Communication

Digging Deeper into Pompeii’s Past July/August 2019

Ancient Graffiti
(Pasquale Sorrentino)
SHARE:

Anyone walking along Pompeii’s busy streets couldn’t help but notice the eye-catching letters painted across many of the city’s houses, shop fronts, and public spaces. Some of this graffiti promoted political candidates, while other examples advertised everything from gladiatorial games to rooms for rent. However, not all messages on Pompeii’s walls were so showy. Thousands of examples of a less conspicuous type of ancient graffiti—writings and drawings incised in wall plaster, or occasionally written with more ephemeral materials such as charcoal and chalk—survive today and capture communications among Pompeii’s residents. “Unlike most modern graffiti, graffiti in ancient Pompeii was a positive form of social exchange,” says epigrapher Rebecca Benefiel of Washington and Lee University. One of the most commonly found words in this more informal style of graffiti is feliciter (“happily”), which, when paired with personal names, indicates good wishes for friends, colleagues, and even the emperor.

Benefiel is director of the Ancient Graffiti Project and is currently documenting and analyzing all the extant graffiti in Pompeii, much of which is at risk of fading away. She has identified examples of all sorts of writing across the city, including tally marks scratched on shop walls to track item inventories and the words of satisfied customers who scrawled praise for the sexual prowess of prostitutes in the city’s main brothel. In both private houses and public buildings, Benefiel has found that people traded quotations from the first-century B.C. love poets Ovid and Propertius, often adapting poetic lines to humorous effect. Says Benefiel, “Looking at graffiti in context gives such a strong sense of the people who inhabited these spaces and left their mark.”

Pompeii Banner

MORE FROM Digging Deeper into Pompeii’s Past

  • Digging Deeper into Pompeii’s Past July/August 2019

    Gardens

    The Casa della Regina Carolina

    Read Article
    (Pasquale Sorrentino)
  • Digging Deeper into Pompeii’s Past July/August 2019

    The Upper Class

    The Villa of Diomedes

    Read Article
    (© Villa Diomedes Project. 3D computer graphics: Alban-Brice Pimpaud (archeo3d.net))
  • Features July/August 2019

    Place of the Loyal Samurai

    On the beaches and in the caves of a small Micronesian island, archaeologists have identified evocative evidence of one of WWII’s most brutal battles

    Read Article
  • Letter from England July/August 2019

    Building a Road Through History

    6,000 years of life on the Cambridgeshire landscape has been revealed by a massive infrastructure project

    Read Article
    (Highways England, courtesy of MOLA Headland Infrastructure)
  • Artifacts July/August 2019

    Bronze Age Beads

    Read Article
    (Courtesy Carlos Odriozola)
  • Digs & Discoveries July/August 2019

    You Say What You Eat

    Read Article
    (Courtesy David Frayer, University of Kansas; Karin Wiltschke-Schrotta, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)