Grand political comedy in Rome and the Vatican

One of the sculptures at the British Museum’s splendid Pompeii exhibition shows four ferocious dogs attacking a stag as it awaits its bloody death with quiet resignation. It is a beautiful work of art, brilliantly carved from a single slab of marble, but potentially shocking today because it appears to rejoice at the prospect of the stag being torn to pieces. The museum clearly fears so, for the label beside the sculpture anticipates objections to it by explaining that the ancient Romans, unlike us, were very keen on bloodsports. This enthusiasm, together with an obsession with erect penises, is one of the few ways in which the Romans were not our superiors in delicacy and refinement.

Hunting with hounds has, of course, been abolished in England by parliament, but fox-hunting has become rather more popular as a result. I don’t know about deer-hunting. Most people, I suspect, feel much greater revulsion at the idea of a deer being savaged by dogs than of a fox suffering the same fate.