Loufir/Liber at the crossroads of religious cultures in Pompeii (third–second centuries BC) 1

Let us start with an image (Figure 6.1). We see, on the pediment of a temple, a male god with a bunch of grapes and a goblet, flanked by a stick with a ribbon, a thyrsus, and a tympanon, in the company of a banqueter and a panther. He is easily recognisable: Dionysos, Bacchus, Liber for Latin speakers, Fufluns for Etruscans. As the relief was cut in Oscan Pompeii during the second half of the third century BC, ² local worshippers must have called him *Loufir or Lifar. ³ And yet, the iconography of the pediment is inspired by a Hellenistic pattern, which has been broadly spread over Italy, as we shall see: and we recognise the god exactly because this voiceless image is, if not transcultural by nature, at least meaningful enough to be adopted by several cultures that might fit their own conception of the god over what is more or less the same image.