FaktowoThe Romans had their own ‘Reddit’. Pompeii’s walls are full of comments
Election ads, declarations of love, insults and gladiator results – several thousand inscriptions from two thousand years ago have survived on the walls of Pompeii.
When Vesuvius buried Pompeii in ash in AD 79, it preserved more than houses and streets. The walls survived too – and on them more than 11,000 inscriptions, scratched or painted by ordinary residents.
There are election slogans (“Vote for Gaius Julius Polybius, he brings good bread”), tavern adverts, gladiator fight results and simple signatures along the lines of “I was here”. There is no shortage of declarations of love, or of crude insults aimed at neighbours.
Conversations on a wall
The most interesting thing is that the inscriptions respond to one another. Archaeologist Rebecca Benefiel has described walls where successive authors added comments to earlier ones – like a thread on a social media site today. Someone writes a poem, someone else corrects it, and a third mocks them both.
One of the best-known inscriptions reads, in a loose translation: “I am amazed, wall, that you have not yet collapsed under the weight of so much nonsense”. It appears in several versions in Pompeii – so it was something like a popular meme.
Why it matters
The graffiti show that the ability to write was far more widespread in a Roman city than was long believed. It is the voice of people whom historians did not write about: bakers, slaves, soldiers and teenagers in love.
- Benefiel R. R., “Dialogues of Ancient Graffiti in the House of Maius Castricius in Pompeii”, American Journal of Archaeology, 2010
- Milnor K., “Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii”, Oxford University Press, 2014
- Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, tom IV (inskrypcje z Pompejów, Herkulanum i Stabiów), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
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