seen. As I noted above, the first words of Vergil’s text are written below
the second line of the advertisement for Paquius for Duovir, the first line
(reading simply ‘‘Paquium’’) lying underneath the letters of the pro-
gramma for Cuspius Pansa. The second line consists of a series of letters
that abbreviate some standard words and formulae: D. I. D. O. V. F.,
which stands forduumvirum iure dicundo oro vos faciatis(‘‘I ask that you
make [Paquius] duovir for declaring the law’’). There is nothing terribly
remarkable about this, but an examination of della Corte’s drawing of the
wall shows that theAeneidquotation is placed neatly under the first four
letters—which, it will be noted, spell DIDO, the name of Aeneas’s
doomed lover in Book 4 of Vergil’s text.
22
In other words, theAeneid
quotation here does seem to have both context and some content, al-
though it is noteworthy that the painter did not quote Book 4 or any other
lines from the epic that directly relate to Dido. Rather, he provided the
most remembered and easily recognizable words from the text as a whole,
so that the joke, if we may call it that, is still fairly basic, requiring only the
ability to recognizearma virumqueas the first words of Vergil’s text and
‘‘Dido’’ as the name of a central character within it.
The programma for Cuspius Pansa thus neatly illustrates my earlier
point about Pompeian wall writing: that it represents the meeting of two
very different kinds of writing practice, what we may term the pragmatic
and the literary.^23 We need not attribute to the Pompeian sign writer a
great knowledge of Vergil’s text; far from it, because one way of reading
the final, repeatedarmais to suppose that the writer could not continue
the quotation pastTroiae quiand so started over again at the beginning
to fill in the remaining space. Rather, the opening words of theAeneidhave
here been redeployed as part of the discourse of advertisement: on the one
hand,thewordsfunctionsimplyaswords,verbiagethatbothdisplaysthesign
writer’sskillinwritingandhisabilitytoconstructavisuallyappealingnotice;
on the other hand, the literariness of the phrase, and the joke it expresses,
must have been visible to some readers, who might then see an association
between the ‘‘learned’’ gesture and the candidate being supported. In
other words, a fragment like arma virumque cano is significant here
precisely because the words no longer say what they purport to say. The
- Play on the practice of abbreviating words in programmata is attested in Cicero’sDe
Oratore(2. 59. 240), in which the letters LLLMM in a political notice from Terracina, which
might have stood for something likeLege Laetus Lubens Merito Memmium, are interpreted
asLacerat Lacertum Largi Mordax Memmius an insult to the candidate rather than a
recommendation. - Indeed, it may be worth noting that this Cuspius Pansa is also the subject of another
programma that incorporates poetry, in this second instance much more systematically.
Nearby, also in Regio 1, we find another notice which supports him for aedile, again adding a
slightly misconstructed couplet:C. Cuspium Aed. Si qua verecunde viventi gloria danda est /
huic iuveni debet gloria digna dari(‘‘C. Cuspius for Aedile: if any honor should be given to one
living modestly / fitting honor ought to be given to this young man’’:CIL4.7201).
Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii 297