Poesía en las paredeslas inscripciones literarias de Pompeya

Abstract

Over 10,000 inscriptions and graffiti registered in the walls of Pompeii have been preserved to date. They have been compiled and edited in Vol. IV of the "Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum". The importance these documents display lies on the way they have been transmitted, for they have reached us straightforwardly, i.e. with no direct intervention of any intermediary whosoever from Pompeian hands to the present-day reader. It is fair to say, then, that Pompeian inscriptions and graffiti bestow an unparalleled lookout to the culture and customs of this Roman city, thus providing a tmi9ue standpoint from which different areas of its inhabitants' life can be assessed. However, it seems paradoxical, to say the least, that these texts continue being objects of interest for historians, archaeologists and philologists alike, provided they were meant to be short-lived and their authors showed no purpose of durability for their creations, but rather produced them as expressions of momentary impulses, very much like any present-day ad poster or street graffiti. Literary graffiti, written in Greek, Oscan and Latin, must rank among any other classical literary sources, akin to ancient papyri and manuscripts. It is through these inscriptions that present-day readers and commentators alike can peek into the cultural world of a provincial city whose very cultural milieu, not unlike the rest of the cities of the Empire, had hailed the spell of Greek culture and customs. It is true that the cultural level of Pompeii was far less cultivated than, say. Herculaneum, whose patrician population was directly exposed to the Hellenistic influence of the Neapolitan area; nevertheless, it should be no wonder that fragments from Homer or the Alexandrian poets appeared in the walls of Pompeii, reproduced the way its citizens remembered them, sometimes betraying playful purposes. Among the great variety of graffiti written in Greek -albeit sometimes Spelled out in Latin characters- Homeric verses stand out promptly; since Homer's work was studied in all over the Empire. Both "The Iliad and "The Odyssey" were recorded in the collective memory of the Pompeiians, for the sake of expressing their feelings, or just for artistic purposes. Homer can, too, be traced all along the imagery of the city, as is the case of the frescoes embellishing The House of the Tragic Poet, whose walls feature several scenes from the cycle of "The Iliad". Homer was not the most heartfelt poet of Pompeiians, as opposed to Virgil or any other Latin author, whose works arguably ranked among the most esteemed when expressing their own views on an art education. "The Aeneid" that is the foundation text of the fatherland, was the chief favorite text to feature in the murals and inscriptions of the city. Most notably, the popular "arma virumque cano", ranked among the favorites as is shown over ten times overall. And yet, the poet from Mantua is not the only example of vernacular poets featured in Pompeii. Its walls also boast distiches by Propertius and Ovid, whose lines, more often than not, betrayed double-meanings and sexual innuendos.