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Graffiti from Pompei

pompeiana.org

121 pointsbenbreen46 comments

The colloquialism of the translation makes it more familiar of course, but a couple millennia of social upheaval, scientific revolution, and cultural change notwithstanding, and we are still the same bunch of noisy, trollish jerks we have always been. Strangely comforting.

At least the street defecating problem seems to have improved.

Ahh, I see you haven't been to LA.

Or San Francisco

Try London.

It's actually not the same at all. Rome was extremely tolerant and welcoming towards homosexual activity and I'm actually surprised you think we're the same after 2 millenia. We're not. We got more religious and more prudish. Imagine "gay" (I use that term loosely because Romans didn't see it as gay/straight, that would be ridiculous to them, and it is frankly ridiculous to me as well) graffiti today that was endorsed by the masses. Not gonna happen. Back in Roman times getting penetrated in the ass by another man was considered a manly act and worthy of praise. And if you go back further into Greek era, male-male sex was seen even BETTER than male-female sex (which was an almost serviceable, "just to get pregnant" ritual as opposed to the hedonism of modern Christian-Western era male-female sexuality). Today male-male sexual activity categorizes you into "gay" and all of a sudden you're blasted with labels, and accusations of sinning plus scandals galore. Imagine Donald Trump blasting over Twitter: "There's nothing like the bond between two grown and the sex that makes them stronger." Laughable, right? In the time of the Roman empire, that would have been a normal tweet, the invention of tweets notwithstanding. We are nowhere near the sexual liberation achieved by the Greeks/Romans. We're absolutely nowhere near it one iota. The only thing we have in common with Rome is that we are also an Empire. That's about as far as it goes. Remember, this was the civilization that worshipped Jupiter and nature, not one that worships a martyr who died for our sins. I mean the worldview and mythology is completely perpendicular in nature.

> I.2.20 (Bar/Brothel of Innulus and Papilio); 3932: Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!

This is some Reddit level humor.

> VI.14.43 (atrium of a House of the Large Brothel); 1520: Blondie has taught me to hate dark-haired girls. I shall hat them, if I can, but I wouldn’t mind loving them. Pompeian Venus Fisica wrote this.

Amusing to see the blonde vs brunette debate even back in the day.

Overall, the sense that I get from this grafitti is that people back then aren't that much different than us. They too believed they had invented sex very much like our generation and every other generation that came before it. To be honest, it seemed like they had a much better time.

Martial, the poet, was able to put worse in writing:

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Martial%20Epigrams.htm

shit you weren't kidding. its just so amusing to find gems like this written millenias ago. it's the same shit you read on reddit

    Epigram X.63

    Phoebus, all faggots ask you home to dine—
    Who feeds on dick is dirty, I opine.

                   Translation by Joseph S. Salemi
                   (first published in TRINACRIA)

and this pure gold:

Aegle was once in bed with double action— The eunuch Dindymus and some old geezer. She lay between while they both got her hot.

Neither guy could make a go of it; One lacked equipment, the other was senescent, So Aegle burned without real satisfaction.

What could she do? She fell down on her knees And prayed to Venus for herself and them: “Make Grandpa young, make Dindymus a man!”

There is something else she could have done on her knees to make an old man young again, surely they knew of that

What's that? She already said he is impotent. So "that" wouldn't work.

There's a Martial epigram (can't find it) that goes something like :

You shave your head to conceal your baldness, But how will you conceal your impotency?

> VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1842: Gaius Pumidius Dipilus was here on October 3rd 78 BC

So, they were already counting down to the birth of Christ 78 years in advance?

I'm guessing dates were translated as well.

What would they have written the year as? ( what was their "zero point" as it were? )

I think the offset into the elected (or otherwise) ruler, by name. Confer the inscription atop the Pantheon "M Agrippa L F Cos Tertivm Fecit" where the gist is M Agrippa <whenever L F Cos the third> made (it).

From Wikipedia's page on the Pantheon: "M[arcus] Agrippa L[ucii] f[ilius] co[n]s[ul] tertium fecit," meaning "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, made [this building] when consul for the third time.

> During the Roman Republic [509 BC–27 BC], years were named after the consuls, who were elected annually (see List of Republican Roman Consuls). Thus, the name of the year identified a consular term of office, not a calendar year. For example, 205 BC was "The year of the consulship of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus and Publius Licinius Crassus", who took office on 15 March of that year, and their consular year ran until 14 March 204 BC. Lists of consuls were maintained in the fasti.

> In the later Republic, historians and scholars began to count years from the founding of the city of Rome. Different scholars used different dates for this event. The date most widely used today is that calculated by Varro, 753 BC, but other systems varied by up to several decades.

I'd have to assume that one of those systems would apply here.

I recognize many of these quotes (the cleaner ones) from the Latin textbook(s) that I used in high school [1]. It's amusing to think that the authors (who made plenty of their own subtle jokes) had to filter through lists like these to find the phrases that weren't too dirty for a middle-and-high school audience.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/ROMANI-LEVEL-STUDENT-HARDCOVER-2005C/...

Back in the early 80s, "Pompeian Graffitti" was one of the most heavily thumbed books in my high school library (all male; everybody had to take Latin and most did Greek). I learned some verbs that didn't even exist in English.

It's how I came up with the subversive username Irrumatio. :O

I know exactly which verbs you are referring to. J. N. Adams's book about Latin sexual vocabulary taught me them.

>The one who buggers a fire burns his penis

Now thats wisdom of the ancients.

"III.5.1 (House of Pascius Hermes; left of the door); 7716: To the one defecating here. Beware of the curse. If you look down on this curse, may you have an angry Jupiter for an enemy."

This is similar to the modern-day "share this 30 times or you'll get bad luck" email chain that baby boomers send around.

Including the original latin would have been more interesting.

Not to me, alas, although my name here is a variant of an ancient Roman joke. Nomen being latin for name.

They are usually better in Latin since there are subtle linguistic hints that are lost in translation.

Ha,ha. I reckon I learned more about ancient Rome in the 5 minutes reading this graffiti than all the years I studied history. If our boring textbooks had included this stuff I reckon we'd all have gotten 'A's.

Seriously, isn't it both remarkable and wonderful that this stuff has actually survived. Unlike us today with our modern sensibilities, it seems Pompeians didn't bother to clean graffiti off walls. If one does the sums it looks that this one below stuck around for 157 years before the eruption of AD79:

"Gaius Pumidius Dipilus was here on October 3rd 78 BC"

Just another comment in passing, this graffiti bears a remarkable similarity to that on the backs of toilet doors in the engineering school at the uni I once attended decades ago. Seems some things never change.

lots of literal shitposting there

People taking a dump in unofficial locations seems to have been a problem.

some people seemed to take pride in it

That Secundus was a lad though wasn't he? Was he the Roman equivalent of FUME (if you ever been to London you will have seen his tag - everywhere).

It's funnyt how there's always that one tag in a town that's everywhere.

Secundus naturally means "second son" so probably there were quite many named that. Romans were a bit unimaginative with names.

They were certainly a romantic and ebullient group, eh?

>V.5 (just outside the Vesuvius gate); 6641: Defecator, may everything turn out okay so that you can leave this place

I like how he wishes the best to Defecator.

It seems the literacy rate there then would have been no more than 10%. http://www.tektonics.org/tsr/tilliteracy.html

I'm amazed how raunchy and explicit it all is.

I guess you can blame Christianity (maybe Catholicism in particular?) and Victorian propriety for pulling it back the other direction.

From what I understand, I think it was mostly the Protestant revival movements of the 18th and 19th century that are responsible. If you look for the sources that were not curated and censored by those same prudes of the 19th century, the very Catholic people of the Medieval period up until the 18th century were astonishingly earthy and frank about sexual matters.

You should check out Martial's Epigrams. Some translations are watered down, but some are faithfully explicit, like the original texts.

Blame Christianity for what? I don't think there has ever been a time or place in the course of human events where there wasn't vulgar graffiti.

With respect to Catholicism, I was getting at the fig leafs that were applied to classic (Roman and Greek) sculptures and paintings that depicted nudity and the general sentiment behind that movement.

Personally, I've never seen such explicit graffiti. The worst might have been "Call XXX-YYYYYY for a good time" sort of messages.

It was mostly Bowdlerism. All sorts of classical literature has bawdiness in it; Apuleius' The Golden Ass is probably the most famous.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler , the man who tried to take the sex jokes out of Shakespeare.)

>I guess you can blame Christianity (maybe Catholicism in particular?) and Victorian propriety for pulling it back the other direction.

Puritan christianity in the US and Europe, after the reformation, yes.

But talk, customs, and such of christian populations throughout the middle ages were just as, if not more, raunchy. Check, e.g. Procopius for some the vibe of what was going on in the Christian empire of Byzantium.

This seem long and complex but in Latin everything is done with prefixes and suffixes.

Does anyone have an idea where to find the original texts (Latin)?

A few here: http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Latin_Vulgar/Texts/Pompeii_...

Here's a book published by Royal Prussian Academy in 1909 Inscriptiones parietariae Pompeianae, Herculanenses, Stabianae: https://archive.org/details/inscriptionespar42zang

You can browse inscriptions at http://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/ Property type has e.g. brothel, inn and tavern for the more raunchy stuff.

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