Ancient vandalism?
Kristina Milnor
GRAFFITI AND THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE IN ROMAN POMPEII
336pp. Oxford University Press. £70 (US $125).
978 0 19 968461 8
Published: 10 December 2014
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When Pompeii was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, no one was particularly interested in the rash of graffiti scratched on its walls. Excavators at the time were too busy carting away bulky and aesthetically pleasing works of art as trophies for the Bourbon kings. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, and the advent of “romantic” archaeology, that one open-minded director, Francesco Maria Avellino, had the foresight to start conserving these fragile, less prestigious relics, thousands of which still survive, either in situ or detached with their original plaster. Other early enthusiasts included Chateaubriand and Bishop Wordsworth, both of whom recognized the “primitive” appeal of the insignificant-looking scrawls and their power to safeguard the noisy, if sometimes indecorous, opinions of Pompeii’s dramatically silenced inhabitants: the trials of school (“If Cicero pains you, you’ll get a flogging”), the pangs of love (“Rufus loves Cornelia”), threats (“Beware of shitting here”), electioneering (“Cuspius for aedile”) and insults (“Narcissus is a giant cocksucker”).
Like other unwelcome, staining deposits, graffiti has always polarized people into defenders and aggressors, neighbourhood-watchers and anarchists. In 1987, Susan Sontag wrote earnestly about the “indecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents . . . washed over and bitten into the façades of monuments and the surfaces of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion . . . the powerless saying: I’m here too”. For Plutarch, on the other hand, writing around AD 100, it was so much tedious drivel, an intrusion into shared space which preyed on people’s natural nosiness: “There is nothing written in them which is either useful or pleasing – only so-and-so ‘remembers’ so-and-so, and ‘wishes him the best’, and is ‘the best of his friends’, and many things full of such ridiculousness”.
From opposite ends of the spectrum, both accounts pit graffiti against the combined weight of authority, community and public property. Throughout history, unlicensed writing on walls has been linked with anti-establishment behaviour, from schoolboy pranks to full-blown insurgency. The two came together in the incident that is said to have kindled the current war in Syria: fifteen children arrested and tortured for drawing revolutionary slogans like “No teaching, no school, till the end of Bashar’s rule” on a town wall (see Tim Llewellyn’s review; TLS, November 14). Traditionally, graffiti infests the grey areas between open and hidden space: dark alleys, public conveniences, subways and disused land – places where disappearing trolls can leave their residue to shock, engage or amuse casual passers-by.
Throughout history, unlicensed writing on walls has been linked with anti-establishment behaviour, from schoolboy pranks to full-blown insurgency
Many of these expectations hold good for the Roman world as well. Martial, a poet who made much of the borderline ephemerality of his epigrams, tells one addressee that he won’t waste satirical words on him: he needs to look for some “drunk poet of the dark brothel, who, with crude charcoal and crumbling chalk, writes poems which people read while they shit”. Cicero records that the Sicilians expressed their displeasure with their corrupt governor Verres by scrawling insults about his mistress above the platform where he made his speeches. Emperor Nero’s critics festooned his statues with abusive verses. Rape threats and excremental language may seem all too familiar verbal substitutes for taboo behaviour and public nuisance, but they also speak of a brash society that was used to framing politics, personal relations and public performance in strong sexual and scatological metaphors.
Yet, as Kristina Milnor argues in Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii, Pompeian graffiti is not always the naive, unmediated vox populi it seems to be. These amateur scrawls often engage boldly and gleefully with the central productions of high literary culture, are as self-conscious about their materiality and creative powers as more respected literary texts, and collapse traditional distinctions and hierarchies between oral and written and primary and secondary to a confusing degree. Few can compete with the selfreflexivity of the following priceless specimen: “I’m amazed, wall, that you haven’t fallen down in ruins, since you bear the tedious outpourings of so many writers”. But many other graffitists draw superfluous attention to the written nature of their interventions. As well as supplementing other forms of exchange and territory-marking in the ancient townscape, they also stake a claim to unauthorized authorship, even to a precarious kind of immortality.
As for the illicit character of graffiti, here it may be wrong to feed modern assumptions back into antiquity. Plutarch’s complaint incidentally makes it clear that graffiti was both normal and ubiquitous. The Pompeian site yields many surprises. For example, graffiti is found as often inside private houses as on public walls – in most of the larger houses, in fact. The same types of inscription are found in cook-shops and grand residences. Plenty are obscene, lavatorial or satirical, but few are genuinely anarchic (no “Romans go home” here). Confronted by ripe language about open legs and wet beds, scholars have tended to ascribe such compositions to underage pranksters or subversive types going about their business after dark. But Milnor argues that writing on walls in antiquity, though unlicensed, was just another dimension of normal civic activity. In a world without print, let alone radio waves, the wall acted as a blank sheet or potential billboard, one that tempted anyone with a horror vacui to fill it and engage in self-expression along with the entitled.
But it was not always just a case of getting a message across. Pompeian graffitists seem to have been fascinated by the physical and visual aspects of writing. Latin (in)scribo, like Greek grapho, meant both “write” and “draw”, and there was a strong sense of both the interconnectedness of words and images and the talismanic allure of graphic design: in magic word-squares, for example, and laboriously produced alphabets, whether these are displaying pride in new-found literacy, symbolically representing all writing, or just testing the match between surface and implement. A whimsical doodle that advertises itself as a “game of snakes” comes in the shape of a sinuous serpent, hissing with sibilants – a spiritual ancestor to Edwin Morgan’s one-line reptilian conceit, “Siesta of a Hungarian Snake” (“s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs ZS zs zs z”).
Milnor reads the graffiti as carefully as any literary text, picking out clever manipulations of lines from Ovid and Virgil and the rhymes hidden in abbreviations that speak of subtle play on the aural and read experience of words. She also takes account of the original location of graffiti, which was often placed so as to initiate a dialogue with adjacent visual images. Along with crudity, she finds delicate sequences of erotic poems and even – wishful thinking, perhaps – Rome’s only personal declaration of lesbian desire. Her project fits well with other recent explorations of the fuzzy areas at the margins of canonical Latin literature: paratexts, pseudepigrapha (fakes ascribed to famous authors) and centos. In her view, one reason graffiti should intrigue us is because it shows how permeable the borders were between elite and popular culture. Street songs influenced higher genres; conversely, letter-writing etiquette and the metrical conventions of epic, drama and elegy were widely known among ordinary scribblers. The affinity between Catullus’ more aggressive poems and graffito abuse is famous (and acknowledged by him when he follows up a threat of oral rape by offering to cover tavern walls with phallic images), while the satirist Persius likens himself to a naughty boy peeing in sacred precincts and scrawling insults behind the emperor’s back.
A whimsical doodle that advertises itself as a ‘game of snakes’ comes in the shape of a sinuous serpent, hissing with sibilants
One of the most extreme forms of high–low exchange takes the form of engagement with Virgil’s Aeneid. Published three generations before the destruction of Pompeii and already consecrated as Rome’s national epic, this would seem to be the perfect example of a unified textual corpus. But, as Milnor shows, Virgil was almost instantly atomized into bite-sized snippets which permeated the popular consciousness and embarked on their own creative afterlife – just as “To be or not to be” did, or “The boy stood on the burning deck”. It would be nice to find something significant in the Pompeians’ choice of Virgilian lines (a few of them contain anti-Greek sentiment, for example). But mostly they are mindlessly ludic, especially when they use the momentous opening, “Arms and the man”. One variation, “I sing of fullers and the screech owl, not arms and the man”, takes us neatly from the Olympian heights of Augustan literature to the world of street traders and craft guilds (the owl was the fullers’ mascot). Some wag, spotting that a formal election announcement fortuitously contains the acronym DIDO, has inserted a tiny “Arma virumque” beneath it. “Everyone fell silent”, the audience’s preparation for Aeneas’ narrative of his post-Troy adventures, is knowingly redeployed in a mural context. Milnor has to conclude that most quotations, above all those of Virgil’s opening words, are “meaningless, not meaningful”. Aeneas had already become a kind of Everyman, his poem a dispersible symbol of authority and national spirit available for all Romans to imprint on its segments their individual stamp. Yet such authorship as is claimed is of an offbeat kind – opportunist and ultimately irresponsible.
Graffiti often has a distinctive local identity. In the coastal church at Salthouse in Norfolk, for example, bored congregations of sixteenth-century seafarers scratched pictures of ships on the pews. In New York, where graffiti artists are feted by smart galleries, the hip-hop movement specializes in deliberately illegible “wildstyle” spray paint. In the Arab world, political slogans are still rendered in timeless calligraphy. Pompeii, a city dedicated to Venus, contains a disproportionate amount of erotic graffiti and erotic wall-painting, though it is still unclear how much that really reflects the economic activities of this particular town. At any rate, it was more multilingual and cosmopolitan than quiet, graffiti-free Herculaneum (Pompeii even offers samples of the proto-Arabic Safaitic script). Yet it is less local difference than the wide reach and common repertoire of Roman popular culture that Milnor is keen to emphasize. The address to a beleaguered wall quoted above is no one-off but is found at least three times in Pompeii in different hands. Far from being the authentic voice of a single individual, the message was a replicable meme: a kind of ancient “Kilroy was here”. And repeated variations on the motif “We couldn’t wait to get here, we can’t wait to leave” made it the Roman equivalent of “. . . and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.
Although some careless editing occasionally undermines Kristina Milnor’s own authorial voice – border is spelled “boarder”, Terence is “Terrence”, Philippus is “Phillipus”, Kilroy is “Killroy”, impermanence is “impermance” and a pair of sentences from the Introduction are recycled verbatim in Chapter One – she comes across as a thoughtful and even tender curator of a selection of demonstrably accomplished graphic artefacts. She ends not by asking us not to canonize graffiti as “Latin literature”, but to reflect carefully on where we put the boundary between the literary and the paraliterary at Rome. Thanks to her, the last voices of Pompeii seem to buzz all the more inventively before everyone falls silent.
Emily Gowers teaches Classics at St John’s College, Cambridge. Her commentary on Horace,Satires I was published in 2012.
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