This full-size marble sarcophagus features sculpted decoration on its three surviving external faces.  The main decorative scene, which runs the length of the front of the sarcophagus, includes, from right to left, a figure that is probably to be identified with Ariadne, leaning on the should of her husband Bacchus, who holds a staff in his left hand and, in his right, a small vase, perhaps a kantharos for wine drinking.  The couple is shown riding in a small, two-wheeled chariot pulled by two prancing centaurs.  The first centaur is bearded and plays a lyre; the second is clean-shaven and blows into a double pipe.  A cista mystica - a vessel of cultic significance - sits under the raised hoof of the second centaur, while a nude maenad stands beside the cista and thumps her tympanum, or drum.  The gesture of her raised arm is mirrored by the arm of a dancing faun who is draped in an animal skin, while a female panther marches between these two central figures.  To the right of this faun are two more fauns, who carry the plump Silenus on  a make-shift hammock.  Another pair of fauns completes the scene: one faun holds a tympanum and a snake, the other is poised with his mantle in hand.  A cista mystica sits between the two figures.

Scenes of Bacchic rituals and dancing were not uncommon on Roman sarcophagi.  Such scenes may indicated specifically that the deceased was an initiate of a Bacchic cult, or they may simply allude more generally to a desire for the joyful afterlife that was associated with Bacchic religion.  The distinctive facial features and the prominence of the dancing maenad at the center of the main panel of the sarcophagus suggest that this representation was intended as a portrait of the deceased.  The Ariadne figure may perhaps bear portrait features as well, as more than one image of the person being honored did sometimes appear in same funerary scene.

-- Elizabeth de Grummond, from Gazda, ed. The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii: Ancient Ritual, Modern Muse (Ann Arbor, 2000), cat. 58