distinction, scholars have found it difficult to define exactly what the wall
texts meant to an ancient writer or reader, and how their presence in
the ancient urban environment should be judged. What we might call
Pompeian graffiti culture thus remains deeply enigmatic, and we have been
left with some of our most basic questions unanswered: who was writing
Pompeian graffiti? Why did they write it? What did they think it was for?
One way in which scholars have attempted to answer these questions is
by looking at the role that writing played in ancient culture as an aspect of
canonical literature—an important and complex issue in the Latin poets.
Again, however, there are clearly both material and generic differences
between a poem by Vergil and one found written on a wall in Pompeii: on
the most fundamental level, the graffito is by definition an autograph and
has not as a text passed through the hands of thousands of readers, rereaders,
copyists, and critics. Indeed, this circumstance—that there is an intimate
connection between a graffito and the hand of its author—has led scholars in
the past to see the language of the wall texts as closely representing Latin as
it was spoken in the streets of the ancient city.
10
Although not disputing this
claim, I would point out that it is curious, therefore, how thoroughly the
graffiti authorsembracetheirrole as‘‘writers.’’Wehavenumerousinstances
of signatures tograffititexts thatemployforms of theverbscribo(‘‘so-and-so
wrote this’’)^11 and others that clearly allude to the creation of a graffito text
aswriting:forexample(followinganobscenejoke),‘‘hewritesitwhoknows
about it’’;^12 ‘‘as many times as I wrote, you also once and for all are reading
(it)’’;^13 ‘‘Lesbianus, you shit and you write ‘hello.’’’^14 In addition, we have a
upon stucco...Wemayassume that the writers were as little representative of the best
elements of society as are the tourists who scratch or carve their names upon ancient
monuments to day’’ (Mau 1902, 491). On the other side, those who, like William Harris,
think that even male literacy was restricted to ‘‘well below the 20 30% range’’ (Harris 1989,
259) conclude that the writers must have been among the elite. To my mind, the sheer
volume of graffiti and its wide variation in style, orthography, and placement would seem to
argue for a community of both writers and readers from a fairly wide range of social and
educational backgrounds. For a critique of Harris’s position on the Pompeian wall texts, see
Franklin 1991.
- An approach most famously represented in Va ̈a ̈na ̈nen 1966, but cf. Wachter 1998.
A more fanciful version is represented in Maiuri 1986 (quoted in Varone 2002, 103): the
graffiti are an ‘‘echo of that lively, noisy, uproarious life in the open air which turned human
relationships in a Campanian city, as it still does in the old quarters of Naples, into the life of
a single immense household, where all feel themselves to be housemates and acquaintances,
conversing and debating loudly as if within the walls of their own houses’’ (136). - For example (among many others),CIL4.1520,scripsit Venus Fisica Pompeiana;
4.1841scribit Narcissus;4.2395,scribet Sabinus;4.4925,Anteros hoc scripsit;4.8259,scribit
rivalis;and so forth.
12.Scribit qui novit(CIL4.4239).
13.Quot scripsi semel et legis(CIL4.1860).
14.Lesbiane, cacas scribisque [sa]lute(m)(CIL4.10070). Cf. Martial (12. 61. 7 10):
quaeras, censeo, si legi laboras, / nigri fornicis ebrium poetam, / qui carbone rudi putrique creta /
scribit carmina, quae legunt cacantes(‘‘I tell you, if you want to be read about, you should look
292 Institutions and Communities