
Graffiti from Pompei - benbreen
http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm
======
sillyquiet
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.

~~~
necessity
At least the street defecating problem seems to have improved.

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

~~~
sbuttgereit
Or San Francisco

------
brilliantcode
> 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.

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

[http://www.thehypertexts.com/Martial%20Epigrams.htm](http://www.thehypertexts.com/Martial%20Epigrams.htm)

~~~
brilliantcode
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)

~~~
brilliantcode
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!”

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

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

------
CrLf
> 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?

~~~
futurix
I'm guessing dates were translated as well.

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

~~~
khedoros1
> 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.

------
woodruffw
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/...](https://www.amazon.com/ROMANI-LEVEL-STUDENT-
HARDCOVER-2005C/dp/0131163701)

------
gumby
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.

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

------
dTal
>The one who buggers a fire burns his penis

Now _thats_ wisdom of the ancients.

------
rocky1138
"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.

------
jayess
Including the original latin would have been more interesting.

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

------
hilbert42
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.

------
return0
lots of literal shitposting there

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

~~~
return0
some people seemed to take pride in it

------
nthcolumn
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).

~~~
tuomosipola
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.

------
pmarreck
They were certainly a romantic and ebullient group, eh?

------
hugozap
>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.

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

------
arfar
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.

~~~
openasocket
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.

~~~
arfar
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.

------
dsfyu404ed
This seem long and complex but in Latin everything is done with prefixes and
suffixes.

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

~~~
tuomosipola
A few here:
[http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Latin_Vulgar/Texts/Pompeii_...](http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Latin_Vulgar/Texts/Pompeii_Graffiti.html)

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

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

