Ancient Pompeii’s Hidden Messages, Preserved in Graffiti | Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons | TED

On Saturday, August 2, at around 9:30pm,

Iuvenilla was born.

While I do have a daughter, her name isn’t Iuvenilla,

and she wasn't born on August 2.

This was a graffito,

a message written by a proud papa or a proud mama,

on the walls of ancient Pompeii nearly 2,000 years ago.

And while we might send a birth announcement

or take to social media,

this Pompeiian took to the walls to exclaim their happy news

and even accompanied the message

with a drawing of little Iuvenilla herself.

The reason why we have this graffito and thousands like them

was the destructive and deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

This volcanic eruption preserved this graffito for us today.

We might wonder what happened to little Iuvenilla,

likely only a few weeks old when the eruption happened.

I hope she was able to escape with her family as many did.

I've been interested in the Romans since I was little

and Pompeii, especially,

as I share my birthday with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24.

I started learning Latin in high school,

and while I enjoyed the language

and enjoyed learning about the Romans,

I couldn't connect with the stories of Julius Caesar

or even the love poetry of Ovid.

I wanted to know what were ordinary Romans doing and thinking.

And in college, I was introduced to Latin graffiti.

Now for the first time I could hear the thoughts and words of ordinary Romans.

When I went to Pompeii, I could put myself in their sandals

standing next to a column,

imagining the messages they might write to one another.

Line graffiti allow us to hear the thoughts and words of ordinary people

who lived in antiquity.

But I believe by studying Roman graffiti,

we can learn a lot more about what makes us human

and a lot more about ourselves too.

Now, when you hear the word graffiti,

you're probably imagining spray-painted messages in urban centers,

bathroom graffiti or maybe graffiti artists like Banksy.

But ancient graffiti were much different than modern graffiti.

Modern graffiti are typically illegal or at least taboo in cities today.

Ancient graffiti were welcome or even permitted.

They appear in nearly every space in the ancient city:

temples, tombs, bars, public spaces and even inside homes.

Almost nothing was off limits.

Modern graffiti are typically written in spray paint

or scratched into a surface like a bathroom stall.

Ancient graffiti were typically scratched into the wall plaster

using a sharp instrument like a stylus or a nail.

In fact, our English word "graffiti" comes from the Italian word meaning "scratched"

and was coined when 19th century archaeologists first encountered

the scratched graffiti of Pompeii.

Ancient graffiti were written by a wide variety of people,

and they're some of our best evidence

for people marginalized from the literary record,

like women and the enslaved.

Now the reason why the Pompeiians wrote so many graffiti

is they didn't have access to inexpensive writing tools like paper.

So they took to the walls to send messages to one another,

record observations

or even record things using tally marks

in the same way we might use scrap paper,

our phones or even social media.

Now on the screen now are two of the most famous graffiti from Pompeii.

Unfortunately, both of them don't survive for us today,

but drawings made at the time of their excavation

allow us to see what they once looked like.

The one on the top says,

"This is the labyrinth,

the Minotaur lives here,"

and is accompanied by a drawing of a labyrinth from mythology.

This graffito was written inside a private person’s home.

There wasn't the same taboo about writing in personal space like there is today.

I doubt any of us would be too happy if somebody came into our living room

and wrote a message such as this.

The bottom graffiti shows us

that the Pompeiians themselves had a keen awareness

of how many graffiti covered their walls.

It says, "Oh wall, I'm amazed you haven't fallen down

holding up so many scribblings."

This message was repeated several times throughout Pompeii.

This particular one comes from the amphitheater,

which is the space in which the gladiators would fight.

Now, most graffiti in Pompeii were scratched as I mentioned,

but some were written with perishable materials

like charcoal and chalk.

These graffiti are the subject of my present research,

and they've been almost totally ignored by modern scholars

in part because very few of them survived to this day.

This is a shame,

as these graffiti are often more flourishing,

inventive and elegant than their inscribed counterparts.

It was far easier to draw on top of the wall plaster

than to inscribe into it.

Now here's an example of one of these graffiti.

This one was written on one of the gates leading out of the city,

and it was likely made with chalk or maybe even just a clod of earth.

It says, "Victor with Phyloterus everywhere."

You can see the very elegant Roman cursive in which this message was written.

Can you trace the large flourishes on the V, Y and R letters?

The author included a playful branch to the right to complete the message.

Now, just above this one was a graffito made in charcoal.

This time the name Victor, with a flourishing V.

And right below it, a portrait, maybe of Victor himself.

We can just make out the right side of his face, his eye and his nose.

Now, I'm interested in ancient aesthetics.

What does the way the graffito was written tell us about the person who wrote it

and their motivations?

Now, here's a graffito you don't need to know Latin to understand.

This one was inscribed into one of the bathhouses of the city.

Can you read it?

How about now?

That's right.

This was originally written upside down.

Now we don't know if the author wrote it upside down while standing right side up

or if they twisted their body to write it upside down.

But either way it shows us the playfulness of so many of the Roman graffiti.

Have you figured out what it says?

What if I do this?

This was an alphabet.

It's the Latin alphabet interspersed forwards and backwards.

So it starts with A,

then it goes to X, which is the last letter of the Roman alphabet,

then B,

then U, which is the second to last,

then C, then T, which is the third to last,

and so on and so forth.

So we have the alphabet written upside down

and interspersed forwards and backwards.

It doesn't get more playful than that.

And we can see a utilitarian message such as an alphabet

could even be written with elegant writing.

The C and the D letter tails are so long, they cross.

For the Pompeiians, it wasn’t enough to write on the walls.

They wanted to write beautifully.

Now looking at graffiti in isolation such as this is interesting,

but we can gain so much more

when we examine them in context

to understand how these graffiti relate to each other

and the places they were written in.

But to do that we're going to have to travel to ancient Pompeii.

Now I wish we could all go there together.

Instead I'm going to take us there virtually.

We're going to walk down one avenue in ancient Pompeii

to find the graffiti that were once written there

and figure out what can these graffiti tell us

about life in antiquity and life in the 21st century.

This is our avenue that we’ll be walking down,

the Vicolo del Menandro,

a small street in a residential district.

We're one block off from the main avenue in town,

in between the theater and the amphitheater.

As we walk down the avenue, we see many names.

Most of the names are male,

as we believe many more men than women were literate in ancient Pompeii,

but some female names jump out to us too.

It used to be assumed that very few women in the ancient world were literate,

but graffiti from Pompeii have truly complicated that picture.

Amongst all the names,

we see a greeting.

This greeting says,

"Prima sends many greetings to Secundus."

Now Prima and Secundus mean first and second in Latin.

So these might be names or they might be nicknames.

So we have a message from one person to the other.

Well, why did Prima write her message here on the facade of the wall plaster?

Well, partly to get her message to Secundus

and to make sure the rest of Pompeii could read it.

This is the equivalent of a tweet or a Snapchat.

Wall posts have been around for over 2,000 years.

Now we can take a look at how Prima wrote her message.

She wrote it in Roman cursive,

but we can see it looks a lot different

than the charcoal and chalk examples I showed earlier.

It's difficult to inscribe into wall plaster

so some of the letter forms become economical,

such as the Es which are underlined on the slide.

They become just two vertical marks.

We can see though that Prima included an interpunct,

a horizontally centered dot between the first and second word

and I literally mean first and second.

That's what those words mean in Latin.

This interpunct helped to show where the first word stopped

and the second word began and was a mark of elegant writing.

Now, just below this graffito there were several drawings.

Unfortunately we don't have these ones today,

but I've drawn them here to show you what they might have looked like

based on other drawings found at Pompeii.

There were four boars, three birds,

a gladiator, a ship and a partridge in a pear tree.

I'm kidding about the last one.

Now, scholars such as Katherine Huntley have used developmental psychology

to propose that some drawings were the work of children,

but others like these could be the work of adults, too,

replicating things they'd seen or heard in picture form.

My point here is that just like the urge to write on a wall is as old as time,

I believe the urge to doodle is a feature of the human spirit.

Now, a little bit further down our wall

we might have a reply from Secundus to Prima.

Again, these might be nicknames,

so we're not sure, but it's possible.

This message says, "Secundus too greet his Prima everywhere.

I ask, mistress, that you love me."

Now let's look at the way Secundus wrote his message.

He didn't write it in the Roman cursive like Prima

and definitely not like the flourishing cursive we started with.

Instead, he wrote his message in capital letters

so that Prima and the rest of Pompeii wouldn't miss it.

And if we look, he accentuated the message with the box surrounding it

as a way to highlight the message and to make it look more official

like official inscriptions.

If we look at the way Secundus spelled his words,

he left off the [As] on most of the words,

likely because they weren't being pronounced at the time.

If you've ever said "gonna" instead of "going to,"

you're familiar with this sort of phenomenon.

Just below this message, Secundus wrote two further greetings.

Unfortunately we don't have drawings of these ones,

but the excavator who discovered them

said that they were written by the same person

and using the same instrument.

So they probably looked pretty similar to the message above.

And these ones say, "Secundus greets his Prima, Secundus."

"Secundus greets his Prima."

Can we just feel Secundus's love through these messages?

Again, Secundus has left off the A in spelling Prima's name,

all three times.

Probably because it wasn't pronounced.

I tell my Latin students, "Don't be afraid of making mistakes.

Even the Romans made them."

Now, why did Secundus and Prima write these messages to one another?

Well, partly it was to get their messages to the other person.

But I believe there's something else going on here too.

Part of it is to take part in this thrill of discovery.

How many of us have left a sticky note for somebody

or put a note in a lunch box

or written on somebody's social media to find later?

Oh, come on, everybody's hands should be up.

Right.

You want to get your message to the other person,

but it's also taking part in the thrill of discovery,

knowing you're leaving something behind for somebody to find later.

And I believe that's a motivation for these greeters in Pompeii.

Now we continue down our walk and we find more evidence of elegant writing.

Here we have a farewell greeting, "Veneria, goodbye."

And the ends of the letters made to look like branches.

Just below it is a graffito that has stumped scholars.

It doesn't really make sense in Latin.

I believe it was a first attempt for the graffito above.

Or perhaps somebody was replicating the elegant graffito above

in rather simpler form, and they weren’t as effective.

These two graffiti show us the true elegance that was possible

in some of these Latin graffiti.

As we continue down our avenue,

we end with a graffito that shows us a group

almost completely left out of the literary record,

and these are the enslaved.

This graffito says,

"Amianthus, slave of Coelius Caldus, a clothes washer."

Now, clothes washing was a notoriously dirty business in antiquity.

One of the materials used to wash clothes was urine.

While we wish we could know more about Amianthus's life,

this graffito has at least given us the name

of one of the many enslaved

whose lives have been lost to history.

We end our tour with one final graffito.

This one says, "On September 3, Satura was here."

How many of us have seen a graffito such as this

or such as this

while waiting at the train station or using the restroom?

Satura could hardly have known

that a destructive and deadly eruption in 79 AD

would preserve this graffito

and thereby her memory for us today.

The urge to write on the wall,

to leave your name behind in space and time,

is as old as time.

While I am by no means advocating

that we all go out and start writing graffiti,

I hope we can consider what messages we're leaving behind

and what we hope will last for the next generation.

Thank you

(Applause)