The Romans, those paragons of civilisation whose aqueducts still run and whose legal codes still bind us, knew a thing or two about good luck. They stuffed their pockets with phallic amulets, they sprinkled their floors with mosaic penises, and they never, ever commissioned a bull without a full set of elegant, fertile testicles. So it is with a sigh of relief that one greets the news that Italian restorers have, at long last, returned the missing ‘lucky testicles’ to a 2,000-year-old bull mosaic at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. British archaeologists, in a state of rare and commendable accord, have hailed this as a ‘heritage preservation win’. Quite right too. For once, the forces of prudery and neglect have been beaten back by the forces of historical accuracy and common sense.
The mosaic in question, discovered in 2018 in the ‘Insula of the Chaste Lovers’ (a name now freighted with delicious irony), depicts a bull being led to sacrifice. The beast’s scrotum had been erased, presumably by the clumsy trowel of a nineteenth-century excavator who felt a frisson of Victorian shame at the sight of lapidary gonads. For over a century, the bull has floated in a state of castrated incompleteness, a symbol not of Roman virility but of our own squeamishness. The restoration, painstakingly achieved using 3D scans and fragments found in the site’s storerooms, has now restored the bull to its full anatomical glory. The testicles, as the park’s director dryly noted, were ‘an auspicious symbol for the ancient Romans’. Indeed they were. And for the modern Italian, I suspect, they are no less welcome.
Let us pause to admire the terminology. ‘Lucky testicles.’ There is a phrase that would never pass the lips of a British civil servant without a wince and a mumble about ‘cultural sensitivity’. But the Italians, bless them, are not so burdened. They understand that the past is not a polite drawing-room conversation. It is a raucous, unwashed, deeply genital affair. From the Iron Age to the Bayeux Tapestry to the priapic gargoyles of medieval cathedrals, human art has always been obsessively concerned with fertility, virility, and the plain fact that we are animals who propagate. To scrub that away is to scrub away the texture of history. It is to impose a modern, sterilised, Instagram-ready past on a world that smelled of garlic, sweat, and sacrifice.
British archaeologists have been fulsome in their praise, and I share their enthusiasm. For once, we are not looking at a restoration that somehow makes the artefact less. No, this is a restoration that restores meaning. The bull, with its full complement of testicles, is a statement of power, of fruitfulness, of the cosmic cycle of life and death. It is a bull that could have stood in the Forum, an object of awe and reverence. The castrated bull, by contrast, was a neutered curiosity, a riddle without a punchline. Now the mosaic makes sense. It tells its story without a stammer.
Of course, one must not be naive. This is also a story about tourism. Pompeii, that great necropolis of ash and plaster, is a cash cow. Every restored mosaic, every lucky testicle, is another enticement for the Instagram hordes. But I do not mind that. Better a million tourists gawping at a properly anatomical bull than a million scholars debating what the missing scrotum might have symbolised. The truth is concrete. It is also, in this case, hairy and pendulous.
There is a larger lesson here for those of us obsessed with the decline of standards. The Romans were not a delicate people. They did not blush at the sight of genitalia. They were, in fact, rather proud of them. The restoration of the bull’s testicles is a small act of rebellion against the sanitisation of the past. It is a reminder that history is not a museum of good taste. It is a record of what we were: crude, superstitious, fleshly, and deeply attached to the idea that a good set of testicles could ward off the evil eye. If only our politicians were so honest.
So raise a glass to the Italian restorers. They have done what the Victorians could not: they have given the bull back its balls. And in doing so, they have given us back a fragment of our own uncensored heritage. For that, we should be deeply, profoundly grateful. And perhaps a little envious.
