Rome’s greatest poet; yet its appearance in the Pompeian graffiti seems to
reduce it to simple words, scratches on a wall with no more meaning than
Marcellus Praenestinam amat.
Like the appearance of theAeneid’s opening in the J. Peterman cata-
logue, therefore, the quotations from Vergil in Pompeian graffiti seem
at once to demand and deny explication. Part of the difficulty here
would seem to be that the practice of literary quotation in Pompeian
wall writing generally is poorly understood. Although Marcello Gigante
made a concerted effort to use the graffiti to prove that Pompeii possessed
a widespread, ‘‘Hellenistic’’ literary culture,
2
his approach seems overly
optimistic; although it is true that there are a surprising number of
quotations from canonical literature found in the graffiti, the vast majority
of wall texts are much more mundane. Moreover, although it is tempting
to try to find a uniform explanation of Pompeian graffiti writers’ and
readers’ motivations, I would argue that this is a mistake, insofar as it
necessarily treats Pompeians as a homogenous group that possessed com-
mon tastes, interests, and levels of knowledge. In a community as socially
and economically diverse as Pompeii, this is clearly an error. In order to do
justice to the differences among both writers and readers, therefore,
I think we must accept the possibility that even a single text might
mean different things to different people:arma virumquemight appear
to one as a ‘‘learned’’ quotation, to another as a hackneyed and ridiculous
tag, to a third, barely literate, person as uninterpretable words on a wall.
For this reason, I have not here attempted to come up with an explanation
for every instance in which a reference to the Aeneidappears on a
Pompeian wall, let alone formulate a single, overarching theory of what
inspired Pompeians to quote Vergil when inscribing the walls of their city.
Rather, my aim is to look at a few specific instances of Vergilian quotation
in the graffiti and to consider how each of them reveals different modes of
reading and writing this most canonical of Latin texts in this least canon-
ical of ancient written forms. What will emerge is not a comprehensive
account of literary quotation in early imperial Pompeii, but one account
of the complicated ways in which ‘‘literary literacy’’ could be displayed
and deconstructed in ancient Roman wall writing.
We have known for many years that the story of Aeneas enjoyed a
‘‘popular’’ following under the early Roman empire. This is illustrated
in Pompeii by the wide variety of representations of the hero found there,
which range from panel paintings in elite houses to small decorative
terracotta statuettes.
3
But the proliferation around Pompeii of images of
Aeneas does not actually tell us anything about familiarity with the words
of Vergil’sAeneid; for answering this question, the graffiti provide an
- Gigante 1979.
- A summary of the evidence appears in Galinsky 1969, 3 61.
290 Institutions and Communities