GRAFFITI AND THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE IN ROMAN POMPEII fi Graf ti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii KRISTINA MILNOR 1 3 GreatClarendonStreet,Oxford,OX26DP, UnitedKingdom OxfordUniversityPressisadepartmentoftheUniversityofOxford. 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For LDS and IEMS You taught me to believe not in permanence, but immortality Preface Candidamedocuitnigrasodissepuellas. oderosepotero,senoninvitusamabo. Afairgirltaughtmetohatedarkgirls. IwillhateifIcan;ifnot,Iwillnotloveunwillingly. (CIL4.1520) Thiscoupletisoneofhundredsofsnippetsofpoetrypreservedonthe walls of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, fragments which range from a few metrical feet of hexameter to fully fledged texts in ten or twelvelines.TheversesaretypicalofPompeii’s‘literary’graffiti,those whoseform,diction,orsentimentpointtotheinfluenceofcanonical Latinliterature.Thistextwasscratchedintotheatriumwallplasterof awell-appointedhouseinPompeii’sfashionablesixthregion,anditis composedofhexametersdrawnfromtwofamouselegiacpoetsofthe early Roman Empire. Erotic in content, sentimental, and perhaps a little banal, the text has drawn little attention from critics, with the exceptionofthosewhoseeitasaprimeexampleofthewaysinwhich such popular poetry is born from, but compares unfavourably with, thegreatearlyimperialpoetryenshrinedintheLatinliterarycanon. It has long been recognized that CIL 4. 1520 is composed of a line adapted from Propertius (1. 1. 4–6: Amor...donec me docuit castas odissepuellas/improbus)andalinefromOvid(oderosepoterosinon invitus amabo: Amores 3. 11. 35). The ‘couplet’ is actually two hex- ameters ripped from their original context and cobbled together to form a new poem. Additionally, although the verse is shaped by a clear metrical schema, on the wall two hexameters are broken into three written lines. Even worse, those lines are not even divided according to themetrical foot, as thefirst leaves off in the middle of the hexameter’s fourth foot, and the second after two syllables of thefifth.Theauthor,criticshaveconcluded,didnotknow,orcare,to write his poem on the wall correctly—proof positive of a lack of education,intelligence,ortaste. Such a judgement is typical of scholarship on Pompeii’s literary graffiti, which have both attracted and repelled critical interest since viii Preface theirdiscoveryinthemiddleofthenineteenthcentury.Thepresence of hundreds of poetic texts inscribed on the walls of the ancient city ledsomeearlycommentatorstocharacterizePompeiiasaparadiseof scholar-poets, all furiously engaged in scribbling their compositions onanymaterialwhichcametohand.Subsequentscholars,however, tended to dismiss the graffiti as a source for investigating ancient literary culture, seeing them simply as examples of the distortion whichaffects‘real’literatureasitpassesintothepopularimagination, whereitisconsumedandreproducedbythosenotfullycompetentto understand it. In recent years, though, there has been increasing interest in non-elite cultural production, particularly in the visual arts. Art historians have convincingly argued that ancient paintings foundin‘popular’contextshaveastylisticlanguageoftheirown,one which is different from, but not necessarily inferior to, that of the canonicalobjectsofscholarlystudy.Butalthoughimportantworkhas beendone onPompeii’s uniquecollection of popular visual arts, the methodological sea-change has not yet reached the city’s store of popular textual art. In this study, I argue that the literary graffiti are morethanthesimple‘distortions’ofcanonicalliterature;rather,they have their own modes of expression, metrical patterns, and styles of language as meaningful in their own terms as those of the great Romanauthorswhopopulatedthegraffitiwriters’imaginations. To return to CIL 4.1520, it is worth noting that the couplet is preserved along with a ‘signature’, written neatly below in what appears to be the same hand: scripsit Venus fisica Pompeiana (‘Venus “fisica” of Pompeii wrote [this]’). This is a joke, but—I argue—a learned one. Fisica is indeed one of the epithets of the goddess as she was worshipped at Pompeii (see, for example, CIL 10.928,adedicatoryinscription),butheretheepithet,whichderives from the Greek physicus (‘physical’), is particularly apt. Pompeii’s owngoddessofbodilyloveclaimsauthorshipofapoemaboutbodily love, in a kind of linguistic playfulness familiar to readers of Roman elegy. Also self-conscious, I argue, are the ‘errors’ which the graffiti- writer committed in scratching his hexameter lines on the wall. By breakinghisverseafternigrasratherthanattheendofthehexameter, the writer underscores the central theme of the verse, namely the contrast between light and dark, now the first and last words of the inscribed line. Moreover, by changing Propertius’ original castas to nigras, and reassigning the responsibility for the change from Amor tocandida,thegraffitiwriterputstheemphasisonappearancerather Preface ix than morality, and on real-world experience rather than Propertius’ programmaticencounterwithLove.WhereasCupidhasmadeProp- ertius‘hatechastegirls’becausetheyneithersuccumbtolovepoetry normakeappropriatesubjectsforit,VenusFisica—adifferentgodof love—emphasizes both the visual element of desire, and the folly in announcing the blanket rejection of any category of attractive per- sons. Moreover, in Amores 3. 11, Ovid bemoans the fact that his mistress’moralsarereprehensible,butherbeautyforeverdrawshim back (3. 11b. 37–8)—a celebration of appearance over character of whichVenusFisicawouldapparentlyapprove.WhatOvid‘learns’in Amores3.11hasbeenretrospectivelyappliedtoPropertius’categor- izationofdesirablegirls. CIL 4. 1520 thus offers one illustration of how literary graffiti do not simply repeat but actually rewrite canonical literature. Although the sentiment of the graffito remains within the ironic erotic dis- course of elegy,the fact that itmanipulates quotationsfrom Proper- tius and Ovid shows both a real familiarity with and a sense of ownership of texts generally assumed to have circulated only within the elite upper class. It is certainly true that we have no way of knowing exactly whose hands inscribed Pompeii’s graffiti, but the sheervolumeofwritingsandtheirmultiplecontextsargueforamore popularauthorshipandreadershipthanscholarshavegenerallybeen willingtobelieve.Butperhapsmoreimportantformypurposesisthe factthat,regardlessofwhoactuallywroteancientgraffiti,thegeneral assumption among ancient Romans was that they were popularly authored: representations of graffiti in canonical literature, from Plautus to Pliny the Younger, all underscore the idea that the wall textsrepresentakindofvoxpopuli,anonymousand,moreoftenthan not,criticalofdominantculturalmores.Althoughthereisadangerin usingelitetextstoreadnon-eliteculture,Ithinkthatitisimportantto recognize the extent to which the graffiti texts are performative of their own popularism—that is, how they both are and wish to be understood as resistant readings of canonical texts. It is in this theft andredeploymentofhighliterarytexts,Ithink,thatwemayfindan importantalternative viewof whatcultural production meant in the earlyRomanEmpire. A few technical notes. A different version of Chapter5 was pub- lished in W. A. Johnson and H. N. Parker (eds), Ancient Literacies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 288–319 under the title ‘Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii’; the first two sections of