invaluable, albeit not entirely transparent, set of data. From them, it is
clear thatarma virumque cano, at the very least, was a well-known phrase:
often shortened simply toarma virumq, it is found quoted at least fifteen
times in the graffiti from Pompeii, in material contexts that range from
the walls of cook shops to the interiors of wealthy houses.^4 Indeed, the
phrase was so well-known that it might be construed as a kind of common
language, as is suggested inCIL4.2361, where it is found preceded by the
wordscarmina communemne. The grammar of this comment is difficult to
construe, and because the plaster fragment has long since disappeared we
must trust the nineteenth-century excavators for the reading of the text.
Still, the words would seem to imply something about ‘‘common’’ or
‘‘vulgar song,’’ which, given the number and geographical spread of
arma virumquequotations in the graffiti, would seem to be a legitimate
description at least of the first words of Vergil’s text.
The volume of textual graffiti from the ancient Roman city of Pompeii
has long both fascinated and frustrated critics. Indeed, the presence of
literally thousands of fragments of text—written in charcoal, scratched
with a stick or stylus, painted with a brush—led some scholars in the past
to characterize ancient Pompeians as a people amongst whom wall writ-
ing was wide spread as a leisure-time activity: ‘‘one of their [sc. Pom-
peians’] favorite ways of amusing themselves. .. was by idly scribbling on
any convenient surface, a temptation furnished by the stucco walls.’’^5 In
later years some effort was made to distinguish different kinds of
(what has been called) graffiti from one another, so that important and
useful work has been done specifically on election notices^6 —‘‘vote for so-
and-so’’—on prosopographical inscriptions^7 —‘‘so-and-so slept here’’—
and on graffiti with erotic content^8 —‘‘so-and-so slept here with so-and-
so.’’ The corpus of Pompeian wall writings, moreover, has been seen as a
window onto the language of everyday life in the ancient Roman world,
one of our few opportunities to read words written by ordinary people
performing an activity (writing graffiti) that we in the modern day do not
associate with the cultural elite.
9
But perhaps precisely because of this
- See the appendix for a complete list. Cf. della Corte 1940, the appendix to Hoogma
1959, and Franklin 1996/7. - Tanzer 1939, 83. Cf. Lindsay 1960, 115: ‘‘Our [sc. Pompeii’s] walls bear witness to
the crowds of citizens who like to scribble verses.’’ Estimates vary, but as one scholar notes,
CIL4 contains almost 11,000 pieces of text that survive from the walls of Pompeii and
Herculaneum, and that includes only material excavated before 1956: Mouritsen 1988, 9. - For example, Franklin 1980; Mouritsen 1988; Franklin 2001.
- For example (most famously), della Corte 1965; cf. Franklin 1985/6.
- For example (among many others), della Corte 1958; Varone 2002.
- Herman 2000, 18 20. The social status of Pompeian wall writers is still very much an
open question, because, as William Harris correctly observes, ‘‘almost all graffiti leave the
status, sex and occupation of the writer and of the expected reader or readers indeterminate’’
(Harris 1989, 261). One view of the issue is famously represented by Augustus Mau: ‘‘the
cultivated men and women of the ancient city were not accustomed to scratch their names
Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii 291