Pub Date : 2018-07-23DOI: 10.1515/9783110594065-002
A. Kolb
“I admire you, Wall, for not having collapsed, despite having been made to endure the tedium of so many writers.”1 This statement, scratched into a wall of the amphitheatre at Pompeii by an anonymous writer, sheds an interesting light on the everyday use of writing in an Italian city of the 1st century AD. The writer does not reveal their name, though it was the name above all else that generated identity in society. As such, the great mass of graffiti are generally names.2 What is truly interesting about these few words, however, is that its ironical author immortalised not only their own literacy but also that of numerous others, who apparently also left their scratched and drawn markings on the city’s buildings. One can imagine a whole range of people among their number, casual passers-by of varying social and economic background, such as idle dalliers, business people, clients waiting on their patrons, and even magistrates and their entourages. The quip quoted here may have been popular in Pompeii, since it was inscribed not only in the amphitheatre, but also at the theatre and on the walls of the basilica – unless of course one wishes to assume that they all were left by the same person.3 Who in particular these spectral authors were who left their various, apparently unnecessary or pointless messages (tot scriptorum taedia) spattered across the city’s wall-space, and what proportion of Pompeii’s inhabitants partook in this pastime unfortunately largely eludes us today. Nevertheless, the so-called “graffiti habit” provides an important indicator for ancient literacy in its day to day practice, especially since it left individual and spontaneous messages not only in public space, but also in various locations inside houses.4 Besides the ubiquitous names, one finds practice alphabets, accounts, obscenities, Virgilian verses, declarations of love, curses and many other forms of textual utterances. Graffiti thus neatly illustrate the breadth of textual content as well as the plethora of uses writing saw in everyday life in Antiquity. To what degree ancient societies were literate and which groups possessed the ability to read and write is a matter of long-standing debate in scholarship. Older
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Pub Date : 2018-07-23DOI: 10.1515/9783110594065-fm
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