Graffiti in Antiquity

by Peter Keegan

Ancient graffiti - hundreds of thousands of informal, ephemeral texts spanning millennia - offer a patchwork of fragmentary conversations in a variety of languages spread across the Mediterranean world. Cut, painted, inked or traced in charcoal, the surviving graffiti present a layer of lived experience in the ancient world unavailable from other sources. Graffiti in Antiquity reveals how and why the inhabitants of Greece and Rome - men and women and free and enslaved - formulated written and visual messages about themselves and the world around them as graffiti. The sources - drawn from 800 BCE to 600 CE - are examined both within their individual historical, cultural and archaeological contexts and thematically, allowing for an exploration of social identity in the urban society of the ancient world. An analysis of one of the most lively and engaged forms of personal communication and protest, Graffiti in Antiquity introduces a new way of reading sociocultural relationships among ordinary people living in the ancient world.

Genres: Nonfiction

348 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

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Egypt, Greece, Rome

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Fucked, I say, fucked, with legs held up, was the Roman citizens' pussy wherein no other but the sweetest and holiest sounds were heard. (CIL 4.1261) [at Pompeii]


The cluster of graffiti listed as CIL 4.1837;

1. 'If you can, but do not want to, why do you put off joy? Why do you foster hope and tell me continually to come back tomorrow? There-fore, make me die, you who force me to live without you. The reward for the good surely will not be to be put to the rack.' (Il. 1-5)
2. 'What hope has taken away, hope surely returns to the lover? (Il. 6-8)
3. 'May he who reads this never have to read another thing in future.' (Il. 9-10)
4. 'May he who writes above never be well/safe.' (I. 10)
5. "You speak truly? (I. 11)
6. 'Congratulations, Hedys!' (I. 11-12).8


I am amazed, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tediousness of so many writers.
(CIL 4.1904, 1906, 2461, 2487)


Martial (12.61.7-10), in a well-known reference to graffiti, shows contempt towards them:
If you are eager to be read of, then look for some drunk poet of the dark archway, who writes poems with rough charcoal or crumbling chalk, which people read while they take a shit.

Plutarch (Mor. 520 d-e): 'Nothing useful or pleasant is written on the walls; simply that so-and-so commemorates so-and-so wishing him well or that another one is the best of friends'.

"Weep, you girls. My dick has now abandoned you.
Now it fucks ass. Farewell, conceited cunt!"

alexamenos graffito (c.200 CE)
http://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/5...
https://iqsaweb.wordpress.com/2017/01...
https://alsahra.org/2016/09/نقش-إبنة-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graff...