Allen's Text 128

Writing was on wall for Pompeii's citizens

POMPEII, Italy--Our cities may be overrun with graffiti, but they are barely scratch hitters compared with the ruins of Pompeii. The Pompeiian’s were past masters of the small talk that makes walls talk.

Pompeii's light-hearted scrawls, and even the many nasty ones, are now cherished leftovers from 79 A.D., when the Roman resort town died in a volcanic eruption.

Graffiti - literally meaning "scratches" - go far back into history. In Pompeii, they were the town news and gossip, in Latin or Greek, long before the days of newspapers or books.

Love, money and politics were the basic themes, and nobody hid their thoughts. "Salve lucrum" ("Hurrah for profit"), proclaimed a joyful inscription in a trader's house. And a lover wrote on a public wall, with Pompeiian zest: "You have never seen Venus? No need: look on my fair one, she is as exquisite."

There was so much electioneering on any available flat expanse--"Proculus, support Sabinus, and he'll support you"--that a householder worked his own plaintive message onto his whitewashed wall: "Painter, I beg you not to write anything here. If you inscribe a candidate's name, may he fail in the elec­tions."

When angry Pompeiians scrawled, "Let the wrath of Venus fall on any one who does damage here," it had nothing to do with love. That was a warning to passersby who might forget themselves and mistake the street or wall for a lavatory.

Thousands of these markings remain, giving us a keyhole view of Roman life. It almost seems as though any Pompeiian who had a passing thought felt compelled to add it to the groaning walls of houses or alleyways. Cartoonists burlesqued gods and gladiators, and there was no shortage of indecent sketches.

There was so much of this sort of thing that it inspired a favorite Pompeiian couplet found in a number of places: "I wonder, wall, that you do not go smash, who have to bear the weight of all this trash!"

The walls did go smash. Mt. Vesuvius wrote the last message.

--Field News Service --

©2006-Allen Sutterfield