There is, however, one noticeable unifying theme amongst the Pom-
peian graffiti quotations from theAeneid—again, setting aside the first
words of Books 1 and 2.^39 This is a marked preference for lines that come
from speeches in the original text: thirteen of seventeen citations are
spoken not in Vergil’s narrative voice but by one character or another.
Moreover, there is a surprisingly high concentration of vocatives, impera-
tives, and second person verbs in the Vergilian graffiti: six of the seventeen
quotations contain at least one of these grammatical forms that ex-
plicitly point to the words as a communication from one individual to
another. Indeed, we might consider this, rather than narrative or thematic
importance to Vergil’s text, as an explanation for the choice of
the particular lines. For example, one line scratched into the wall of the
palaestra isvade, age, nate, vocas Zepirios(‘‘come now, son, you call the
Zephyrs’’), a version ofAeneid4.223 (which hasvocain place ofvocasand
the spellingZephyros). The line opens Jupiter’s address to Mercury, when
he orders him to retrieve Aeneas from the arms of Dido—the speech as a
whole is certainly thematically important, but this particular line seems
more significant for its representation of the mechanics of direct address.
Similarly, scratched into the plaster of the atrium in house 1. 10. 8 were
the wordsEntelle heroum, or the opening of Acestes’s reproach atAeneid
- 389—a phrase that, likearma virumque, is meaningless on its own but
does offer an unambiguous vocative form. The basilica offers the begin-
ning of Priam’s reassuring words to Sinon in Book 2 (148)Quisquis es,
amissos hinc iam obliviscere Graios(‘‘whoever you are, here and now
forget the departed Greeks’’). And quoted on two different walls in
Pompeii is Ascanius’s oddly decontextualized remark to Nisus in Book 9
(269),vidisti quo Turnus equo, quibus ibat in armis(‘‘you saw on what
horse, with what arms, Turnus went’’). Although it is true there are a
number of quotations from theAeneidon Pompeian walls that do not
contain internal evidence that they were spoken from one character to
another, it is nonetheless suggestive that so many (particularly of the
fragments that are longer than three words: four of seven) contain internal
grammatical evidence that they were originally spoken from one individ-
ual to another.
Given these parallel examples, we might then wish to revisit the
traditional understanding of other instances that, on the surface, seem
to point to greater narrative or ‘‘literary’’ understanding—thus, for ex-
ample, a line from Nisus’s prayer to the moon in Book 9 (404) was found
scratched on a wall outside a cook shop in Pompeii’s seventh region:tu
Dea, tu pr(a)ese(ns), nostro succurre labor(i)(‘‘you, goddess, be present,
assist [us] in our work’’). Della Corte sees it in its graffiti form as an
invocation of the goddess to look after the shop’s business, which is by no
means impossible. Yet, like the other quotations above, it represents a
- See my appendix for a list.
Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii 305