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- [00:00]
Mary Beard
A Phidius was here. You'd recognise that kind of graffiti anywhere. It's just one of more than 10,000 scratchings that survive on the walls of Pompeii.
- [00:12]
Charlotte Higgins
Another one says, vibius Restitutus slept here alone and missed his darling Urbana.
- [00:20]
Mary Beard
And if you want a different perspective, well, try Atomitas got me pregnant.
- [00:26]
Charlotte Higgins
Oh, dear. It's not all about sex. Actually, here's a bit of improvised election pr. We ask you to vote for Gaius Julius Polybius. He produces good bread. That's another one.
- [00:40]
Mary Beard
Or go to Pojlav in Herculaneum, just next door to Pompeii, and you'll find this Apollinaris, doctor of the Emperor Titus, had a good crap here.
- [00:53]
Charlotte Higgins
In fact, there's so much graffiti all around Pompeii and Herculaneum that one scribbler scrawled, I am amazed, wall, that you haven't completely collapsed because you're holding up all these scribbles. Of graffiti artists, I think that of
- [01:10]
Mary Beard
all the things that can make us feel right up close to ancient Romans, I mean, graffiti must be one of the best. I mean, it's not just the fact that there's so much of it, it's what it says too. I mean, and the concerns of these graffiti artists and their jokes could easily appear on our walls, too. Although probably with rather fewer affidiuses and vibiuses. But probably. I mean, how shall I put this politely? With just as many drawings of the male member as we find on our walls.
- [01:51]
Charlotte Higgins
So what did people write on their walls 2,000 years ago? And if we look harder at all these scrolls, what does it tell us about their world? Who was writing and who could write? And was Roman graffiti basically the same as today? Or should we be wary of that trap of thinking that the Romans were just toga wearing versions of you and me, marking walls with nails or pieces of flint rather than spray cans or marker pens?
- [02:20]
Mary Beard
This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. And I'm Mary Beard.
- [02:29]
Charlotte Higgins
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now, this episode, Roman Graffiti. The writing on the wall.
- [02:45]
Mary Beard
Sorry, Mary. Wasn't that delicious? So good. Your bill, ladies. I got it. No, I got it.
- [03:04]
Charlotte Higgins
Seriously, I insist.
- [03:05]
Mary Beard
I insisted first. Don't be silly. You don't be silly.
- [03:09]
Charlotte Higgins
People with the Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited 2% rewards on purchases.
- [03:15]
Mary Beard
Okay?
- [03:16]
Charlotte Higgins
Rock, paper, scissors for it. Rock, paper, scissors.
- [03:18]
Mary Beard
Shoot. No.
- [03:20]
Charlotte Higgins
The Wells Fargo ActiveCash credit card. Visit Wells Fargo.comActiveCash terms apply.
- [03:29]
Mary Beard
We do have to warn you before we start that quite a lot of graffiti from the ancient world is pretty rude. We will try and be as polite as we can be, but it's a challenge.
- [03:40]
Charlotte Higgins
We're well known, well known for our decorum and politeness. Mary and I, we will do our best.
- [03:46]
Mary Beard
I mean, I think we gotta start with some absolute basics really, which is that we're used to graffiti all around us. Well, graffiti was all around the ancient Romans too. And I think even more so in the Roman world because of the lack of other places. You know, no post it notes, etc. To write your thoughts down or your complaints or the clever joke that you just thought of. I mean, graffiti was even more embedded really in antiquity in writing on walls or on bits of pot or wherever you like. And that was so much the case that it actually finds its way into mainstream ancient history writing. I mean, Suetonius, for example, the biographer of the first 12 Caesars in his life of the Emperor Nero, he actually quotes some of the graffiti that was put up in Rome. This no longer survives, but he quotes little squibs against the Emperor. I mean, there's a great one complaining about Nero's vast new palace that he's building his golden house. And it says words to the effect of, hey citizens, get out of town, go to the nearby town of Bay. Because this place is becoming a single house belonging to a single man, I the Emperor. So it really, people did take notice of this and it kind of central to public communication and probably even more central than it is for us, I think.
- [05:43]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, that's so interesting. I hadn't thought actually of the lack of availability of just random places to put your thoughts in the ancient world as much. So it's sort of also the notes app on your phone, you know, you have a thought and you might scratch it into a wall.
- [05:59]
Mary Beard
Or it's social media, you know, it's Twitter and X, isn't it? You know, the Romans would have absolutely loved social media, you know, if they had it. Instead, happily for us, they're using graffiti, they're writing it, you know, on any convenient wall surface. And I mean, I think, you know, we've just said look, it was everywhere in the ancient world and I'm sure it was. What we're going to be doing in this episode is concentrating quite heavily on Pompeii and Herculaneum. Next door turn just for the simple reason that there will survive and we can get, we get a whole lot of the graffiti all together. So it's not just that it wasn't that the Pompeians were more keen on writing than anyone else in the world, it's just we've got their walls and we've got walls of absolutely all sorts. Perhaps we should get, get this out of the way first because it's what people always ask. One of the, the most covered sites in, in Pompeii, one of the most covered with graffiti is the brothel. There is a purpose built brothel in Pompeii and there's more than 100 graffiti in that saying. Well Charlotte, what's it saying?
- [07:26]
Charlotte Higgins
Saying mostly the F word, Mary. Mostly it's blokes boasting about how fabulous they are at doing the act. It's not clear that the sex workers did very much graffiti writing unfortunately. So we don't really get that. Am I right about that? We don't really get, we don't really get the sex workers point of view. As far as we know there are
- [07:47]
Mary Beard
a few female names but probably written by the blood blokes. And we, we don't know for a fact that all the sex workers were female, but that's usually assumed.
- [07:58]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah. So it's more like X or Y had a great night or a great, a great moment of, a great moment of coming together with a sex worker, let's say. We're really trying not to use the F word here but that's, that's what it is, that's what it is.
- [08:14]
Mary Beard
And up to a point we perhaps shouldn't exaggerate how raunchy the broth of graffiti is. It's about 150 graffiti on the, mostly on the walls of the sex workers cubicles. The biggest topic is what they came there to do. But it's only about just over a third of the graffiti that quite a lot of it, you know, is just somebody writing their name and you know, writing, writing your name on the wall has always been one of the, the biggest pleasures for the graffiti writer. Just, you know, you don't have to say what you're doing. Just you know, basically it's I was here. But they also draw little pictures, there are little slogans about local gladiator teams and even, there's even a few death announcements. It seemed, you know, Africanus is dying. So amidst the kind of the F word there, you know, it's a place where people were chatting about things other Than sex.
- [09:28]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah. And not only in Latin.
- [09:31]
Mary Beard
Right.
- [09:32]
Charlotte Higgins
There's quite a bunch of. It's in Greek, which itself bespeaks a kind of cosmopolitanism of the cosmopolitanism of the brothel. People from elsewhere. People from elsewhere, so to speak. So people from like the eastern part of the empire coming in. Are any of those. If it said, you know, X or Y had a good F here, is that slightly tripadvisory? I mean, is that slightly like leaving a review for the sex worker in question? Or is it more like I performed fantastically? It's more like a tripadvisor review for oneself.
- [10:12]
Mary Beard
I have to say that I hadn't thought of it in the terms that you just talked about, Charlotte. But, you know, I think that, you know, my view of your average Roman bloke tends to push me towards it being, look what I, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's me, me, me, stuff me, me, me with a bit of sex thrown in it. But I think, as you say, there is a, you know, for the, you know, putting historians hat on now that there is more to this. I mean, you know, about 10% of these are written in Greek, which is suggesting that if you want to think, go from the graffiti beyond just the act itself to thinking about who went to the brothel and how it worked. There's an international trade and Pompeii is a port city. It would be commonly said that here that the sailors from the Greek is, you know, out on the town for a night. But there's something else which is really, really curious and intriguing, which is there are, you know, what I think about six or seven different cubicles in this brothel. I find it a rather uncomfortable place actually, because modern tour guides now tend to kind of be a bit, a bit sort of lurid about it. Oh, this is, you know, you know, what happened here, mate? Well, and you know, they don't often think or don't often mention the probably women who were actually basically probably many of them not, not free women who didn't get a chance to escape and were providing the services. Okay, speech over. What's interesting is that the graffiti is not evenly spread through the brothel. Something like half of it is actually written on the walls of the two cubicles nearest the main customer entrance. And there are some cubicles that really barely have any at all. Not entirely certain how we should explain that. I mean, I tend to think that people come in from the street and the customers take the vacant cubicle that they come to first so that the ones nearest the door get most trade but people have suggested all kinds of things, like there were some sex workers in this brothel who said, you're not writing on the wall of my cubicle. I find that slightly unlikely. The other thing I think we'll come back to this later is it's quite interesting to see at what height the graffiti is scratched on the walls. And not much of it is clearly scratched from, you know, lying on the. There's kind of built in beds in these cubicles. You know, not much of it is done from lying down. It's mostly quite high up on the wall, so it looks as if, you know, the guy gets up, then says, I had a good F here, right, and then leaves.
- [13:40]
Charlotte Higgins
But not much. Hanging around in each other's arms. It feels like it's a bit of a wham, bam, thank you, mum situation. Probably. I don't know, maybe I'm extrapolating a little bit too far.
- [13:51]
Mary Beard
Yeah, no, it does, but it is a case where you can see some hints of how you might use this to kind of repopulate the brothel, but who the people are, how they're behaving, you know, what the footfall is like in the brothel. So it's. It's more interesting than simply a load of blokish boasts about their sexual prowess.
- [14:23]
Charlotte Higgins
I think Mary, what you've just unfolded there, as someone who's not spent a lifetime looking at Pompeii and looking at its graffiti as you have, or not a lifetime, but a long time, is if you're thinking, why are these two. Why are Mary and Charlotte thinking about graffiti this week when we could be thinking about, I don't know, Virgil or Ovid or Homer or any other work of great literature is just what a different picture this scrawled stuff on the walls gives you of. This is life as lived by pretty ordinary people. This is not great literature. This is stuff that comes into people's heads and they just scroll on the walls. So you're getting a completely different way outside the canons of. Of great literature. But also you've just shown just how much you can extrapolate or begin to try to extrapolate or hypothesize from where it's written, how it's written, at what height on the walls it's written. So there's so much information that you can mine or try to start to mine out of this graffiti. It operates at so many different levels on which you can think about it, which, I mean, I've. I've barely thought about Roman graffiti in a few will come There are a couple of contexts in which I have. But the idea that you can go so far in using it to help you piece together life. And there are so many. There's. There's a much. There's a huge variety, isn't there, Mary? I mean, you know, we're in the brothel, but let's step outside the brothel.
- [16:01]
Mary Beard
And we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't give the impression that people. Roman graffiti is all about sex. It's not. And what we call graffiti, you know, something scratched up on the wall is used for things like price lists in Pompeian bars. So you can start to get to see, you know, what. What the cost of a glass of wine would be. There's loads of graffiti, little pictures, but also fan notes about local gladiators. So you see the kind of. The quotes, entertainment aspects of Pompeii. And there are personal confessions of every sort that you can possibly imagine. I think one of my favorites in what looks as if it was a local kind of inn, hotel B and B, and it says, I wet the bed. Oh, landlord, I confess I messed up, but there was no chamber put around. So you think, what? So again, it's a kind of. There's a sort of bravuriness about that, you know, that slightly blaming the landlord, I wouldn't have wet the bed if he'd left me a chamber pot. But also showing us that what did Romans do at night? Well, it was chamber pot territory. There are some drawings also that are quite recognizably drawings done by kids. And the sort of children's drawings of a human being then and now are pretty much the same, you know, what kids do for the faces and how the body works. I mean, it's uncanny. There are also, even in Pompeii, not just as reported by Suetonius, there are kind of. There's political commentary, political satire. There's one. One scratching seems to say poison Kikuta Poison is the Emperor Nero's accountant. Now, I think what that means is that when Nero needs money, what does he do? He forces some rich guy to death and takes his cash. So Nero's accountant. Gosh, A range, you know, all. All Roman human life really is. Is there?
- [18:52]
Charlotte Higgins
Yes. And not just heterosexual. I mean, I. I had a. There's a wonderful online resource that we'll put in the show Notes that is a really easy to navigate and fun sort of compendium of. Of different examples of graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum. But, I mean, maybe I'M just a bit soppy, but I quite like the love stuff. There's one that's Sabinus, handsome Sabinus te amat. Hermos loves you, you know, handsome guy. Sabinus Hermos fancies you, which is, you know. Well, that's two blokes. So, you know, there we go. Prayers to Venus asking for help in the matters of love. There's one that's like Fortunatus loves Ampliander, Januarius loves Veneria. We ask Mistress Venus that you keep us in mind, which is kind of fun. And there's some wonderful, well, supposed misspellings. It's quite hard. I mean, we've made this point at the beginning. It's unbelievably hard to read this stuff. Like, not only is Roman handwriting incredibly difficult, but also it's very, very old. But there's one, there's one that says, actually it says fuebus e grotes, but it's been, it's been sort of interpreted as Phoebus ae grotes. So a misspelling which kind of means may Phoebus fall ill. So it's a little bit of a curse, but that. It's of kind. Quite an extrapolation, I think. I think that starts to get us into, you know, it's actually quite tricky, isn't it?
- [20:37]
Mary Beard
Roman handwriting is as difficult as, you know, think someone in 2000 years would probably find modern handwriting. And the other, you know, the other issue is that our very standardized version of Latin spelling is not what many writers, Romans actually wrote. And spelling was much more fluid and flexible than, you know, than we're accustomed to see it when we get a modern Latin text. So these things are, they're quite tricky and they also, you know, as soon as they're uncovered, they tend to deteriorate. So, you know, there is a whole subfield of, of ancient classical scholarship which is really devoted to trying to squeeze these things for their sense. I think though there is one category of what we still put really with the graffiti, though it isn't scratched graffiti, but it's on walls. And we mentioned one in the intro. And these are much more carefully composed and clearly written election posters saying things like X or Y says vote for so and so to be on the town council. It's quite an interesting glimpse of local level political life that there are sort of. There appear to be contested elections for the local council and people appear to be taking an interest. But for me, what's striking is at first sight, they're not half as imaginative as our own electoral posters.
- [22:39]
Charlotte Higgins
Right. You'd have thought of not yet been born to reinvent election poster and you
- [22:47]
Mary Beard
really would have thought the Romans might have invented it, you know, but their graffiti is so imaginative. You'd have thought they would have had, you know, something up their sleeves for election posters. And most of it is along the lines of oh, his neighbors all say that so and so would make a good aedile or the carpenters are backing so and so for, for the local council, etc. Now what I think is interesting here is not just that these are clearly painted on the walls and sometimes they're even signed. They look as if they're semi professional sign writers here, but underneath they are a bit more nuanced than you think. It looks as if it's just positive campaigning for favourite candidates throughout. When you look at some of them and you see it saying the thieves all say vote for so and so or the late drinkers. The seri bibi all say vote for so and so. You can see that you're getting a slightly ironic bit of negative campaigning here. You know, if it says the thieves all say vote for so and so, what it means is don't vote for so and so.
- [24:12]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, and they are. And the lushes who are still drinking at 4 o' clock in the morning, those are the late drinkers, are they? Yeah, I, I assume people after, after closing time. Yes, I'm sure there wasn't a closing time, but you know what I mean.
- [24:26]
Mary Beard
No, so they are quite interesting and you know, they, they've also particularly been squeezed to try to, you know, try to get through to what the governing class of Pompeii looked like and how support was organized. This. What's interesting is there's very, very few reasons given for why you should vote for so and so. We quoted one at the beginning which said he makes good bread, but it's, it's really no more than, no more than that at all. So it's. So you have to put them, I think next to. They're not exactly the same as the graffiti, but they're very similar. You know. I think before we go on to bigger questions though, I think it's worth saying we've touched on this already, that they can be quite hard to interpret. I mean, and that's not just because they're very difficult to read. You know, there's stage one interpretation is working out what the hell they're saying. Right. But stage two is thinking, well what did that actually mean? And that's as with modern graffiti, you know, out of context, it can be quite hard. I mean, even that graffiti of Apollinaris, the doctor of the Emperor Titus, boasting about his bowel movement in the rather posh lavatory. Some slightly stuffy scholars, I think, have come in here and said, we don't actually have to imagine that the doctor of the Emperor Titus really was emptying his bowels in this laugh. This is a kind of Queen Victoria slept here joke, right? So someone has come in and as a kind of bit of an, you know, ironical gag, has said, oh, Apollinaris, the doctor of the Emperor Titus had a good crap here. Ha, ha. No, he didn't. But it's a good joke to write on the wall.
- [26:26]
Charlotte Higgins
Yes. I mean, there's a whole interesting question around just how informal and rude and demotic and ordinary this stuff is and how maybe scholars sometimes just want it to be more decorous and more official. And, I mean, I don't know. I don't want to undermine scholarship.
- [26:47]
Mary Beard
I think you got it the wrong way around, Charlotte. I think that quite a lot of repressed scholars have come along to this. And what they really wanted to find is the smart. Right.
- [26:58]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, well, there's plenty of that to go around.
- [27:00]
Mary Beard
You've got one not being decorous and the other finding more smut than there really is.
- [27:06]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay, I get it. But, yeah, some of them. Some of them seem, you know, you read it and you think, well, that could mean almost anything. Even these apparently incredibly simple, super simple things like, goodbye, Phyllis or goodbye, Urbanus, which are two examples from Pompeii or Herculaneum. But that could mean they're leaving town. It could mean they've died. It could even be a threat. It could be. I mean, I'm sure it could be a bunch of things I haven't even thought of. But when you think of how encoded modern street tagging is, or, I mean, this is, you know, who knows? It looks simple, but I have this sort of strong feeling that it's. It's not as simple as it looks.
- [27:52]
Mary Beard
No, that's right. Goodbye, Urbanus can mean I'm leaving you, Urbanus. Or it can mean I'm so sad, but I gotta go away and I'll miss you. It could mean, I miss you, Urbanus. And so there are kind of. There are unfathomable stories, you know, underneath an awful lot of these. I think what we need to do after the break is kind of take a step back from the individual stories. Fascinating as they are, and, and see what this graffiti tells us as a kind of at a more general level, what does it tell us about life and culture in the Roman world?
- [28:36]
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- [29:06]
Mary Beard
Hello lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics book club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
- [29:26]
Charlotte Higgins
We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
- [29:45]
Mary Beard
All details are on our website, instant classicspod.com
- [29:53]
Charlotte Higgins
so Mary, one of the super interesting things about graffiti is we see it in Pompeii and Herculaneum and indeed to the extent that we can see it elsewhere, elsewhere in the Roman Empire, it's just how much literature actually is quoted among the graffiti. So we get bits of Virgil, Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid, but other bits, other poems by Virgil too. We get bits of poetry by the Lucretius and Ovid. And you know, this seems really surprising on the one hand, I mean, people on the streets of London or Manchester or Los Angeles are not by and large quoting Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or whatever it might be. So, you know, like, you know, what is going, why are people quoting famous lines of Virgil?
- [30:42]
Mary Beard
That's really interesting. And it opens up a big question that we often shy away from, I think, which is we have these great works of classical literature that we still read and we still teach. When we teach classics by people like Virgil and Lucretius and Ovid. And one of the nagging doubts that we have is quite how well known were these in the ancient world itself? I mean, we're very happy to imagine the elite sitting down and listening to or reading Virgil. Nice evening entertainment. But what about about the more ordinary people? How, you know, who knows Virgil in the ancient world? Who knows even more? So I mean Lucretius, the philosophical poet of the first century bc. And there are. There's more than a hundred graffiti of snatches, little quotes from high literature, mostly in Latin, but some of it in Greek, on the walls of Pompeii. And that's. That's an. It is one indication that our great classics were in part an element of popular culture, not just very posh elite culture, the action world too. But there is a big but coming up here, and I think it raises all kinds of interesting questions if you just restrict it to Pompeii. There are a wide range of authors quoted. The vast majority are from Virgil. Absolutely overwhelming majority. And the overwhelming majority are from Virgil's epic poem, the Aeneid. And you might say, well, you know, that is quite interesting because the Aeneid does bed down as a classic and as a school text very quickly after Virgil's almost finished writing it, he dies just before the end. But again, you have to be even more careful than that because if you look carefully at what these quotes from Virgil's Aeneid are, they the. Okay, the vast majority are the first line of the first book of the Aeneid, arma wirrum quaecano, and the first line of the second book of the Aeneid, contigure en mes. You know, everybody fell silent. When you see that kind of distribution, it does make you think that we're perhaps not dealing with a load of an avid in readers in Pompeii, but we're dealing with the kind of quotes from high culture that would be as well known to people as to be or not to be from Shakespeare's Hamlet. And we certainly know that, you know, people come out with to be or not to be, or they even sometimes write it on the wall. But that doesn't mean that they've read or seen Shakespeare's Hamlet. So we've got this kind of level of familiarity, bite size familiarity with these texts that may not mean that people are going back home of an evening to, you know, get their copy of Virgil out.
- [34:44]
Charlotte Higgins
It feels a bit like they've learned them off by heart at school, doesn't it? Maybe. And these are the bits that. These are the bits they know. Even so, it's. Yeah, it's. I mean, you mentioned Contiquere Omnes, which is the second book of the Aeneid, line one. And that even turns up as a bit of graffiti in Roman Britain, which is perhaps even more surprising than. I mean, obviously you don't have walls of a town of Silchester which is where this is found. You know, that's. It's all ruins. But what you do have in Silchester is there's a bit of roof tile into which someone had scratched while the clay was still damp. That quote from Aeneid, book two, line one. So this habit of sort of schoolboyish, I think of it slightly schoolboyish, schoolboyish writing of the famous line. It's not just in Italy, it's across the Empire. And there's another one. Actually, I wrote about it in the Guardian a couple of years ago. It's really. Again, it's not a wall, because the walls, remember, the only walls that we really have are in Pompeii and Herculaneum. But it's a very. Again, it's a quote from Virgil and it's scratched onto the bottom of a Spanish amphora, one of those enormous storage pots that was used to store oil and for exporting oil from Spain to all across the Empire. But they were mass produced, these enormous single use pots. And into the top of the whelk, into the bottom of the pot was scratched a line from Virgil's poem the Georgics. But when it was drying, the pot would have been inverted, so it would have been the top and someone scratched it. I mean, it's not for anyone to read. Like, you know, you'd never. Because the pot, no one would ever look at the bottom of this pot. And it's a single use pot. So it must have been just someone writing it for the hell of it or something like that. It's kind of hard to work out, but it's such a. In a way, it's such a beautiful
- [36:56]
Mary Beard
thing, you know, but it feels very much kind of Dictionary of Quotations stuff, you know, it's. It's little things.
- [37:05]
Charlotte Higgins
I'm robbing this of any romanticism, Mary, that I'm trying to.
- [37:09]
Mary Beard
No, I'm actually going to put some romanticism back in. Don't worry, Charlotte, because just in the interest of completeness, I also say that one of the graffiti in the brothel is actually the first line of the second book of the Aeneid, or at least the first word, contiguere.
- [37:27]
Charlotte Higgins
Right.
- [37:27]
Mary Beard
They all fell silent. Right. Imaginative scholars have thought that this was. Could have been perhaps some guy who, you know, after he'd done what he came for, he thought, heavens, everybody's making such a noise here, you know. Can't you all shut up and give me a bit of. Give me a bit of peace, all right? Gondigoere on These on the, on the wall, maybe, but, but, but it's. They're the kind of quotes that you, that you carry around in your head and that you carry them around in your head and then. And they come out. Sometimes you think, you know, you transfer them from your memory to the wall or to the pot. And I think that is really interesting. But as long as we don't confuse it with, you know, widespread reading by everybody of the Aeneid or whatever bit of literature is concerned. And I think even the schoolboy stuff is a bit perilous because the number of young boys. Let's forget the girls, I'm afraid here, if they were taught to read and write, it would have been at home, the young boys. Quite how far any sort of formal schooling went down in Pompeii is down. The social scale is unknown. Although I think it's wonderful that what we read was actually even in snatches put on the wall. Also, it's not just that if you go beyond the strict quotes, you can see there's some graffiti which not just repeat, but kind of pun on parody, these lines of Virgil. So people are kind of actively using these Virgilian quotes. I mean, and there's one funny one which is a little parody of the first line of the first book of the Aeneid is arms and the man. I sing. And this is outside a laundry, right? And it's. I think it's on the outside wall of a laundry. And instead of alms and the man I sing, it says, phulones ululamque cano. I sing of the laundry workers and their ulula and their probably owl. The laundry workers have an owl as a mascot. I sing of the laundry workers and their owl not. Then goes on, in case you hadn't got the point, not arms and the man. So there is, you know, it's nice that. I mean, I think you're seeing kind of more active command of this when you find people making a joke out of it, parodying it, twisting it.
- [40:48]
Charlotte Higgins
So it's. That's so fantastic. I hadn't known that one at all. I, I also find it amazing how quickly Virgil is so well known. So Virgil dies in 19 BCE and Pompeii and Herculaneum are destroyed in 79 CE. So, you know that. That's, that's, you know, a hundred years, right? I mean, that's quite. That seems quite quick to me to be so, so omnipresent. Because there's a lot, There's a lot.
- [41:22]
Mary Beard
You mentioned kids learning it at School and you know, probably elite kids, but there's actually some surprising physical evidence of that because if you, if you look not just at what these quotes from Virgil are, but you look where they are, where these things were scratched, quite a lot of them are not scratched on the, on outside, on exterior walls. They're scratched on interior walls of quite rich housing at sort of childlike height. So it looks as if there's a significant proportion of these Virgil quotes are actually literally schoolboy quotes, if the place and the height is anything to go by. There are these kids who come home from school and they're practicing or they're learning the prep for tomorrow or whatever.
- [42:32]
Charlotte Higgins
And sometimes the handwriting is slightly schooly, isn't it? There's something, you know, the sort of attempt to be sort of very neat and by the book, but, you know, perhaps slightly failing in that mission.
- [42:46]
Mary Beard
Yeah, but a bit easier to read than some of the raunchier things done on the outside, expressing lust or love for some uncooperative person.
- [43:00]
Charlotte Higgins
But Mary, I just wonder, like, are we able to extrapolate from this a sense of literacy, for example, in the Roman Empire at law? I mean, this is. We've got this amazing sample of Pompeii and Herculaneum with so much data, really. But how far does that get us in figuring out how many people are literate in the Roman Empire?
- [43:26]
Mary Beard
That again, you know, we're moving to the really, really big unknowns here because, you know, one of, one of the crucial questions of, you know, modern study of the ancient world has been how many people could read and write. Now there is no answer to that question, certainly if you take a sort of imperial wide perspective, because, I mean, I think it kind of goes without saying that people living in the backwoods of Roman Britain were not as literate as people living, well in Pompeii or some of the smart towns in the Italian peninsula. People in the towns would have been using writing probably much more than people in the countryside. Men would have been, by and large, because it's pretty certain that only they went to school. Men would be pretty certainly more literate than women, et cetera, et cetera. And it's been a huge kind of cause of debate. And if you wanted an over generalizing guesstimate, the, the one that most modern ancient historians come out with on the basis of not much is that across the empire you're probably looking at 15 to 20% adult male literacy. But it's kind of hard to know what that actually means really. And I mean, and that estimate is partly on the basis that it seems that no modern society before the advent of universal education had ever got literacy at a higher rate. So it seems. So, you know, it's one guess built on another. I think that what I find interesting about Pompeii, and I don't think it's possible really to put a, a number on it, but you find writing being used obviously in all kinds of day to day activities, buying and selling, et cetera. You know, so you go to a bakery and you will find, you know, scratched on the wall by the door, things that look like they're to do with deliveries and orders, what, you know, where the bread is going to be delivered and to whom. You look at those big jars, the amphorae of oil and wine, and you will find painted or scratched on them, not actually quotes from Virgil, but you'll find what looks like a rudimentary address in the city saying where this is going to be delivered. Now, what that looks like is that the people doing those basic urban infrastructural jobs have what modern historians rather snootily, I think, call functional literacy. I mean, we don't necessarily mean they're reading Virgil, but in order to do the jobs they have, they clearly need some level of basic literacy. And the same goes a bit for the electoral slogans, I think. Now they could just be like, you know, like quite a lot of advertising is. They could be not really intended to convince anybody. They could, many of them could really just be intended as declaratory. I'm supporting so and so, but all the same, you know, you think some people are going past, they are actually reading these, otherwise it is a bit of a colossal waste of time to paint them up so carefully. You know, the price lists in Bar suggest that, okay, you could have asked the bar staff how much is a good glass of wine, but there are price lists there. And I think that to me it's quite hard to think about Pompeii without imagining a quite, quite a thick level of literacy for basic day to day tasks. And for a historian that is hugely important because one of the things that we're always saying about the ancient world is how they're writing everything down, they're putting up notices and public documents are being inscribed on stone. Well, who's reading those and who can read those?
- [48:38]
Charlotte Higgins
The whole culture, as you say, is so thick with. It's so there's so much writing in the Roman Empire. I mean, it's just worth pausing on that thought. You Know, even in Roman Britain, the number of written inscriptions that have been collated and of this huge resource for historians, it's just absolutely vast. It's public writing inscriptions. It's so difficult to get your head around it. So enormously vast. So writing is absolutely everywhere. And we can tell from things like the Vindolanta tablets that soldiers or officers at least were exchanging letters with each other. There's certainly a huge amount of writing around.
- [49:25]
Mary Beard
Yes. And it would be very odd if we then went to Pompeii and found writing not being used for day to day activities. You know, it would push us. Now, I've sometimes gone down this route, I have to confess. It would push us to thinking that an awful lot of this public writing in the ancient world was symbolic, really. You're writing it, you're wr. This law, not because you expect anybody to come and read it, but because in a sense you're memorializing it, making it permanent. And I'm sure there's a bit of that about. But, you know, when I go to Pompeii and I look at this stuff, it's very hard to think of its population, its male population, its male economically active population as not having the absolute basics of literacy. Maybe, you know, it's always easier to read than to write. And probably more of them were competent at reading rather than at writing. But still some of them are going out of an evening and, you know, chipping their messages onto somebody's bit of plaster. So I think it's. It to me, it just seems that, you know, 15% adult male literacy for Pompeii seems a bit low now, if you average it all out across the empire, you know, maybe that's true, but I, you know, I think that, I think my heart and my head really is with the. Let's say it's a guy, the guy who wrote up that little graffiti about pitying the wall because, you know, it's amazing that it hadn't fallen down because there are just so many bits of writing on it, you know, I think, yeah, you probably did get the point.
- [51:30]
Charlotte Higgins
I find it oddly moving, the whole thing, because, because this is, this is stuff that people wrote, okay, they wrote it in public places, so they did mean it to be seen. But I strongly suspect that if any of these people had thought, you know, in 2000 years people are going to be reading it and puzzling over it, they would have been extremely surprised. Whereas, you know, the poets and the historians did have a sense that this was, you know, did have a perhaps arrogant sense, although it turns out to be true in some cases, that this stuff was going to be read deep into the future. You know, I have built a monument more lasting than bronze. The poet Horace said about his own poetry with this stuff is people scratching on the wall for a passing day, for a passerby today or tomorrow, but not 2,000 years hence or, you know, semi private, semi public. And that sort of sense of the. I mean, I love the bar tab, the bar menu stuff, you know, a pound of lard, three coins, wine, one and a half coins, cheese, one and a half co. There's just really basic stuff of life that we can, by this really extraordinary fluke of incredible fluke that Vesuvius erupted. And when it did, we have got this peculiar little glance into these extraordinarily ordinary worlds of Romans living in those towns.
- [53:01]
Mary Beard
It gives us the chance that we don't often have to sort of snoop on them when they're not expecting us to be there. And I think in some ways the most exciting bit of history, it's when you snoop on someone unawares from 2,000 years ago. And that's what these graffiti give us.
- [53:19]
Charlotte Higgins
I think, as ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions. And so if you have them, please do so. Send them to us at instantclassicspod@gmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classicspod.
- [53:36]
Mary Beard
Bye bye.