. One of them names Lucius Ceius Secundus and gave the house its modern title.
In the 1st century AD the house received a major overhaul, most likely while Lucius Ceius Secundus lived there. He belonged to an old Oscan-Samnite family that rose into local office after the earthquake of 62 AD. Inscriptions on the facade support him for aedile around 76 AD and for duovir around 78 AD. Among those who endorsed him were Quintus and Sextus Caecilius Iucundus, members of the well-known banking household from the House of Caecilius Iucundus. The renovations added a partial upper story in timber-frame opus craticium, replaced the wall paintings throughout with Third Style schemes (red panels on light grounds, slender architectural fantasies, and small mythological scenes), and enlarged the garden. Work was still unfinished when Vesuvius erupted: some rooms lacked their final paintings and building materials still lay about. Everyday objects left in place, however, prove the family continued to live there.
The entrance retains a cement cast of the original two-leaf door with its iron fittings. Beyond the fauces lies a tetrastyle atrium whose impluvium is lined with amphora sherds set on edge, a Greek-inspired technique found in only one other Pompeian house (the House of the Ancient Hunt). A marble table with lion-paw feet and a carved well-head have been returned to their original positions beside the impluvium; a plaster cast of a wooden cupboard stands nearby. A masonry-and-wood stair, screened by a wattle wall, led to the incomplete upper floor. Under the stair excavators found eleven terracotta lamps, one iron lamp, and a bronze lantern. The kitchen still contains a small hand mill.
Third Style paintings survive in several rooms. In the winter triclinium a youthful Bacchus offers wine to a tiger. An adjacent room shows busts of satyrs and maenads. The small rear garden (viridarium) is the visual climax. Its back wall carries a large hunting fresco: wolves pursuing boars, a tiger chasing two rams, a lion attacking a bull. The side walls present Egyptianizing Nile landscapes with pygmies fighting a hippopotamus and a crocodile. These exotic scenes, popular in Pompeii’s last decades, probably signal the owner’s interest in the cult of Isis.
Ash and lapilli buried the house in 79 AD. Looters likely entered soon afterward, yet the structure survived in unusually good condition. Matteo Della Corte directed the main excavation from March 1913 to August 1914; further work took place in 1982. Recent conservation, including laser cleaning of the garden frescoes completed around 2021, has restored much of their original color and detail. Visitors today can again see the hunting scene and Nilotic landscapes in something close to their ancient brilliance, together with the replaced marble table, well-head, and other original furnishings.

Architecture

Surrounding rooms open directly off the atrium in the usual Pompeian sequence. Cubicula (bedrooms) occupy the sides, compact and often only dimly lit, intended more for sleeping and storage than for display. To the right of the atrium lies a winter triclinium, a dining room placed to catch the low winter sun and retain heat. Other service and living rooms - store rooms, a possible kitchen annex, and smaller sitting spaces - also open from this central court. A staircase rose from one side of the atrium to an upper floor. In 79 CE that upper storey was either still under repair after the earthquake of 62 or already damaged by the first hours of the eruption; only the lower flights and a few landing traces survive.
At the rear, a corridor or a tablinum-like passage leads into the peristyle garden. Porticoes enclose the garden on three sides, so that the colonnade frames the planted court and funnels light and air back toward the house. The rear wall, the one visitors saw last and longest, carried the house’s most ambitious decoration. The garden itself held ornamental plants, boxed shrubs, and almost certainly a modest water feature - a small fountain or a shallow basin - typical of mid-sized Pompeian houses that wanted the look of a villa garden without the space of a true hortus.
The plan is economical and socially clear. Reception rooms (atrium and the rooms that open immediately from it) occupy the front of the lot, closest to the street. More private cubicula and service rooms withdraw to the sides. The garden at the back supplies light, ventilation, and a pleasant view for diners and for anyone passing through the tablinum. Finds confirm comfortable but not palatial living: plaster casts of wooden furniture, including a wardrobe, amphorae for wine and oil, and ordinary household pottery.

Wall Decorations (Third Style)
The surviving interiors are painted in a refined Third Style. Instead of the heavy, illusionistic architecture of the Second Style, the painters used flat, elegant surfaces: slender candelabra, thin columns, and trailing foliage that barely project from the wall. Backgrounds are monochrome - black, deep red, and yellow, with more green and blue than in earlier phases. Small central panels, like framed pictures hung on the wall, show mythological or theatrical subjects. After Rome’s conquest of Egypt, Nilotic landscapes, ibises, pygmies, and other Egyptianizing motifs also appear, mixed with theater masks and Dionysiac imagery.
In the atrium and the rooms that open from it, one panel is especially striking: a youthful Bacchus (Dionysus) offering wine to a tiger. The scene is compact and lively. The god, still beardless, holds out a cup or pours from a vessel; the tiger, smaller than life and more panther-like, rears or crouches to drink. The image links fertility, wine, and untamed nature - a fitting theme for a house that also used satyr and maenad busts in nearby rooms. Those companion figures, followers of Bacchus, keep the Dionysiac thread running through the reception suite.
The winter triclinium to the right of the atrium continues the same Third Style scheme. Panels of the same Bacchus-and-tiger scene, or closely related Dionysiac subjects, sit against the colored grounds. Other rooms carry architectural fantasies - impossibly thin columns, floating aediculae, and delicate linear ornament - together with small mythological figures. Floors are usually geometric mosaics, sometimes with inset marble chips or simple emblema panels, practical rather than lavish.
Taken together, the house shows a well-planned mid-level Pompeian residence: public rooms at the street, private and service spaces tucked to the sides, a garden that both lights the interior and finishes the view, and wall painting that favors elegance and myth over architectural bombast.

The Garden Frescoes - The Highlight
The three walls of the garden, or viridarium, of the House of the Ceii (Casa dei Ceii, Regio I, 6, 15) carry some of the most striking large-scale wall paintings still visible in Pompeii. A major restoration completed in 2021, including laser cleaning of stubborn incrustations and careful retouching of abraded passages, has brought back their original intensity of color. What visitors now see is closer to the vivid, almost theatrical effect the house presented in the years before 79 CE.
The back wall is dominated by a monumental hunting scene that rises nearly two stories. Predators and prey are shown in violent motion across a rocky, vegetated landscape framed by painted architecture. Wolves pursue wild boars, a tiger leaps toward rams, a lion attacks a bull, and a deer twists in terror as a boar gives chase. The composition is not a peaceful pastoral vista. It is nature as spectacle: tooth, claw, and panic arranged in stacked registers so that the modest garden appears to open onto a vast, dangerous wilderness. Two marble sphinx fountains once stood at the lower corners of this wall, tying the painted hunt to real water and to Egyptian imagery.
The side walls continue the illusion with pseudo-Egyptian, Nilotic landscapes. Pygmies hunt and struggle with a hippopotamus and crocodiles on the banks of a river that stands in for the Nile. Boats, amphorae, shrines, and exotic vegetation fill the remaining space. These motifs were fashionable in Pompeian gardens in the last decades of the city. They enlarged a small outdoor room by visual trickery and carried the diner or guest into a distant, exotic world. Scholars also read a more personal meaning: the owner’s taste for Egypt and, very likely, an interest in the cult of Isis, which had a strong following in Pompeii by the 70s CE.
Taken together, the three walls turned a compact garden into an immersive backdrop for dining and rest. Guests looking out from the tablinum or walking the short corridor from the atrium would have seen hunt, Nile, and garden merging into one continuous, entertaining panorama.

Additional Features and Context
Floors in the principal rooms use geometric mosaic patterns and insets of multicolored marble (opus sectile in the triclinium). The tablinum, which opens directly onto the garden, has a cocciopesto pavement with a central geometric mosaic framing lozenge-shaped marble tiles. At the time of the eruption this room was still awaiting new wall paintings, a sign that renovation was unfinished.
The house also had an upper story along the street façade. Stair evidence and collapsed remains show that the second floor was under construction or recently added and was probably used by household staff. Daily objects found throughout the building confirm that the family continued to live here while work was in progress.
The House of the Ceii itself is one of the rarer surviving late-Samnite houses in Pompeii, with a core dating to the late 2nd century BCE. In the 1st century CE it was substantially modernized in the Third Style. An electoral inscription painted on the façade names Lucius Ceius Secundus, aedile in 76 and duovir in 78, and the house is generally attributed to him or his family. The decorative program mixes Greek mythological panels elsewhere in the house with Roman taste for luxury, illusionistic space, and fashionable exoticism. The result is prosperous but not palatial: a local magistrate’s home that used paint, marble, and water to suggest a wider world than the modest plot actually contained. A tortoise skeleton found in the garden and numerous graffiti add small traces of everyday life amid the grand painted hunt.

Restoration and Preservation

Over the decades after excavation, the wall paintings lost much of their original brilliance. Fading, humidity, rising damp from the ground, salt efflorescence, and gradual paint loss all took their toll. Earlier repairs were sometimes inadequate, and long exposure to rain and open air only made the damage worse, especially on the lower registers where capillary moisture carried soluble salts up through the plaster.
A major conservation campaign finished in February 2021 under the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, paid for from the park’s ordinary operating funds rather than a special grant. Conservator Stefania Giudice directed the work, with archaeological supervision by Luana Toniolo and restoration oversight by Raffaella Guarino. The Padua firm RWS carried out the practical operations.
The team first consolidated detached plaster and flaking paint so the surface would not crumble during cleaning. They then combined chemical and mechanical cleaning with controlled laser ablation to lift stubborn crusts and later deposits without scratching the ancient pigment. Abraded passages were retouched with a fine dotted (puntinato) chromatic reconstruction so the new color sits quietly beside the original rather than imitating it as a solid patch. Joints and losses were filled with a traditional lime-based mortar compatible with the Roman plaster. Finally the roofs, ancient window openings, and remaining gaps were sealed to keep rainwater out and slow future decay.
Earlier phases of the same program had already focused on rainwater management, new protective roofing, and floor coverings so that the delicate interiors would no longer sit under dripping eaves or standing water.
The paintings that emerged belong to the garden (viridarium) of the House of the Ceii. The back wall shows a large hunting scene with wild animals; the side walls carry Egyptianizing landscapes populated by pygmies and creatures of the Nile Delta. After the 2021 treatment the colors once again read with surprising intensity. Officials described the result as “a film faded by time and then restored,” a phrase that captures both the fragility of the original surface and the care with which it has been brought back into view for visitors.

Significance

The House of the Ceii is one of the few Pompeian houses that still preserves a late Samnite plan from the end of the second century BC. Its severe facade, tetrastyle atrium, and compact garden show how a mid-level elite family lived as Campania shifted from Oscan-Samnite traditions into full Roman civic life. The later Third Style frescoes, added in the first century AD, turn that older shell into a statement of taste, status, and cultural mixing.
Electoral slogans painted on the street front name Lucius Ceius Secundus, aedile in 76 and duovir in 78. That is why scholars assign the house to him and to the old Samnite gens of the Ceii. The facade keeps the austere look of the late Samnite period: white stucco panels imitating opus quadratum, a high doorway framed by cubic capitals, and a dentilled lintel. Nine campaign inscriptions once covered that wall. The house itself is modest in size (about 288 square meters) and has no street-level shops, which already marks it as a private residence rather than a commercial block.
Inside, a two-leaf door (known from its cement cast and surviving iron fittings) leads through the fauces into a rare tetrastyle atrium. Four stuccoed columns surround an impluvium whose basin is lined with amphora sherds set on edge, a Greek technique almost unique in Pompeii (the only close parallel is the House of the Ancient Hunt). Marble borders were added in the first-century renovation. The floor is cocciopesto with white tesserae. A marble table, a wellhead (puteal), and the cast of a wooden cupboard have been returned to their original places. A staircase rose to an upper floor, so the household used more than one level.
The small viridarium at the back is the house’s real showpiece. A narrow water channel ran between two fountain figures, a nymph and a sphinx. A tortoise skeleton was found in the garden. The three enclosing walls were painted to enlarge the tiny court and to create an exotic, almost theatrical landscape:

The rear wall is a crowded hunt: a lion pursues a bull, a leopard attacks two rams, dogs bring down a boar while another boar and two deer flee across a rocky, watery setting. Painted marble reliefs, urns, statues, and garlands frame the scene.
The side walls show Nilotic landscapes: pygmies fighting hippopotami and crocodiles, a boat loaded with amphorae, Egyptian-style temples and sacred buildings, isolated figures walking or carrying basins.

These garden paintings belong to the late Third Style (or a transition toward Fourth). They were not mere decoration. Hunt scenes advertised virtus and control of wild nature. The Nile scenes, pygmies, and Egyptian architecture point to the owner’s interest in the cult of Isis, which had a strong following in Pompeii in the last decades before 79 AD. Together they turn a compact Campanian courtyard into a miniature theater of nature, myth, and distant lands.
Other rooms keep Third Style panels in red, black, and white with architectural fantasies. The winter triclinium shows a young Bacchus pouring wine for a tiger. Nearby rooms have busts of satyrs and maenads. Still-life panels line the short corridor that links atrium and garden.
Excavated in 1913–1914 and restored again in 2021 (laser cleaning, careful retouching, and new protection against rain), the house now displays much of its original color. It stands on Vicolo del Menandro, opposite the House of Menander in Regio I, Insula 6, no. 15. Because so few late Samnite houses survive with their later Roman decoration still readable, the House of the Ceii remains a compact lesson in how Pompeian domestic architecture, local politics, and Mediterranean taste changed together before Vesuvius buried the city.