Out: The Roman Empire. In: Roman Graffiti
A few weeks ago, we were watching Saturday Night Live when they did a skit hinged on the joke that guys spend all day contemplating the Roman Empire. Katie was really confused and — in what has apparently become a common scene — she turned to me and asked how often I think about the Roman Empire. And, well, like a lot of other guys, I think about ancient Rome a lot. And, like a lot of other spouses, she was kind of blown away.
It’s stupid, she said. Why in the hell would you waste so much time thinking about the Roman Empire? My defense was, well, it’s not just the Empire. I think about the Republic just as much as the Empire. And I don’t think about gladiators that much; I don’t waste afternoons daydreaming about Caligula or Caesar or Marcus Aurelius or Nero. But, oh at least twice a day, I daydream about what life was like along Hadrian’s Wall or in Jerusalem during the Bar Kokhba Revolt. And, more than anything else, I think about ancient Roman graffiti a lot. Like, a lot.
It’s an elucidating quirk of history that so much ancient Roman graffiti has survived while things like the Library of Alexandria and almost all of the Greek plays have been swallowed by time. We only have seven plays by Sophocles but we’ve discovered something like 11,000 pieces of graffiti in ancient Pompeii. Little bits of daily life and I think about them all the time. About how life among human beings hasn’t changed.
My favorite are the political graffiti, two-thousand-year-old astroturfing like this: “the late drinkers ask you to elect Marcus Cerrinius Vatia as eadile.” (Eadile was an elected post in Ancient Rome)
Also, written on the wall of a bar, “if you’re going to fight, get out!” Now isn’t that pleasant to think about — not a smartphone in sight, just men in tunics getting drunk and fighting bars, enjoying the moment.
Sure you could read the ancient Roman historians. You could read Josephus and Pliny the Elder and Suetonius but those guys invariably give you cleaned-up versions of history, they knew they were writing for posterity. Their histories are full of shiny generals and emperors. But life has never happened on those grand scales, even in Rome. Life has always happened in little instances, like the guy in Pompeii who scrawled on the wall of a tavern “I screwed the barmaid here.”
It might be mentally elevating to muse about the Punic Wars but, in Ancient Rome you were far more likely to encounter a penis drawing than a triumph parade. In fact, history is filled with penis graffiti! They found ancient phallic graffiti in Rome, in Pompeii. In Smyrna there’s an example of a penis graffiti over an earlier graffiti of a man’s face. You walk into any high school bathroom and you’ll still see the stall walls scrawled with penises. Some things (humans) never change. We’re still having wars and drawing penises on walls.
Everybody wants to pretend they would have been a gladiator or an emperor in ancient Rome, but almost certainly, we wouldn’t have been anything so exceptional. Just like we’re not generals or NFL players now. We would have been plebs, probably pretty similar to the plebs in the show, trying to scrape by.
And sure, if you must put on your professor hat, there is a historical importance to the graffiti. For example, we know that the pyramids were built in gangs of men because the ancient labor forces graffitied their gang-names — “the Drunkards of Menkaure” or “Friends of Khufu Gang” — on the pyramid stones.
It’s even possible that the first depiction of Jesus Christ might be this 2nd Century Roman graffiti depicting a man standing beside a crucified donkey with the caption “Alexamos worships his god.” That’s a hell of a blasphemy footnote in history. And there’s another reason I can’t stop daydreaming about ancient graffiti — it acts as a footnote in history. It illustrates the way people, in history, viewed history.
One ancient Roman visiting the Valley of the Kings in Egypt wrote “I visited and did not like anything except the sarcophogus. I can not read the hieroglyphs.” When Flaubert visited Rome, he reportedly complained about “the number of imbeciles' names written everywhere.” But among those imbeciles was Lord Byron, who etched his name into a Greek temple.
Maybe I’m just the sort of person who notices writing on walls. If I had to boil this fascination down to anything, any one reason that I think so constantly of ancient Rome, it’s that — human beings may have shot forward on the evolutionary ladder by way of the industrial revolution and the cold war, but really, we’re not any more advanced than the Romans. At our best, we’re still just mammals writing on walls.