5.4 Graffiti from Pompeii — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read Latin written by people with no literary training, spelling and all. Recognise the four or five sound changes that the misspellings record. Read an editor's brackets: expansions, restorations and line breaks. Say why a misspelling is evidence rather than an error. Prerequisites : lesson 5.3 — the mottoes, which were the most correct Latin in the course; this is the least. Everything else in this volume was composed, copied and corrected. This was scratched on a wall with a nail, by somebody who was not going to read it again, and then buried by a volcano in 79. About eleven thousand pieces of writing survive from Pompeii, which is more ordinary Latin than from anywhere else in the world, and it is ordinary in every sense: shopping lists, election notices, love messages, complaints about the wine, and an argument conducted in three hands on the same piece of plaster. The spelling is wrong throughout, and that is why the material is valuable. Read the separate document first and let the misspellings alone; the section after the table explains what each of them is evidence of. About this text What survives and why. Pompeii was buried in ash rather than burned, so its plastered walls kept what was written on them. The graffiti were catalogued in the fourth volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum , published in 1871, and they are cited by that volume and number — the CIL IV in the first column. What is in this selection. An election notice, a shopping list, four greetings and messages, two complaints, a love triangle, and a note of a birth. Twelve items and about a hundred and fifty words. What is not. A large share of the surviving material is obscene and a good deal of the rest is abuse. None of it is here. That is a choice about what belongs in a language course rather than a claim about Pompeii, and the references say so plainly. The brackets. Round brackets expand an abbreviation the writer used; square brackets restore letters that have been lost from the wall; vertical bars mark where a line ended, and doubled bars a larger break. All four are the editor's and none of them was on the plaster. Reading them is a skill in itself and it is the same in every edition of every inscription you will ever meet. Word by word Twelve graffiti with a note on each. Read the Latin, then the note, and only then the translation. CIL Latin What is happening CIL IV 172 C. Cuspium Pansam aed(ilem) d(ignum) r(ei) [p](ublicae) o(ro) v(os) f(aciatis), Saturninus cum discentes rog(ant). An election notice, painted rather than scratched, and the commonest kind of writing on a Pompeian wall. Almost every word is abbreviated; the brackets are the editor's expansions. The last three letters spell out a formula so worn that it is almost a single word. CIL IV 396 ligna, | procu IV | pan. H VI | coliclo II, || be(tam) I, | sina(pi) I, | men(tam) I, | sale I. A household shopping list with prices in asses. Not a sentence and not meant to be one. CIL IV 510 pupa que bela is, tibi | me misit qui tuus est: vale. A message carried by a third person. Note the spelling of the relative — the classical form has a different vowel — and of the adjective, where a consonant has dropped out. CIL IV 523 fullo Cresces coponi sal. Nine letters, and the last word is an abbreviation of the greeting formula. A fuller cleaned cloth; his workshop is one of the best preserved buildings in the town. CIL IV 525 Campani salvete viri. Aulus Olo suo salutem. Two sentences of pure formula, and a plural imperative of the ordinary greeting verb. CIL IV 569 benivolentibus feliceter Two words. The dative plural is a participle used as a noun, and the adverb has an ending that classical Latin would spell differently. CIL IV 598 qui hoc leget, nuncquam posteac aliid legat. (altera manu) nunquam sit salvos qui supra scripsit, (altera manu) vere dicis. Three hands in one graffito: somebody wrote the first sentence, somebody answered, and a third agreed with the answer. This is the oldest surviving comment thread. CIL IV 631 da fridam pusillum. Four words, and one of them is not Latin as a grammarian would write it: the adjective has lost a syllable. Somebody wrote this in a bar. CIL IV 636 talia te fallant utinam medacia, copo: | tu vedes acuam et bibes ipse merum. A complaint about watered wine, with a subjunctive of wish and the particle that marks it. Two of the words are misspelled and both misspellings are the ordinary ones. CIL IV 1023 Secundus Prime suae ubique isse salute. | rogo, domina, ut me ames. A love message with a noun clause after the verb of asking. The greeting noun has lost its final consonant, as it does constantly on these walls. CIL IV 1026 Sucessus textor amat coponiaes ancilla, | nomine Hiredem, quae quidem illum | non curat, sed ille rogat, illa comiseretur. | scribit rivalis, vale. | invidiose, quia rumperes, sedare noli formonsiorem | et qui est homo prevessimus et bellus. The longest and the best: a declaration of love written by a rival, and an answer scratched underneath by somebody else. Six of its words are misspelled, one of them twice, and the syntax of the last sentence has defeated every editor who has tried it. CIL IV 1128 X k. Febrarias Ursa peperit diem Iovis. A note of a birth, dated in the Roman way — counting backwards from a fixed point of the month — and with the day of the week named after Jupiter, which is the Thursday of 4.12. The frame of the sentence The spelling in these twelve is wrong in about twenty places, and the errors are not random. They fall into five groups, each of which is a sound change that was happening in spoken Latin in the first century and that would go on to produce the Romance languages. Final consonants dropping. salute for salutem . The final m had been weak for centuries and was probably not pronounced at all in ordinary speech. Every Romance language has lost it, and the accusative case went with it. Vowels merging. bela for bella , vedes fo