number of texts that play on the written materiality of the graffito text,
perhaps most famously the couplet found scratched several times in differ-
ent parts ofthe city:Admiror o parieste noncecidisse ruinis / qui totscriptorum
taedia sustineas(‘‘I’m amazed, wall, that you haven’t fallen down in ruins, /
since you bear the tedious outpourings of so many writers,’’CIL4.1904).^15
UnlikecanonicalLatin poets,who seem tohavea certain ambivalenceabout
the material aspects of book production,^16 graffiti authors repeatedly call
attention to the written aspect of their work.
This is not to insist on a strong distinction between the vocabulary of
authorship in the Pompeian graffiti and that found in canonical Latin
literature—prose authors such as Livy and Cicero, after all, often speak
of themselves and their literary models asscriptoreswithout any apparent
hesitation. Yet it is important to consider the ways in which the appella-
tion ‘‘writer’’ signifies differently in a graffito text and, for example, in the
preface to Livy’s 142-book history. That is, when Livy refers to his
relationship to other ‘‘writers’’ (novi... scriptores; in tanta scriptorum
turba: AUC pref. 2–3) and their practice of ‘‘writing’’ (scribendi:
pref. 2), he underscores both the materiality of his own work and the
material tradition of which it is a part; theAb Urbe Conditathus takes its
place as a book in a long line of books on the subject of Roman history.
The materiality of the graffito text, by contrast, is much more local and
immediate; when a wall text tells us that ‘‘so-and-so wrote this’’ it delib-
erately calls attention not just to the words themselves but to the act that
created them. In this sense, to quote critic Susan Stewart on the modern
day, ‘‘graffiti is not a crime of content,’’ or, in other words, what often
signifies about graffiti is the material fact of their existence and not what
they actually say.^17 Fundamentally, graffiti are meaningful not just as texts
qua texts but as traces of the act of inscribing them. They serve to
document not simply the sentiments their words express but the practice
of writing those words on the wall.
for a drunk poet of the dark brothel, who, with crude charcoal and crumbling chalk, writes
poems which people read while they shit’’).
- Other examples includeCIL4.1234,pupa quae bela is, tibi / me misit qui tuus es[t].
vale(‘‘girl, you who are lovely: he who is yours sends me to you. farewell’’). The epistolary
form here seen in the verbmisitand the finalvale is the rather feeble joke, because the
text is stationary and the girl (any beautiful girl who comes by, presumably) must come to it.
More sophisticated isCIL4.2360, which plays with the relationship between writer, text,
and reader:Amat qui scribet, pedicatur qui leget, / qui opsultat prurit, paticus est qui praeterit. /
Ursi me comedant; et ego verpa qui lego(‘‘He loves, the one who writes; the one who reads is
fucked, / The critic wants it bad. Who passes by? He sucks. / Bears eat me! I’m the reader and
a dickhead too’’). The joke in this instance is compounded if we imagine someone reading
this text aloud and ending with the statement in the final line. - See Farrell, ch. 8, in this volume.
- Stewart 1987, 174.
Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii 293