Roman fresco depicting a pygmy soldier with a large raised cleaver, hung above the child outstretched on the table. One woman holds the child, another imploringly kneels before a three-person tribunal, as if asking for mercy.
It is hard to resist the impression that this is an illustration of the Old Testament scene of “Solomon’s judgment”, in which the Jewish king settled a dispute between women about which one is the mother of the child, ordering to halve the object of the dispute. The message of this caricature is not entirely clear. Most studies suggest that this scene is a mockery of the Jewish religion and an attempt to ridicule it.
The object was found in one of the houses in Pompeii.
