THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

This is an image from the Greco-Roman city of Pompeii, on the slope of Mt. Vesuvius, showing Terentius Neo and his wife, equally literate, equally civilized, equally real and actual.  The house of Terentius Neo was buried under volcanic ash in AD 79 during the famous eruption. This image, two thousand years old, is a refutation of every “progressive” or “post-modern” claim about the “oppressiveness” of Western Civilization, in which women have enjoyed historically unprecedented parity with men.  It helps in understanding Islam to grasp that, for the Koranic consciousness, this household portrait is an obscenity, down to the degree that it is an image, images being forbidden under sharia and under Islam generally.

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Dr. Bertonneau adds:

Here is another image, also from Pompeii, showing a woman, in company with two friends, painting a picture.  Like Terentius Neo and his wife, or the young woman, this lady is cultured and elegant.

In respect of the young woman: Notice her coiffure and dress, both immaculate and decorous, bespeaking a deeply held idea of form and appearance; notice also the pensive facial mien, bespeaking an active and deliberate inner life and the search for the mot juste.

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Paul T. writes:

I’ve admired those Pompeiian images for decades now. It’s sobering to consider that Graeco-Roman pagan society — gladiatorial contests and all — could still evoke so much more dignity, so much more of a sense of ‘man made in God’s image’, than modern and postmodern Western art could muster 2,000 years later. Any notion of human history as unequivocally ‘progressive’ founders on that alone.

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