Figure 12.3Painting of writing materials from Pompeii (MANN 4676).The act of literary quotation on Pompeian walls generally, I would
argue, trades on this sense of ‘‘poetry,’’ on a self-conscious sense of writing
in a distinct, more formal mode. In this way, there is not a vast difference
between quoting the first line of theAeneidand quotingquisquis amat,
even though the canonization of Vergil had already under the early Roman
empire far outstripped that of the nameless author who left us the latter
text. Yet if we look back to the inscriptions outside the ‘‘house’’ of Fabius
Ululitremulus, it is worth noting that, here, the quotation of theAeneid’s
first words has been given content and context by both the parodic change
to the line and the surrounding environment in which it appears. Rather
than representing a slavish repetition of the canonical text, the parody
invests Vergil’s text with meaning, as the thing against which the new
‘‘song of the fullers’’ will be measured. The earliest commentators on
the graffito spent some energy imagining the real song that is reflected
here—was it a sort of guild chant or something more like a popular ditty?
This, to my mind, is missing the obvious joke of the text, which is
encapsulated incanoas it is transferred from the epic ‘‘arms and the
man’’ to the much more pedestrian ‘‘fullers and the screech owl.’’ The
point is that in neither case is anyone actually singing;canois funny here
because it evokes a world of elite literary performance—perhaps in con-
trast with the ‘‘song’’ of the owl that gave theululaits name—whereas its
written form reminds us that even Vergil’s song had long since been
circulating as a material text.
In a certain sense, the play between spoken and written word animates
a great deal of ancient poetry—even, it might be argued, Vergil’s original
arma virumque cano. The opening ofAeneid2 withconticuere omnes
(‘‘everyone was silent’’), moreover, makes a neat contrast with the
poet’s emphatic speaking that commenced Book 1. In fact, this latter
phrase is quoted almost as frequently in the Pompeian graffiti asAeneid
1.1, a circumstance that has been taken to indicate the particular reading
and memorizing patterns of the ancient populace (see appendix for a list of
Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii 303