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Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii

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Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii KRISTINA MILNOR 1 1 Landscape and Literature in the Roman City It has become a scholarly commonplace to remark that the ancient Roman city had, at least after the time of Augustus, a wide, varied, and almost omnipresent regime of writing in public. This regime included texts of many different types, commercial, political, dedicatory; writ- ten with charcoal, paint, stylus, or chisel; on stone, wood, plaster, and mortar; on private houses, public monuments, temples, shops, baths, fountains, and tombs.1 In part, this pervasiveness of public writing is due to what has come to be known as the ‘epigraphic habit’, the characteristically Roman practice of recording acts and events on stone.2 From the late Republic onwards, both public and private individuals who had even marginal means to hire a stonecutter left behind inscriptions—honorific, commemorative, funerary—which document multiple aspects of social life, from birth to death. Many of these texts have direct ties to civic authority: decrees of the Senate or the Emperor; dedicatory texts on buildings by consuls, tribunes, or other magistrates; milestones, boundary markers, altars, statue bases, and the like, all of which record the names of the officials responsible for their placement. The production of such publicly-readable texts, however, was not simply the purview of the state. Wealthy private individuals also could and did erect monumental inscriptions, which often recorded some act of public beneficence like the construction of a building or the presentation of gladiatorial games. Other writing was less formal. Thus, in Pompeii, the famous cave canem mosaic marked the threshold of the House of the Tragic Poet; a bakery 1 For an overview, see Corbier (2006b) 53–75. 2 The term was coined by R. McMullen (1982) 233–46. 46 Landscape & Literature in the Roman City featured a terracotta plaque with a phallus and the perhaps aspir- ational legend hic habitat felicitas (‘here dwells good fortune’); and the front sign of the cookshop of Euxinus announces Phoenix felix et tu (‘the phoenix is lucky, and so may you be!’). As William Harris once noted, ‘Roman cities ...were full of things to read’.3 This proliferation of public texts under the Roman Empire has made it the traditional centre of the study of ancient epigraphy, a field which has recently seen a resurgence of critical interest. Scholars have provided a comprehensive yet nuanced account of the writing culture of the Romans—a culture which has been seen to encompass every- thing from the formal inscriptions in stone or metal commissioned by the political elite to the popular verses scratched on statues by a disgruntled populace.4 Although these texts originate from different places in Roman society, nevertheless they share particular things: an understanding of the power of writing to communicate beyond an immediate circle of listeners; an interest in the ways that the material word was associated with authority; an appreciation of writing as an art in and of itself.5 It is true that we should not underestimate the oral aspects of ancient culture, especially popular culture, which are not as accessible to us as those which were written down; neverthe- less, it is also clear that even within the non-elite segments of Roman society, orality existed side by side with writing, something which can be seen in the proliferation of placards, pamphlets, signage, and graffiti. Scholars have been rightly cautious about drawing too grand a conclusion about the range of literacy in the ancient populace on the basis of this evidence, but it seems likely that a large number of people could read a little bit, such as names, common words, simple phrases.6 Thus, it seems safe to assert that writing had an important, 3 Harris (1989) 91. 4 There has been an explosion of bibliography in recent years, but see (e.g.) Poucet (1989) 285–311; Meyer (1990) 74–96; R. Thomas (1992b) 158–70; Demougin (1994); Woolf (1994) 84–98 and Bowman (1994) 109–25; A. E. Cooley (2002); Corbier (2006a) passim. 5 Again, for an overview, see Corbier (2006d)9–50. For the jeux de lettres more specifically, and its relationship to status and power in Roman society, see Purcell (1995) 3–37 and Habinek (2009) 114–40. 6 It is also worth noting that different people could probably read different types of writing: Hermeros in the Satyricon famously remarks that he can read lapidarias litteras (‘stoney letters’: Petronius, Sat. 58. 7), by which he seems to mean the block capitals commonly used for inscriptions, drawing a distinction between such lettering Landscape & Literature in the Roman City 47 even if difficult to define completely, place in Roman culture at all different levels of the social hierarchy. On the other hand, the focus on the ubiquity of writing in the imperial Roman city has served to obscure the places in the urban environment where we might expect to find writing but do not. For instance, the ancient city entirely lacked architectural identifiers, that is, signs which describe a building’s function (‘Library’; ‘City Hall’), which actually do not come into regular use until the nineteenth century.7 Similarly, street signs and those identifying houses and businesses were, to the extent that they existed, pictorial; indeed, it is not entirely clear that most streets even had names, although there were certainly some exceptions.8 A stranger to the city would have had to ask directions from a local passer-by, which would then have been given by referring to easily recognizable landmarks such as fountains, temples, or porticoes.9 Town houses were known by the names of their owners, as were businesses, although inns were per- haps associated with the painted images out front which identified them.10 With a single exception, which is more of an inscribed joke than a genuine effort at advertising, we have no evidence that shops or taverns listed in verbal form what goods they had for sale.11 Moreover, in contrast with the modern city, the ancient displayed no local expressions of civic regulations. Thus, for instance, we know that traffic within the city was restricted in certain ways, certainly spatially and perhaps temporally as well, but as far as we can tell this information was not displayed in the streets affected.12 Drivers were simply expected to and (e.g.) the cursive found in handwritten documents. For a discussion of the different types of lettering, see Corbier (2006a) 80–4. 7 Cunningham (2000) 143–61. 8 It is worth noting that the best evidence which we have for street names in Pompeii are inscriptions in Oscan, which the majority of the populace may well not have been able to read by the time of the city’s destruction. For an overview of Pompeii’s ‘streetscape’ see Kaiser (2011) 67–105. 9 As in Terrence’s Adelphi, 572–84. Ling (1990) 204–14. 10 e.g. the Inn of the Cimbric Shield in the Forum Romanum (Cicero, de Oratore 2. 266; Quintilian 6. 3. 38). 11 The inscription—(H)ABEMUS IN CENA PULLUM PISCEM PERNAM PAO- NEM (‘we have for dinner chicken, fish, ham, peacock’)—is in the form of a dicing board, with six words (or word groups) of six letters each. See Ferrua (1964) 3–44, at 34 n. 178. Cf. Purcell (1995) 24. 12 The temporal restrictions on vehicular traffic in Rome during the day are known from the Tabula Heracleensis, a bronze tablet from Heraclea in the Gulf of Tarentum. 48 Landscape & Literature in the Roman City know, and if they didn’t, presumably someone would have had to tell them.13 In sum, then, we might say that there were almost no texts in the ancient urban environment that someone would be required to read in order to negotiate basic living in the city. This evidence has been used in the past to argue for a very low level of literacy in the Roman general population. Yet the multiplicity of other kinds of texts with which the ancient city bristled argues against this. It is true that the contrast is striking, and should, I think, cause us to consider not just what bare percentage of people in the Roman street were literate, but what kind of literacy people displayed: what was writing and reading actually used for, and what can that tell us about what it meant for an individual to create and consume written texts? This chapter has two goals: first, to give a more nuanced picture of the wider regime of public writing into which Pompeian graffiti insert themselves, and from there to suggest some reasons why graffiti writing in antiquity meant something different from what it does in the modern day; second, to consider the role that literary forms had in Pompeian public writing generally and what influence that had on the graffiti texts with which it shared space. Ultimately, I think we must see a far more porous boundary between formal epigraphic texts and graffiti than might have been expected, as well as a significant ‘literary’ presence in both formal and informal wall-writings beyond what has been explored by scholars. Although the law specifically refers to Rome, the fact that it was posted in an Italian municipality may indicate that the regulations also applied there. See Robinson (1992) 62–5. The spatial restrictions on traffic in Pompeii, mostly in terms of one- and two- way streets, have been studied through the patterns of wheel ruts: see (e.g.) Poehler (2006) 53–74. Poehler suggests the possibility that there was a handbook for drivers (74) which laid out the laws for driving in the city.
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