We need not, however, prioritize the graffiti’s role as artifacts over
their role as texts in an attempt to take their materiality seriously. Rather,
I would underscore the ways in which graffiti foreground the act of
writing and must, therefore, be understood in relation to the various
other writing practices that gave structure to social interactions in
Roman culture. We should see the graffiti in relation to other written
texts that make up the ‘‘literate landscape’’ of the ancient city, texts that
range from notices advertising rental properties, to the painted street signs
that enjoin the passerby not to foul the footpath, to inscriptions on the
bases of honorific statues in the forum.
18
Graffiti share with these other
writings both a fixed, material place in the urban environment and the
sense that they speak to a casual, almost accidental reader, rather than
someone who has deliberately chosen to encounter a text. At the same
time, however, the graffiti also reflect, reformulate, and represent more
formal and ‘‘elite’’ kinds of literature. One of the first examples of wall
writing published in the reports from the Bourbon excavations was a
fragment of Euripides found in 1743 painted on a wall in Herculaneum;
19
subsequently quotations from a number of different canonical authors,
more Roman than Greek, emerged painted or scratched into the ancient
plaster. In addition to the direct quotations from canonical authors,
moreover, there is other evidence of a connection between the wall
texts and elite literature: uses of meter such as dactylic hexameter, the
elegiac couplet, and iambic senarii; invocations of mythological characters
like Pasiphae, Danae, and Dionysus with his Bacchantes; the use of
‘‘literary’’ words, figures, and modes of expression.^20 The Pompeian wall
texts thus represent, in a certain sense, the meeting point between two
genres of writing, between pragmatic, urban, everyday texts and those
that emerged from the sphere of elite cultural production.
In this context it is worth taking note of one instance in which the first
words of theAeneidare found not scratched but painted on a wall in
Pompeii. On a wall to the south of the city, in Regio 1, was found a
- ‘‘For rent’’ signs:CIL4.138, 1136;cacator cave malum(‘‘shitter beware!’’):CIL
4.3782, 3832, 4586, 5438. For a discussion of the different ways in which texts framed the
experience of the urban environment, see Kellum 1999. - Pannuti 1983, 213. The fragment in question is a version of a line from theAntiope
(frg. 220 Nauck). Because it was excavated so early, we have little information on the exact
findspot other than that it was painted on a wall on a street corner in large black and red
letters. The painting itself has long since vanished. It seems clear that a significant percentage
of wall writers and readers were literate in Greek, although the common practice of
transliteration suggests that there may have been more speakers than writers/readers.
For a discussion of the different ways in which Greek mingles with Latin in the graffiti, and
what it signifies about the literate population of Pompeii, see Biville 2003. - For an excellent description of the literary range of Pompeian graffiti, see Gigante
- As noted above, I disagree with some of his conclusions, but his book remains the only
attempt to offer a systematic explanation for this aspect of the graffiti, which makes it an
invaluable resource.
294 Institutions and Communities