The Graffiti at Pompeii
August Mau, of the German Archæological Institute in Rome, says, “The graffiti form the largest division of the Pompeiian inscriptions, comprising about three thousand examples, or one-half of the entire number; the name is Italian, being derived from a verb meaning to scratch. Writing upon walls was a prevalent habit in antiquity, as shown by the remains of graffiti at Rome and other places besides Pompeii, a habit which may be accounted for in part by the use of the sharp-pointed stylus with wax tablets; the temptation to use such an instrument upon the polished stucco was much greater than in the case of pens and lead-pencils upon the less carefully finished wall surfaces of our time. Pillars or sections of wall are covered with scratches of all kinds,—names, catchwords of favorite lines from the poets, amatory couplets, and rough sketches, such as a ship, or the profile of a face. The skit occasionally found on walls to-day,—
“‘Fools’ names, as well as faces,
Are often seen in public places,’—
has its counterpart in a couplet which has been preserved:
“‘Admiror, paries, te non cecidisse ruinas,
Qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas.’
(Truly ’tis wonderful, wall, that you have not fallen in ruin;
You that have to support so many nauseous scribblings.)
“Taken as a whole, the graffiti are less fertile for our knowledge of Pompeiian life than might have been expected. The people with whom we should most eagerly desire to come into direct contact, the cultivated men and women of the ancient city, were not accustomed to scratch their names upon stucco or to confide their reflections and experiences to the surface of a wall. Some of the graffiti, to judge from the height at which we find them above the floor, were undoubtedly made by the hands of boys and girls; for the rest, we may assume that the writers were as little representative of the best elements of society as are the tourists who scratch their names upon ancient monuments to-day. Nevertheless, we gain from these scribblings a lively idea of individual tastes, passions, and experiences.”
Here and there in the collection we find imitations of the jests of Hierocles, and sometimes we are amused by inconsistencies and contradictions which remind us of the modern Hibernicism. Of this character is a Greek line scratched upon a wall on the Palatine hill in Rome: “Many persons have here written many things; I alone refrain from writing.”