>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
^M00:00:05
[ Silence ]
^M00:00:23
>> Dr. Benefiel did graduate work in epigraphy at the University of Rome and she holds a PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University.  Since 2005, she has taught at Washington and Lee University where she is an associate professor of classics.  Last year, she was awarded the State of Virginia's outstanding faculty award known as The Rising Star which is given annually to two young faculty members selected from among all of Virginia's colleges and universities.  Rebecca has an impressive list of grants and fellowships to rename that include not only the Kluge Fellowship, but also fellowships from the Archeological Institute of America, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Rome.  Her work has been included in numerous edited volumes published by Routledge Press and others with two Wiley-Blackwell publications on the near horizon.  And her work also has been featured in both academic and popular press journals that stretched from the American Journal of Archeology to the Smithsonian Magazine, Science News, and USA Today.  Now, many of her colleagues may already have been aware of these accomplishments.  But there is something that even her colleagues don't know about her.  So, listen up here because Rebecca is also the ancient history consultant for the game show, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."  [Laughter]  Now, she cannot discuss any of the questions with you, but she can probably tell you a little bit about the experience.  So, please help me welcome her today, Dr. Rebecca Benefiel.
^M00:02:25
[ Applause ]
^M00:02:33
>> Thank you, Mary Lou for that very kind introduction.  And, I do just want to say it's been such a privilege to have a fellowship here at the Library of Congress, to work in this beautiful, beautiful building.  And to meet some fascinating colleagues and friends.  So, thank you all for being here.  I will point out that the room that we're sitting in today is inspired by Pompeian wall painting.  It definitely would not be decorated this way if Pompeii hadn't been rediscovered.  I do have to also say a particular thank you to Victoria Ivanova who is an intern here this spring and who helps me create some of the maps that you'll be seeing today.  She is off on her first archeological excavation herself in Bulgaria.  So, I wish her much luck.  All right, the sight of ancient Pompeii is famous for its wall painting.  Oops, so there.  In fact, more than 90 percent of all the wall painting from the ancient world comes from this one site.  Pompeii offers us an abundance of visual imagery including ornately decorated scenes encompassing different plains and perspectives as we see in the study in the House of Marcus Lucretius Fronto.  Megalographic or large scale compositions like the famous room for which the villa of the mysteries was named.  Mythological vinettes like this depiction of Narcissus falling in love with his own image and whimsical flourishes such as this cupid racing a chariot drawn buy dolphins.  These paintings have only survived to the present day because of the catastrophic destruction of Pompeii.  In the year AD 79, the nearby volcano of Mount Vesuvius which had been dormant for nearly 2,000 years erupted and devastated the surrounding regions.  The volcanic debris that rained down over the course of two days reached as far as Egypt according to the writer Cassius Dio and ended up burying the town of Pompeii to a depth of more than 10 meters.  The city was effectively sealed off, and the friable wall plaster that covered virtually every surface was thereby preserved.  What I am interested in is, what else was on those walls.  Take for example, the House of the Four Styles.  When enters the atrium, turns to the left and finds there atop the brightly colored second style wall painting a message incised or cut into the wall plaster.  Written slightly below eye level, it reads "Welcome to those whom LVP loves."  So, I've created an inversion because it's hard to make it out.  So I've just changed it from the lettering being white to dark so that you can see it a little better.  But it quotes, [foreign language].  LVP are the initials of a Roman male.  Roman females had only two names.  So, they'd only have two initials.  This is not just a message of welcome, though.  It's also an illusion to a popular poem.  A poem that would have easily sprang to mind since it was so well-known and copied throughout the town.  That poem begins, [foreign language] in the singular, "Whoever loves may they be strong or may they farewell."  It continues, "making perish whoever does not know how to love, make you perish twice over whoever forbids love."  It's also clear that deliberate care went into the writing of this message.  These raised dots are interpuncts, a standard element of honor a fake inscriptions on stone.  And here, they appear between every word.  The carefully spaced lettering also includes serifs as well as the downward flourishes of the Q and the N at the beginning and end of the message with which thereby frame it.  And this is one of several messages written on the walls in this house.  So, how do we make sense of this?  The first thing we need to do is recognize that even though ancient wall inscriptions are called graffiti, they are very different from their modern counterparts.  It's only by shedding our modern associations with the term that we can begin to understand what is happening in the first century AD.  And in Pompeii of the first century, something is definitely happening.  What this was, it's rather hard to get a sense of today.  Pompeii still stands, but with every passing year, the wall painting becomes a little less vibrant, a few more walls fall down.  The bare stones and bricks that make up most of the site today do not convey even a hint of what excavators found when they first uncover the streets and buildings, a city full of writing. Building facades emerged like this with scores upon scores of wall inscriptions including everything from political campaign posters, to greetings written to friends, to individual prayers.  But the variety that makes this material so fascinating is also partly what has made it so challenging to study.  Indeed, despite this vast quantity of this archeological material, it has been a read subject of relatively few studies and none at all that attempt to examine the phenomenon as a whole.  This is a shame because Pompeii offers an incomparable look into a vast collection of none literary writing.  Egypt offers us the examples of messages Greco-Roman travelers left on famous sites like the Statue of Memnon.  The fort town of Vindolanda in Britain at the Northern edge of the empire has preserved letters on wax tablets.  But no site in the ancient world offers as detailed in close up a look into entire city full of writing as does Pompeii.  Today, I would like to approach the topic of ancient graffiti in two ways.  First, I offer a broad introduction to this material and to the format and the wide range and content of these inscriptions.  From this, I hope to give you a sense of the character and the nature of ancient graffiti.  In the second part of my talk, I move from a close up to a bird's eye view shifting away from discussion of individual graffiti to consideration of the phenomenon as a whole.  So, to begin, we might start by simply asking, what are these inscriptions like and what do they say?  Pompeii and wall inscriptions can be divided into two broad categories based on their form, those that were painted and those that were incised into the wall plaster.  The painted inscriptions also called dipinti generally contained public information, the kind that might appear on billboards and posters today.  The other category, graffiti, we'll return to in just a moment.  Hundreds of painted inscriptions, for example, consist of campaign posters endorsing candidates for political office.  Advertisements for gladiatorial games were painted as well.
^M00:10:01 These inscriptions were painted in red or black, often high on the wall for better visibility and they contain a more or less standard paleography.  They also tend to employ formulate abbreviations.  So for example, you see here highlighted in blue a compressed abbreviation for OVF.  OVF with how you wrote "I asked that you vote for."  And so, that abbreviation marks something as a campaign poster.  So, "I asked that you vote for" if you look at the longest inscription there.  We have, "I asked that you vote for Gaius Laelius Fuscus he's running for Aedile.  There were two positions that were elected annually.  Do aware, so you see that IIVIR on the top inscription?  That was the chief executive officer and there were two elected for a one year term and there were two Aediles who were in charged of all public works.  And they were elected annually as well also, for a one year term.  So in Pompeii, we have a lot of these campaign posters as you can imagine with this elections taking place annually.  But you can see from these examples that abbreviations are a standard part of these campaign posters.  So DR and DRP are the typical way that you say someone is worthy of serving in the government, worthy of office.  Once you know a few of these abbreviations, it's really pretty easy to figure out almost any campaign poster.  So, you see, we've got "I asked that you vote for Gnaeus Helvius Sabinus for Aedile.  He's worthy of serving in the government.  VB is a very simple way to say that he's a "vir bonus."  He's a good man.  And that's about as far as we go with this.  So, these are campaign posters.  The other category of wall inscriptions consists of those incised or scratched into the wall plaster.  The term graffiti comes from the Italian word graffio or "scratch."  It was originally applied to these writings because they're scratched into the surface.  Only later was that term applied more generally to any writing on a wall as it is usually used today.  This graffiti were written by individuals in contrast to many of the painted inscriptions that were put up by teams of professionals.  Graffiti could be created by anyone on the street with a sharp implement and a desire to write something.  So here, the content is all over the place.  I've given you a couple of moments to look at this slide and maybe if you're sitting close enough, you're going to be able to make out some of the letters on the bottom.  We have H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R.  And in fact, what we have in this room where renovations were clearly taking place because you can see part of the wall is painted and then part of it has this rough plain plaster.  In that rough plain plaster that was put up when the door was inserted here, someone decided to write the entire Latin alphabet.  But we get more than that.  So, we get greetings, beautifully written like this one from Perigueux [phonetic] greetings to Alchemist [phonetic].  And you can see there are flourishes on this scratched in message as well.  What's interesting when we see greetings in Pompeii is that people are not only identifying the person they're addressing, but they're also identifying themselves.  So, it's usually person A named sends greetings to person B.  So, anonymity is not a part of ancient wall inscriptions.  Here, we get a lovely message of "Long Live the Emperor."  We don't know which emperor because Augustus here is the title of emperor.  It's not the name of what we think off as the first emperor of Rome.  But Augustus Filogeter [phonetic], this was--Filogeter was a phrase that's popular in Pompeii.  Its good wishes to so and so.  And you get it addressed to individuals and to groups.  Then, we get clusters of graffiti like this where you can see the largest inscription up there is "Epaphroditus was here with Dalia."  Then a little bit lower [foreign language] is "the beginning of something."  Whoever dot, dot, dot.  And then, what you can probably just get a glimpse of there at the bottom in much smaller letters.  And these really all are small letters.  They're about three-tenths of a centimeter high.  It's really hard to write that small for us.  Anyway, it's a two line poem.  "How I wish I could be a gemstone for not more than an hour so that I could give you press kisses as you sign your letters."
^M00:14:58
[ Pause ]
^M00:15:02
A lot of graffiti have now crumbled, vanished, and are gone.  But sometimes, we still have a line drawing like this to give us a sense of at least what they did look like.  And this also closes into how difficult it was to figure out what day it was in the first century AD, because what we have here are elements of the Roman calendar.  And you can see we've got different columns.  The first column DA is day.  That's a day--that's a column where we have Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.  That's the week that we're all familiar with.  But this seven day week was actually pretty brand new in the middle of the first century AD.  That second column, Nomndeni [phonetic] is a list of all the towns and the region that would be holding a market day in rotation.  And there are eight towns mentioned there, because up until the middle of the first century AD, the Roman calendrical system worked off an eight-day week.  And then, we have at the far right, the days of the month.  The Romans didn't count as we do successively.  They counted backwards.  So, you can see for example, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11 days, that many days until the calends--until the first of the following month.  So, it could very well have been difficult to figure out what day you say we're going to meet, in four days time what day is that.  So, we have things like this.  Since graffiti could be written by anyone, their content is extremely varied.  They include everything from people such as this female slave who's offering prayers, to those cheering for their home town, to insults, using erotic language, biggest, is "maximus," so it could conceivably be "the best," but I'll just leave it there as maximus, to those of gambling winnings and notices for a lost horse.  People also left drawings like this labyrinth with the caption "Hic habitat minotaurus."  "Here lives the minotaur."  Yet interesting as this inscriptions may be, one only get so far by analyzing the content of graffiti.  And that's essentially what has happened in the field.  The campaign posters offer more for analysis since they include the names of various candidates and the different government positions.  Over the past 30 years, those inscriptions have powered five separate studies on local government and the rise and fall of the cities leading families.  Significantly, less has been done with these incised inscriptions.  Only those with erotic content and those consisting of poetry have generated sustained scholarly interest.  Certainly, there's much more than ancient graffiti can tell us.  But only if we move beyond understanding and treating graffiti simply as text.  And instead, recognize their value as social and cultural artifacts.  That means digging deeper than the typewritten page, the only place where most of this writings now exist.  And it means heading to the field where this graffiti were written and where they were seen.  By whom where they created?  What visual impacts did they have?  What relation did they have with their surroundings?  These are questions that cannot be answered by the content of graffiti.  But fortunately, that's not all we have.  Pompeii offers us an architectural and a social landscape.  And by analyzing graffiti in relation to the ancient city, we may come to better understand both the city itself and the writings that were scattered through it.  Let's take for example acclamations to the emperor.  A group of paint and inscriptions all contained a similar phrase [foreign language], so "Hooray for the decisions of the emperor."  Nine examples were collected and compared.  And it was noted that three associated the emperor with a consort.  So, you have here "Hooray for the decisions of the emperor and the empress, with you, both safe and sound, were happy forever."  But as you can see, the emperor and the empress are just being given--are just being named by their tittles Augustus and Augusta.  So, it wasn't until this final example was discovered that the identity of the couple was determined.  So, the Empress Poppaea Augusta happens to have been the second wife of the Emperor Nero.  Emilio Magaldi was the first to propose the now universal view that the decisions are plotted here involved the emperor repealing a ban on gladiatorial games.  This ban had been put in place as a result of a particularly violent riot that had broken out in the amphitheater of Pompeii in the year '59.  This riot is discussed by the historian Tacitus in his [inaudible] and is the subject of a large-scale fresco from a house in Pompeii.
^M00:20:02 So in this fresco, you see the amphitheater of Pompeii which is the main building there.  And inside the amphitheater, there are people in the sand fighting that you see also spilling outside of the building.  There are people throwing things, attacking each other, falling on the ground.  And so, the riot seems to have taken over at least that corner of the city.  Thus, this group of nine wall inscriptions contributes to our knowledge of the history of Pompeii.  But what if we look beyond the text and consider the location or the appearance of these inscriptions?  All nine were painted not incised.  These suggest that they were not spontaneous expressions.  It wasn't simply that various Pompeiians decided to thank the emperor in this way.  Someone had to pay for the equipment and the workers to create them.  Mapping out the locations tells us even more.  These acclamations are not clustered in a particular area such as that around the amphitheater.  Instead, they're scattered across the width and length of the city.  More than that, they're often placed at intersections where they might be visible to traffic coming from multiple directions.  All together, it would seem difficult to traverse the city without coming across at least one of these acclamations.  And this, I would suggest may have been the point.  If we examine only the text of the inscriptions, we find multiple variations and we can determine the identity of the ruler.  If however, we consider the physical format along with the heavily traffic conspicuous locations where they were posted, we have the repetition of a particular message in its systematic diffusion through town.  These points to a program to a civic effort, one that was designed to fill the city with prominent displays to thank and honor the emperor.  Historical accounts may clear that Nero passed through the Bay of Naples on his travels to Greece.  Another graffito in town refers to a personal visit Nero made to Pompeii like these announcements have been posted specifically so that they would greet the emperor during his visit.  And I actually wrote this up a couple of years ago, but it's funny coming back and looking at it in the year of the queens jubilee.  It made a bigger impact on me.  In any case, this sort of approach takes us beyond considering which emperor intervenes in civic affairs.  And it prompts us to consider the matter from the perspective of the city's inhabitants, those who were responsible for creating this statements and why and how they did so?  So, how can we ask those type of questions of the whole body of material?  I proposed that we widen our perspective so that instead of examining individual graffiti, we consider the collective whole.  How prevalent were graffiti in this town?  Or to put it in other way, how often might a resident encounter this type of writing?  In order to tackle this question, I offer combined approach via three different perspectives.  First, I began by examining the Corpus of Graffiti and the city as a whole.  I then move to the mid-range scaling down to the city block to consider where graffiti appeared and where they did not.  Finally, I analyzed the individual building and explore graffiti within their archeological context.  The immediate stumbling block for assessing the overall phenomenon of ancient graffiti is that at present, we don't even know how many examples there are.  This is a result of the fact that this material was collected and documented well before the age of computers.  And although different epigraphic corpora have begun to be digitized over the past decade, the Pompeiian material is on a vastly different scale at least five times and as many as 30 times the size of other projects.  My first step was therefore to tackle this deceptively simple question.  The Pompeiian wall inscriptions discovered through the 1950s are compiled in a Corpus of Latin inscriptions.  A large multi volume project begun in the mid19th century whose aim was to document all Latin inscriptions from the ancient world.  So, they cover North Africa, and Syria, everything that was at one point apart of the Roman Empire.  And CIL is divided up geographically.  So, volume 4 is dedicated to Pompeii and the region around Vesuvius.  The page from it looks like this.  The advantages of this work are, there's one location where all the examples are catalogued.  And each inscription is assigned its own number.  So, you see, in here we have 1474 to 1481, more or less.  So, that would seem to be helpful.  The challenges of working with CIL, however, are that entries take forms such as this.  So you see, 1478, 1478A, 1481, 1481A.  What's happening there is that they're collecting, documenting, and laying out all the inscriptions.  Then someone goes back and finds another inscription.  They have to be inserted.  We don't have computers yet and so, they're inserted in different ways.  Also, if you look at 1474 and what we have is a graffito that gives the name Spiculous and gives the name Optimatus.  And below in small cursive, you have noted that there's a depiction.  This is how they talk about drawings of a gladiator standing and then a gladiator lying on the ground.  Then, you have type script in the middle that tells you--just to the write of this, there's another gladiator, another pair of gladiators.  And then 1474A tells you, here's some writing and here are drawings of horses.  So you got kind of a lot of compression.  And so, even though we have these nice Arabic numerals, it doesn't give us a sense of how many we're actually working with.  Another challenge is that, CIL, very happily does give us some information about where this graffiti were located.  But it was keyed to an earlier plan of the city.  So, the graffiti in CIL are all referenced to this map from 1867 when excavations were going on and the houses were being numbered successively.  What ends up happening is that, Pompeii is just huge and that system gets to be too unwieldy.  So, in the early 1900s Guiseppe Fiorelli comes up with this idea of dividing the city into nine regions.  And each region is then divided into the individual city blocks.  And then, each city block is numbered with each doorway onto it.  So, any address of location in Pompeii is now given by the series of three numbers.  All right, so, I--so this winter, I designed a database that is simple but flexible enough to allow for a different types of analysis especially queries into the geographic distribution and spatial analysis of graffiti.  So, how many into graffiti are there in this medium-sized Roman town of about 150 acres?  Nearby sites, we have Boscoreale and Boscotrecase together about 50 examples.  We have one from Naples, 248 from nearby Herculaneum.  We have villas just outside of Pompeii.  Discovery, since 1956 account for another 200 examples.  There are 815 drawings from Pompeii.  And CIL gives us another 5,800 individual Graffiti which brings our total just in Pompeii not counting the sites outside of it to almost 7,000.  To set this in perspective, this means in a town of 10,000 residents, we have two graffiti for every three men, women and children.  This makes clear that writing on the wall was not a limited activity.  We're encountering a significant phenomenon.  The real advantage of digitizing this corpus however is the fact that it allows us to conduct analysis on this material.  So for example, if we look at public versus private spaces, we see that only a minority of graffiti appear on building exteriors instead, at a rate of more than two to one graffiti occur inside buildings.  In here are excerpted open air public buildings that's not really fall into one or the other.  So, where are graffiti found?  Are there concentrations in certain areas of the city?  Do they appear in some types of buildings but not others?  Here, the city of Pompeii is too large to illustrate patterns that are intelligible and so, I've limited our search to the insula or city block.  Here, the three examples that I've selected from different areas of the city.  So, to begin with, Region IX Insula 3, it's a "City block of mixed zone development."  It's situated near the middle of the city and was boarded on one side by the Vista Viana [phonetic], the road that run north south through the length of town.  Just north of this where the central baths, a new bath complex that was still under construction when the city was overwhelmed by Vesuvius.
^M00:30:04 The color coded Yeshivat plan illustrates that this insula contained a mix of workshops for industrial spaces, shown in purple, retail establishments or shops in yellow, a property involving hospitality in blue, this could be a brothel and in or a place that serve food.  And finally, in beige, a couple of houses.  33 graffiti were found in this insula.  They appear in four different buildings: A workshop at 932, a shop at 937, and two houses, 935 and 9325.  Thus, we find graffiti--and here we go, in one of the many shops, in one of the four workshops, and then two of the three houses in this block.  And if we look at the absolute numbers of graffiti, these houses deserve further attention.  For almost 70 percent of all the graffiti here, up here in them, it therefore seems prudent to look more closely at residential areas of the city.  One place to turn is the northwestern section.  Insula 15 in Regio VI was excavated between 1895 and 1898 and is primarily residential, but as it occurs throughout Pompeii zoning is mixed.  The very northern most portion in blue is located just inside one of the city gates and it offers services for visitors and drink Pompeii, two, thermopolia which served hot food and a large set of tables.  There are only two industrial spaces in this insula, a small scale workshop, and a two room laundry establishment, and retail space is limited.  The rest of the block consist of houses including the well known house of the Vettii which occupies the southern portion of the insula.  The overall number of graffiti in this block towards our previous location, in contrast to the 33 examples in 93, this block features nearly five times as many with a total of 140.  The number of locations also--with graffiti also differs in contrast of four buildings.  Here, we find 11 different properties.  This means nearly three quarters of the buildings in this block featured inscribed messages.  And if we mapped out which locations those are, in gray, it becomes remarkably clear that very little space was characterized as graffiti free.  In fact, when we look at this map, the questions ask might not be, "Why do we find graffiti where we do?"  But rather, "Why do we not find graffiti in those four locations?"  So, what are these four locations?  Well we have these two room, laundry establishments, and we have one room shop.  And as we've seen elsewhere, workshops and shops do not uniformly have graffiti in them.  Then, we have one of our thermopolia which served hot food.  The thermopolium just to the north of it did have graffiti.  This one did not, but we can tell that it was under going renovations at the time of the eruption because a large--there are large piles of building material, chalk and line.  So, it seems that that building was not in use.  Finally, we have a large house about not with--not much, about which not much is known.  But this house at 61523 is the only house in the block that does not contain any graffiti.  Like contrast, the other ten houses here.  All featured at least some messages written on their walls.  The extent of writing in these homes varies from a minimum of three examples to a maximum of 14.  The number in each residence does not correspond to the size of the house nor is there a qualitative difference in the content of graffiti between houses of different sizes and levels of decoration.  For example, the smallest house in the insula had 659 held a total of nine graffiti which included two poems and a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid.  We might ask then, which was the more typical scenario?  Are graffiti generally found in some buildings but not others?  Or are they found in the majority of buildings?  Let's sample just one more area, the southern part of town where Region VIII, Insula 5 lies between the Forum and the theater district.  On the northern side of this block runs the Via dell'Abbondanza, the major road that stretches the length of town from the port out towards the Amphitheatre.  Located along this major road, and as close to the Forum as this block was, it must have been important real estate, a fact that's born out by the amount of square footage given over towards retail along that roads.  So, if you look at all of those yellow spaces.  The anterior portion was occupied by residential buildings and a large open area in green operated as a garden restaurant.  And here, in Insula 5 or Regio VIII, the same trends continue.  Although, no graffiti are recorded in the retail or industrial spaces of the insula, the other seven properties, the large majority of these block do feature writing.  These are the garden restaurant in all six houses.  What emerges from this analysis is that graffiti were regularly found within private residences.  Not only were they found inside houses in Pompeii, they where found in the majority of houses.  Indeed, it was far more comment for a house to have writings on his walls than for it to be without.  Discussions of Pompeiian domestic space have generally mentioned graffiti sporadically.  In certain cases, the existence of graffiti has been used to suggest that a property was abandoned.  Analysis of even just a few blocks as we've seen here shows that this is to misunderstand the evidence.  Ancient graffiti are not found in only a few dilapidated structures, therefore--they're found throughout the city, outside and within properties especially homes.  And so I'm panning out just a little bit to show you Region VII which covers essentially central Pompeii on both sides of the Forum to give you a sense that this really does happen, city block after city block, after city block.  And in fact, there's only one insula here where there's a single location with graffiti.  And there, I wonder about the documentation that took place.  But you can see, it's pretty prevalent elsewhere.  So, it should also be underscored that the number of graffiti we have recorded is only a minimum and maybe a portion of what was originally extent.  With this fading of wall plaster, ancient graffiti can be difficult to detect and multiple visits under different lighting conditions are necessary.  It may be the case that some shops, for example, decorated as they were with simple plain, white plaster did not attract the attention of excavators, but may have once held some writings on their walls.  So, we do see in some retail spaces that it seems the shopkeeper was keeping track of people's accounts with names and series of Roman numerals.  But it's not the sort of thing that really jumps of at the wall--jumps off the wall at you.  We cannot argue from silence or draw solid conclusions about the absence of wall inscriptions, but what we can say with certainty is that we're, is that there were at least this many wall inscriptions in a particular building or a particular insula and there may have been even more.  Finally, let's explore the presence of graffiti within the Pompeiian house.  The House of Maius Castricius serves as priming sample because it was excavated as recently as the 1960s and the roof was installed [inaudible].  So, almost all the graffiti discovered there are still intact and legible.  Occupying more than 16,000 square feet and standing four stories tall, this residence rates among the 20 largest houses in Pompeii.  It also had one of the best locations in town standing atop the walls at the western edge of the city where residents would have enjoyed a fabulous view over the Bay of Naples.  So, the shoreline would have come up to the garden level there.  You've got a garden then you've got a second floor with a large private back complex.  Double peristyles on the third floor, and at least the fourth floor.  This house also had 71 graffiti within it.  In this house as elsewhere, it becomes clear that there are three key characteristics of graffiti in domestic spaces.  First, they're centrally located.  Graffiti are not hidden in remote or out of the way places but appear in the core spaces of the home.  They're at the center, not the periphery.  The three most heavily inscribed spaces in this house are all locations where people would frequently be passing the vestibule into the house, the central peristyle and the stairway connecting the central peristyle with live living space on the fourth floor.
^M00:39:58 Not only are they central spaces architecturally speaking, but these are spaces that are central to the social life of the residence.  In particular, where we have these black circles, the largest concentration of graffiti occurs at the entrance to room seven, the most important room of the house where visitors and clients would have been received.  The suite of rooms seven and eight is marked as important, both through its architecture and decoration.  It's aligned on axis with the entrance and the low wall that surrounds the peristyle includes only one break which serves to guide the gaze of the viewer directly here.  The decoration included a complicated mosaic pattern on the floor.  And this fresco of a heavily [inaudible] female figure holding a golden scepter, wearing a golden crown, and looking out into the peristyle, and she's wearing so much jewelry.  She's got earrings.  She's got necklaces that include pearl necklace and world necklace, gold necklace.  She's wearing these beautiful purple flowing robes that it's thought that this may have been Pompeiian Venus who was the guardian deity of the town.  The second characteristic of graffiti in domestic spaces is intertwined with the location in this--with these high prestige locations.  And that is, ancient graffiti are almost uniformly discrete.  So, outside the entrance to room seven, there are 18 graffiti.  But given this quantity, it's remarkable to see how unobtrusive they are.  So, the example we have here that I've shown you is there's a spiral form candelabra.  And it's very thin spiral form candelabra.  And if you can see directly next to it, not across, not across any figural imagery, but next to it, we have this very tiny letters that say [foreign language], "Farewell or bye or take care, Romula."  It's written in small letters as or most of this.  Sorry, as are all of these graffiti, most of which are smaller than one centimeter tall.  This small size produces an understated present and allows the text to blend more or less into their surroundings.  In fact, if you're standing more than two and a half feet away, you can't see them at all.  We can contrast this graffiti outside of room seven with those in the vestibule which you see here on the right hand side.  Their graffiti liberated by more ample space and the lack of decoration to be avoided are to written in larger letters averaging three centimeters in height.  So, they're much larger, but they're still very small.  Thirdly, I am going to apply the adjective of respectful.  There is a certain respect that's going on even when we have clusters of messages here.  So, graffiti are respectful of the existing wall decoration and of other messages.  So in the stairwell, we have this panel that has yielded 11 separate graffiti.  Many of which have multiple lines.  But you can see they're arranged more or less vertically into two columns and none of them overlap each other.  If you look at the second example in column one, "suave mari magno," you can see this nice flourishes which are taking up all of the space between the two poems above and below it.  But there--it's being fit into there very carefully.  This particular clustering holds some of the most popular epigrams from Pompeii, but there's also a high level of originality.  So, we have a poem that begins--we came here desiring.  And here, we don't have the second line that appears everywhere else through Pompeii but we have a modification, "that girl holds back our feet."  And the other poem that we have here, "whoever loves may she farewell," [foreign language] is that poem that I mentioned at the beginning.  Here, it's not standing on its own as it does in most other places in Pompeii, but it's being added as this concluding flourish to another poem, "beautiful girl you stick the kisses that I stole" which is not found anywhere else in town.  But it isn't another elegiac couplet.  So, this wall in the House of Maius Castricius provides one particularly literate example of graffiti inspiring and creating a conversation with each other.  Let's then return to the House of the Four Styles where we first begin and consider again that message of welcome.  This graffito shares the characteristics of those founds and the House of Maius Castricius.  It's in a central space located in the largest and most visible space of the atrium.  It's nevertheless discrete, measuring only one and a half to two centimeters high.  And as to the other graffiti in this house, this one shows a certain level of respect.  It's not written across any of the colored panels, but it's contained within it.  The series and the care that went into inscribing these messages suggest that the intention of the writer was not to deface, instead, we may understand it best by taking in it face value.  I carefully created poetically inspired message of welcome to those who enter.  The presence of ancient graffiti then does not suggest that the House of Four Styles was abandoned, or even out of the ordinary.  Indeed, the writings on its walls puts this house in the same category with most others on the block and with most others in the town.  So, how often would a Pompeiian encounter graffiti?  Anytime you stepped outside, certainly.  Writing inside houses is another matter.  The small size and discrete nature of these messages suggest that one could pass through a house without noticing them.  But for those individuals who could read and who knew where to look, there might be messages to entertain, challenge, or welcome the viewer.  These different perspectives each contribute to a fuller understanding of the epigraphic landscape in Pompeii.  Not only was official information posted, but significant numbers of the population took an interest in creating text themselves.  From the Pompeiians who wanted to show off their talents at quoting or composing poetry, or those who wrote greetings to friends, to the businessman who kept track of clients accounts, to the city councilmen who wanted to make sure the place was ready for an important visit.  People of all classes and motivations were responsible for creating text and contributing to the vast amount of writing in this ancient city.  From the individual house to the city block, to the streets throughout town, writing was everywhere.  It was both consumed and produced by inhabitants a part of their daily life and a part of the urban fabric of first century Pompeii.  Thank you.
^M00:47:12
[ Applause ]
^M00:47:20
Sorry, Mary Lou?
>> Take the questions.
>> Sure.  I'm happy to--
[Inaudible Remark]
Yeah.  I'm happy to take questions.  Hi, Peter.
>> So, what I'm trying to go study about this series of step is to [inaudible].  I mean, in literacy, it might seems to be enormous this thing.  And I'm wondering what stratification and confidence of these descriptions as you correlate as such things as social status, the stratification of society, and of the relatively speaking through this particular part of town--
>> Yeah, that is the big question.  And it's something that people have really shied away from saying, "Well, there are this graffiti in Pompeii, but they're all short.  They don't really say much."  And that's why one of the main things I wanted to do is find out, you know, what sort of numbers are we talking about here?  When we have 7,000 individual writings, I think we can't ignore that this body of writing does suggest that more than a few people were literate in Pompeii.  That they knew how to write their names, absolutely.  What I found so far is that this phenomenon seems to be an urban behavior.  So, even in the villas outside, you still have writing on the walls, but in the country villas where you probably don't have the same sort of business transactions happening on a daily basis where people coming and going, there, you have graffiti that are more functional.  You got a lot of numbers with people keeping track of things and you get more drawings.  In Pompeii, I think the urban context meant that larger numbers of people were using writing.  And so, we have writing on the walls.  We also have a good amount of writing on merchandise.  So, the empress that carried oil and wine and fish sauce, those popular, are often labeled with either the contents or the name of the location where it's heading to.  But the literacy question is a big one and it's why I wanted to go about my research kind of systematically to layout.  This is where we find it.  It's not just a sporadic occurrence.  It's in all of these locations.
^M00:50:03 As far as who is participating, I think it's really surprising because as I said, people are identifying themselves.  And so, we have males and females.  And certainly, females to a lesser extent.  But we've got hundreds of female names who are writing greetings to their friends or like methai, we have a female slave who's appealing to Pompeiian Venus.  And it's a beautiful prayer that she's written.  But we do have slaves.  We have inhabitants of houses saying, "Ramula, in fact, Ramula lives here with her boyfriend."  And we have visitors to the houses.  So, we have the bedroom attendant of the emperor who gives greetings to the most holy colony of Pompeii in one house.  And I think that's all I'm going to say about literacy for right now.  But thanks, thanks for the right question, yes?
^M00:50:58
[ Inaudible Question ]
^M00:51:14
There is one formal inscription where someone is identifying himself as a priest of Nero and that particular phrase has been scratched out.  And maybe it is interesting that these acclamations that I talked about, none of them named Nero specifically.  But Nero is named elsewhere in about 50 other inscriptions.  And if you think about the fact that he'd fallen from Greece and been killed more than 10 years earlier, those messages stayed up there.  But yeah, the Pompeians were a pretty positive group.  And I think maybe it's because there is this element of pride and being able to write, and so identify your self that way.  And if you're proud of this fact, then at this point, they're communicating possibly to the others in their community.  Yes?
^M00:52:16
[ Inaudible Question ]
^M00:52:31
Yeah.  Well, one of my questions at one point was, "Oh my gosh, like, how does everyone have something short to write with?"  Because sure, some people were writing in wax tablets and you had a metal stylus that you could carve into the wax which would be perfect for just writing on the plaster of the walls.  But then, someone points at me, "Well look, all the women are wearing this broaches that have, you know, essentially safety pins."  And that would be perfect to use as well.  Who is doing this?  Well, one of--when I was trying to get my mind wrapped around the fact that these are showing up in houses, I was looking at the houses where there are the greatest number of graffiti, like the House of Maius Castricius.  And in those houses, most of them are the largest most beautifully decorated houses.  And they would have had domestic staff who would have been present.  And if it was really a bad thing to write on the wall, I think they could have moved people along.  But what's interesting is that kind of both in houses and perhaps more passingly in public buildings where people would have to be standing to put these messages up where the messages are, they are in the most visible locations of the entire building.  So, if you're standing in the peristyle, anyone in any of the other rooms of the house can see you.  And especially, those important rooms that are on access with the entrance, the doors to Roman houses would always be open.  So, anyone passing by could look in and see you doing that.  So, in terms of who's doing it, we do get people identifying themselves both as residents and as visitors.  And Pompeian houses where also places where people did conduct business.  They had clients coming to their house to meet with them.  So, I think it's really a mix.  But what's interesting is that--usually, inside the houses, the writing is so small that it suggests to me that its people who are very comfortable with writing, who are doing it on a daily basis.  The writing that sometimes in the entrance ways or outside of houses tends to be larger and less carefully managed.  And I think that maybe shows people who are not as comfortable with writing, but still wanted to participate, if that's okay.  Yes.
^M00:55:17
[ Inaudible Question ]
^M00:55:30
Okay, excellent questions.  So, do we have any temporal information?  Happily, yes, but I have to new ones at this.  So, the basilica which is the lockwards, a major public building which actually with a multifunctional space, but a very large building on the Forum has a graffito that says, "So and so was here on this date, in the year when this person and person were consols," which is the year 80 BC."  And that graffito has been taken as genuine and has been used to date that building.  So, I started off and I looked at the basilica and found that we have about--well, we have four that four messages there that predate Augustus.  And then under the emperor Augustus, we have this kind of group of about 20 graffiti where people are writing back and forth to each other and the slaves are playing a ball game.  And then, there's not much else that gives any indication that it would be earlier than say '50, '80, so the last 30 years--last generation there.  So at least in the basilica, we have kind of a timeline.  Most other places, we don't have a timeline, but in certain sporadic locations, you'll get plaster peeling of the wall and you can see that there are graffiti below as well.  So, in the House of Maius Castricius, there is one room where the plaster has come off the wall.  And what's interesting is below, there are graffiti in Greek.  On the final surface of this house, everything is in Latin.  But in general, it's been assumed that graffiti do belong to kind of the last generation of Pompeii.  And some of the painted inscriptions, we have a few that have lasted from the early part of the century.  But I would say about 75percent, probably, date to the end.
^M00:57:59
[ Inaudible Question ]
^M00:58:03
Yes.  Yeah.
[Inaudible Question]
I definitely think that what we have in this city is the blossoming of the epigraphic habit.  And I think that that really kind of what Augustus is doing with putting everything, monumentalizing everything.  So, calendar is in lists of local magistrate.  I think text starts to just beam everywhere, yeah.  And then I think, you know, when you're walking down the street and are kind of being bombarded, I think that maybe that's what's helping it spill over into the domestic sphere as well, yeah.  Thank you.  Thank you.
^M00:58:45
[ Inaudible Question ]
^M00:58:53
Yeah.
[Inaudible Question]
Yeah.  [Laughter]  Thanks.
^M00:58:59
[ Inaudible Question ]
^M00:59:26
Yeah.  I am hoping--I'm hoping that by putting some of my work and my method out there that people will recognize, "Wow, this is really a fertile material that we really can do something with it."  And I'm hoping that will draw more people to work on Pompeii.  But yes, definitely, that's the aim, that kind of, you know, once I've processed all of the locations and all of CIL, it give us hopefully, you know, decades of material to work with.  So, that's the hope.  I'm glad that you got the sense.  Thanks.  That is exciting stuff to work with.
>> Thanks Rebecca, very much.
>> Thank you Mary Lou.
>> I'm sure there's more questions that you could fill.
>> Thank you.
[Applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov.