Pompeii is not immediately associated with Ancient Egypt, and yet Egyptian religious beliefs and practices – especially the worship of the goddess Isis (4 and 13) – influenced the lives of many inhabitants of the doomed city, as it did elsewhere throughout the Roman world.
Two contemporary texts tell us much about the esoteric beliefs and the rituals performed by priests and initiates of the increasingly popular Isiac cult that spread out from Egypt into the Roman empire from the 2nd century BC. These are the essay On Isis and Osiris (Moralia) by the philosopher Plutarch (AD 45-120) and the novel Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass written by Apuleius (AD 125-180), in which the hero, Lucius, after many picaresque adventures, finds his salvation in the goddess Isis.
Isiac temples were found in most cities of the empire, including Rome where a large temple to the goddess next to one to her consort Serapis was rebuilt after the fire of AD 80 by Emperor Domitian (r AD 81-96) in the Campus Martius, near where Emperor Hadrian (r 117-134) was to build the Pantheon. The best preserved of these temples was, however, unearthed in Pompeii (2) between 1764 and 1766. It was complete with its furnishings and vivid wall paintings, all priceless documents that show the secret rituals enacted within (3 and 10). Five years later, one of the first visitors to the newly discovered buried city was the 13-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He saw the temple of Isis which, 20 years afterwards, inspired him when he was composing The Magic Flute.
