English: Mid-1st Century BC. (before 46 BC).

Painted plaster.

From Rome, excavation of a domus in Via Graziosa, present-day Via Cavour (7 April 1848).

This fresco, from the middle of the first century B.C. (before 46 B.C.), divided into eight panels and then reassembled to form four rectangular panels, was found in Rome on 7 April 1848 during the excavation of a domus in Via Graziosa, present-day Via Cavour, and donated to Pius IX on 2 January 1851. The cycle, depicting episodes from the Odyssey books 10-12, may have adorned the upper portion of the wall of a portico. There remain eight landscapes positioned in sequence against the background of a double colonnade viewed in perspective:

the meeting between the companions of Ulysses and the daughter of the King of the Laestrygonians (left); assault of the Laestrygonians on the Greek ships (right)

the Laestrygonians destroy Ulysses' fleet (left); Ulysses' ship, the only one spared, makes its way towards the Island of Circe, Eea (right)

Ulysses in the palace of Circe (left); possibly Ulysses' companions, retransformed from pigs to humans (right)

Ulysses, in the underworld, first meets the shadows of the dead (left), then Orion, Sisyphus, Tityus and the Danaids (right).