Ancient Pompeii’s Hidden Messages, Preserved in Graffiti: Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons (Transcript) 

This volcanic eruption preserved this graffito for us today. We might wonder what happened to little Iuvenilla, likely only a few weeks old when the eruption happened. I hope she was able to escape with her family, as many did.

I’ve been interested in the Romans since I was little, and Pompeii, especially, as I share my birthday with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24. I started learning Latin in high school, and while I enjoyed the language and learning about the Romans, I couldn’t connect with the stories of Julius Caesar or even the love poetry of Ovid. I wanted to know what ordinary Romans were doing and thinking. And in college, I was introduced to Latin graffiti.

Roman Graffiti

Now, for the first time, I could hear the thoughts and words of ordinary Romans. When I went to Pompeii, I could put myself in their sandals, standing next to a column, imagining the messages they might write to one another. Roman graffiti allow us to hear the thoughts and words of ordinary people who lived in antiquity. But, I believe by studying Roman graffiti, we can learn a lot more about what makes us human and a lot more about ourselves too.

Now, when you hear the word graffiti, you’re probably imagining spray-painted messages in urban centers, bathroom graffiti, or maybe graffiti artists like Banksy. But ancient graffiti were much different than modern graffiti. Modern graffiti are typically illegal or at least taboo in cities today. Ancient graffiti were welcome or even permitted. They appear in nearly every space in the ancient city: temples, tombs, bars, public spaces, and even inside homes. Almost nothing was off limits.

Ancient vs Modern Graffiti

Modern graffiti are typically written in spray paint or scratched into a surface like a bathroom stall. Ancient graffiti were typically scratched into the wall plaster using a sharp instrument like a stylus or a nail. In fact, our English word “graffiti” comes from the Italian word meaning “scratched” and was coined when 19th-century archaeologists first encountered the scratched graffiti of Pompeii. Ancient graffiti were written by a wide variety of people, and they’re some of our best evidence for people marginalized from the literary record, like women and the enslaved.

Now, the reason why the Pompeiians wrote so many graffiti is they didn’t have access to inexpensive writing tools like paper. So they took to the walls to send messages to one another, record observations, or even record things using tally marks in the same way we might use scrap paper, our phones, or even social media.

Now, on the screen now are two of the most famous graffiti from Pompeii. Unfortunately, both of them don’t survive for us today, but drawings made at the time of their excavation allow us to see what they once looked like.

Famous Pompeiian Graffiti

The one on the top says, “This is the labyrinth, the Minotaur lives here,” and is accompanied by a drawing of a labyrinth from mythology. This graffito was written inside a private person’s home. There wasn’t the same taboo about writing in personal space like there is today. I doubt any of us would be too happy if somebody came into our living room and wrote a message such as this.

The bottom graffiti shows us that the Pompeiians themselves had a keen awareness of how many graffiti covered their walls. It says, “Oh wall, I’m amazed you haven’t fallen down holding up so many scribblings.” This message was repeated several times throughout Pompeii. This particular one comes from the amphitheater, which is the space in which the gladiators would fight.

Now, most graffiti in Pompeii were scratched, as I mentioned, but some were written with perishable materials like charcoal and chalk. These graffiti are the subject of my present research, and they’ve been almost totally ignored by modern scholars in part because very few of them survived to this day. This is a shame, as these graffiti are often more flourishing, inventive, and elegant than their inscribed counterparts. It was far easier to draw on top of the wall plaster than to inscribe into it.

Perishable Graffiti

Now here’s an example of one of these graffiti. This one was written on one of the gates leading out of the city and was likely made with chalk or maybe even just a clod of earth. It says, “Victor with Phyloterus everywhere.” You can see the very elegant Roman cursive in which this message was written. Can you trace the large flourishes on the V, Y, and R letters? The author included a playful branch to the right to complete the message.

Now, just above this one was a graffito made in charcoal. This time the name Victor, with a flourishing V. And right below it, a portrait, maybe of Victor himself. We can just make out the right side of his face, his eye, and his nose. Now, I’m interested in ancient aesthetics. What does the way the graffito was written tell us about the person who wrote it and their motivations?

Unique Roman Graffiti

Now, here’s a graffito you don’t need to know Latin to understand. This one was inscribed into one of the bathhouses of the city. Can you read it? How about now? That’s right. This was originally written upside down. Now we don’t know if the author wrote it upside down while standing right side up, or if they twisted their body to write it upside down. But either way, it shows us the playfulness of so many of the Roman graffiti.

Have you figured out what it says? What if I do this? This was an alphabet. It’s the Latin alphabet interspersed forwards and backwards. So it starts with A, then it goes to X, which is the last letter of the Roman alphabet, then B, then U, which is the second to last, then C, then T, which is the third to last, and so on and so forth.

So we have the alphabet written upside down and interspersed forwards and backwards. It doesn’t get more playful than that. And we can see a utilitarian message such as an alphabet could even be written with elegant writing. The C and the D letter tails are so long, they cross. For the Pompeiians, it wasn’t enough to write on the walls. They wanted to write beautifully.

Graffiti in Context

Now looking at graffiti in isolation such as this is interesting, but we can gain so much more when we examine them in context to understand how these graffiti relate to each other and the places they were written in. But to do that, we’re going to have to travel to ancient Pompeii.

Now, I wish we could all go there together. Instead, I’m going to take us there virtually. We’re going to walk down one avenue in ancient Pompeii to find the graffiti that were once written there and figure out what can these graffiti tell us about life in antiquity and life in the 21st century.

This is our avenue that we’ll be walking down, the Vicolo del Menandro, a small street in a residential district. We’re one block off from the main avenue in town, in between the theater and the amphitheater. As we walk down the avenue, we see many names. Most of the names are male, as we believe many more men than women were literate in ancient Pompeii, but some female names jump out to us too. It used to be assumed that very few women in the ancient world were literate, but graffiti from Pompeii have truly complicated that picture.

Greetings in Graffiti

Amongst all the names, we see a greeting. This greeting says, “Prima sends many greetings to Secundus.” Now, Prima and Secundus mean ‘first’ and ‘second’ in Latin. So, these might be names or they might be nicknames. So we have a message from one person to the other. Well, why did Prima write her message here on the facade of the wall plaster? Well, partly to get her message to Secundus and to make sure the rest of Pompeii could read it. This is the equivalent of a tweet or a Snapchat. Wall posts have been around for over 2,000 years.

Now we can take a look at how Prima wrote her message. She wrote it in Roman cursive, but we can see it looks a lot different than the charcoal and chalk examples I showed earlier. It’s difficult to inscribe into wall plaster so some of the letter forms become economical, such as the Es which are underlined on the slide. They become just two vertical marks.

We can see, though, that Prima included an interpunct, a horizontally centered dot between the first and second word, and I literally mean ‘first’ and ‘second’. That’s what those words mean in Latin. This interpunct helped to show where the first word stopped and the second word began and was a mark of elegant writing.

Artistic Expressions

Now, just below this graffito, there were several drawings. Unfortunately, we don’t have these ones today, but I’ve drawn them here to show you what they might have looked like based on other drawings found at Pompeii. There were four boars, three birds, a gladiator, a ship, and a partridge in a pear tree. I’m kidding about the last one.

Now, scholars such as Katherine Huntley have used developmental psychology to propose that some drawings were the work of children, but others like these could be the work of adults, too, replicating things they’d seen or heard in picture form. My point here is that just like the urge to write on a wall is as old as time, I believe the urge to doodle is a feature of the human spirit.

Conversations on Walls

Now, a little bit further down our wall we might have a reply from Secundus to Prima. Again, these might be nicknames, so we’re not sure, but it’s possible. This message says, “Secundus too greet his Prima everywhere. I ask, mistress, that you love me.”

Now let’s look at the way Secundus wrote his message. He didn’t write it in the Roman cursive like Prima and definitely not like the flourishing cursive we started with. Instead, he wrote his message in capital letters so that Prima and the rest of Pompeii wouldn’t miss it. And if we look, he accentuated the message with the box surrounding it as a way to highlight the message and to make it look more official, like official inscriptions.

If we look at the way Secundus spelled his words, he left off the [As] on most of the words, likely because they weren’t being pronounced at the time. If you’ve ever said “gonna” instead of “going to,” you’re familiar with this sort of phenomenon. Just below this message, Secundus wrote two further greetings. Unfortunately, we don’t have drawings of these ones, but the excavator who discovered them said that they were written by the same person and using the same instrument.

So, they probably looked pretty similar to the message above. And these ones say, “Secundus greets his Prima, Secundus.” “Secundus greets his Prima.” Can we just feel Secundus’s love through these messages? Again, Secundus has left off the A in spelling Prima’s name, all three times. Probably because it wasn’t pronounced. I tell my Latin students, “Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Even the Romans made them.”

Motivations and Messages

Now, why did Secundus and Prima write these messages to one another? Well, partly it was to get their messages to the other person. But I believe there’s something else going on here, too. Part of it is to take part in this thrill of discovery. How many of us have left a sticky note for somebody or put a note in a lunch box or written on somebody’s social media to find later? Oh, come on, everybody’s hands should be up. Right. You want to get your message to the other person, but it’s also taking part in the thrill of discovery, knowing you’re leaving something behind for somebody to find later. And I believe that’s a motivation for these greeters in Pompeii.

Elegant Writing and Historical Insights

Now we continue down our walk and we find more evidence of elegant writing. Here we have a farewell greeting, “Veneria, goodbye.” And the ends of the letters are made to look like branches. Just below it is a graffito that has stumped scholars. It doesn’t really make sense in Latin. I believe it was a first attempt for the graffito above.

Or perhaps somebody was replicating the elegant graffito above in a rather simpler form, and they weren’t as effective. These two graffiti show us the true elegance that was possible in some of these Latin graffiti.

Voices from the Past

As we continue down our avenue, we end with a graffito that shows us a group almost completely left out of the literary record, and these are the enslaved. This graffito says, “Amianthus, slave of Coelius Caldus, a clothes washer.” Now, clothes washing was a notoriously dirty business in antiquity. One of the materials used to wash clothes was urine. While we wish we could know more about Amianthus’s life, this graffito has at least given us the name of one of the many enslaved whose lives have been lost to history.

Leaving a Mark

We end our tour with one final graffito. This one says, “On September 3, Satura was here.” How many of us have seen a graffito such as this while waiting at the train station or using the restroom? Satura could hardly have known that a destructive and deadly eruption in 79 AD would preserve this graffito and thereby her memory for us today.

The urge to write on the wall, to leave your name behind in space and time, is as old as time. While I am by no means advocating that we all go out and start writing graffiti, I hope we can consider what messages we’re leaving behind and what we hope will last for the next generation. Thank you.

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