Massimo Osanna’s statement that the pair “might have been lovers” was made in the context of an earlier exhibition featuring the casts, before the DNA study was published. It was an attempt to open the interpretation beyond the sibling or parent-child frameworks — to acknowledge that the relationship of two individuals pressed against each other in their final moments might have been romantic rather than familial. The statement attracted considerable attention at the time, partly because it raised the possibility that the pair’s relationship was one that Roman society recognized in some contexts but that has rarely been discussed in mainstream presentations of Pompeii.
The DNA finding that at least one of the pair was genetically male — and that the pair was not closely biologically related — changes the terms of the discussion significantly. It does not confirm or deny a romantic relationship; it removes the assumption that both individuals were female. Whatever relationship they had, it was not the relationship of sisters, and the two individuals were not the two maidens their conventional name implies.
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## How Interpretation Became Assumption: A Short History
The specific interpretations that the DNA study revised did not arise arbitrarily. They emerged from a long process by which tentative readings became standard descriptions, standard descriptions became unexamined assumptions, and unexamined assumptions became embedded in the public presentation of Pompeii in ways that were difficult to question without specialized knowledge.
When Fiorelli introduced the casting technique in 1863, the casts that resulted were immediately interpreted in terms available to Victorian-era archaeology: family relationships, domestic scenes, the universal human experiences of love and death. The Victorians brought to Pompeii a set of cultural preconceptions about family structure, gender roles, and social life that were not Roman but that were applied to Roman remains because they were the interpretive vocabulary available.