context (the palaestra, where wrestling matches and other athletic con-
tests took place), which may explain why it is quoted here. This is an
example of the kind of ‘‘local’’ explanations, which, like the letters spelling
DIDO above the painted quotation ofAeneid1.1 in the programma for
Cuspius Pansa, would have been immediately visible to some ancient
viewers, but which are all too frequently overlooked in a modern scholarly
quest for more global interpretations.
In other words, one of the things that we must always bear in mind
when discussing the Pompeian graffiti is the importance of the local;
although on some level the mass of graffiti texts offers us a kind of
window onto the Pompeian populace, it cannot be forgotten that each
text is unique, written by a single hand, in a single place, at a single
moment in time. For this reason, any general assertion about the function
of literary literacy in Pompeii is going to be vulnerable to individual
exceptions. On the other hand, what I hope I have shown here are
some of the ways in which local interpretations of individual wall texts
can provide us with a view of how some wall writers saw the relationship
between Vergil’s text and their own. For these Pompeians, theAeneidis
not so much a stable, idealized, cultural product, as a means of cultural
production; like graffiti generally, Vergilian quotations on Pompeian
walls are less facts than acts and are aware of themselves as such. As has
been written of ‘‘sampling’’—the practice in contemporary music of
quoting passages from others’ compositions—‘‘it is a longstanding prac-
tice for consumers to customize their commodities.’’^46 That Vergil’s great
epic poem was simply one such commodity in the streets of Pompeii is an
important fact to remember as we try to peel away the layers of canon-
ization which had already begun to accrue to theAeneidin antiquity.
Moreover, it also allows us to see how canonization itself was a useful
tool, in that it could give certain people a kind of common language
overtly distinct from the discourse of everyday life. In this sense, there-
fore, like its use by the mysterious ‘‘satin doll’’ with whom I began, the
literary Latin on Pompeian walls speaks less to a specific taste for
the canon than a desire, and an ability, to put the canon to work in the
ancient urban environment.
APPENDIX: QUOTATIONS FROM VERGIL ON POMPEIAN WALLS
Aeneid
1.1: Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
1.CIL4.1282: ARMA VIRUS (perhaps m)
size: 6.5 cm long2 cm high
- Sanjek 1994, 343.
Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii 309