instances). It may well be true that Books 1 and 2 of Vergil’s epic poem
were the most popular in early imperial Rome, but I would also point to
the ways in whichconticuere omnes, likearma virumque cano, underscores
itself as a quotation by representing in writing a spoken act, or, rather, an
unspoken one, which does the opening of theAeneidone better. The joke
of writing ‘‘everyone was silent’’ on a wall—especially a wall that most
of the time also contained other graffiti—is not just to nudge the reader to
recall happy days in the schoolroom consuming Vergil’s poem; it also
serves to call attention to the lack of silence, or the lack of a lack of speech,
which is represented by the presence of the words on the wall. In the same
sense thatarma virumque cano, when quoted out of context, does not
mean anyone is actually singing, soconticuere omnesdoes not mean anyone
is in reality silent. Again, the point of the quoted words is not to mean what
they say, but rather to call attention to themselves as quotations, in part by
invoking the world of poetic spoken communication that is external to the
written world of graffiti.
The Vergilian quotations above stand out from the other wall writings
because they do not sound like locally authored graffiti. But their discur-
sive difference does not just lie in their vocabulary or metrical form; it is
also visible in the speech acts they describe and the way they describe
them. Thus far, however, we have been focusing on the opening phrases
of the first books of the Aeneid, phrases that seem to have enjoyed
significant popularity in many different contexts and locations.Arma
virumque cano, especially, probably circulated as a phrase almost inde-
pendently from the rest of Vergil’s text, and was probably consumed and
reproduced by people who had only the vaguest notion of what connec-
tion it had with the great epic poem. Yet the Pompeian graffiti also offer
us a selection of other quotations from theAeneidwhose ‘‘popularity’’ is
not so easily identified or understood. That is, we know that theAeneid
played a significant role in ancient education, as one of the standard texts
for learning everything from syntax to ethics; Robert Kaster famously
offered a vivid description of the ‘‘sacredness’’ of Vergil’s text among
the Latin grammarians in the third and fourth centuries, who used him
to create an educated elite ‘‘as superior to the uneducated as they are to
cattle.’’
38
The further quotations—that is, those that are neitherarma
virumque canonorconticuere omnes—from Vergil’s text that we find in
Pompeii have usually been attributed to the priority that theAeneidwas
given in the ancient schoolroom. At the same time, however, these are
often passages whose thematic or educational significance are not imme-
diately obvious, and they are generally not lines to which the later gram-
marians—who, admittedly, represent a much later period in ancient
education—give much attention.
- Kaster 1988, 17.
304 Institutions and Communities