writer is not actually attempting to communicate that he himself is singing
about arms and the man, or even necessarily that he agrees with Vergil that
singing arms and the man is an important or illustrious thing to do. On the
other hand, he also did not write a series of random or simply banal words
like ‘‘man wood dog’’ or ‘‘sheep are fat,’’ nor did he write a message that
could beconstrued asa personal sentiment evenifitwas not, for example, ‘‘I
love you’’ or ‘‘power to the people.’’ Instead, he selected a phrase that, as a
function of its literary heritage, seems to say something important beyond
what the words themselves signify; as in the J. Peterman catalogue, the
opening of Vergil’sAeneidis here useful because what it means goes beyond
what the words actually say.
The association between the words and Vergil’s text produces, then, a
sense of meaningfulness. Still, the quotation does not depend solely on
recall of theAeneidto signal its origins: its literariness is additionally
expressed in its dactylic rhythm, its invocation of Troy, and especially
by the verbcano. Among Pompeian wall texts, which, as I noted above,
frequently foreground the fact that they are part of a written medium,
‘‘I sing’’ necessarily invokes a different discourse: other than in quotations
of the first line of theAeneid, the word is found in only two other places
on walls in the ancient city, both of which (I would argue) are deliberately
employing literary language. The irony here is that, by writing a word for
verbal performance (cano), the writer of the Pompeian text sounds book-
ish, by which I do not just mean he sounds learned but rather as though he
has been reading something other than walls in Pompeii. One of the
things that serves to signal the quotation as a quotation, of a literary
medium, is the fact that it represents in writing an imagined oral
event.^24 This is not, I hasten to add, to say that Vergil’s text was under-
stood to be a ‘‘real’’ song that people actually sang. Rather, the idea of
a sung poem is, within the context of the graffiti, anomalous, so that the
use ofcanonecessarily invokes the high literary tradition represented by
Vergil rather than the general discourse of graffiti.
Perhaps the important question is not so much why people wrote the
first line of theAeneidon walls in Pompeii, but rather why they wrote
the first line of theAeneidas opposed to something else. Again, the answer
to this question probably varies from instance to instance, but as a general
observation it is worth noting the wide mobility ofarma virumque—words
that especially when quoted without the governing verbcano,asvery
frequently occurs in the Pompeian graffiti, are literally meaningless except
as a reminder of Vergil’s text. This reflects, of course, the popularity
of theAeneidparticularly, but it is also true that poetic quotation far
- We might compareCIL4.9848, which is a rare instance of the verbcanoused in
Pompeian wall writing outside of a quotation of the first line of theAeneid. Here the phrase
hic duo rivales ca[n]ont(‘‘here two rivals sang’’) appears beneath two lines of verse quoted
from Ovid and Propertius.
298 Institutions and Communities