Fun Times with (Roman) Epigraphy.

[quinara]

Oh, the Romans... Sometimes Always they amuse me so. As part of trying to work out whether or not we can say whether there was any sort of moral/sexual geographical zoning in Pompeii (say whether there was a 'red light district', to quote an exam paper - I say not in literal terms, but in ideology/perception/phenomenology yes, definitely) I've been reading the records of inscriptions around the town - ie. the dirty graffiti, basically.

Most of it isn't that interesting - 'Jimmy fucked Sheila', 'I had a fuck here', 'Terry sucks cock', 'Alice will fuck you for X amount of cash' etc. (No, these are not their real names.) But every now and then some randomer comes up with a piece of sheer brilliance, such as this one (CIL IV 1882, for anyone who knows what the heck that means) from the basilica (big posh building in the forum where meetings and stuff are held):

ACCENSVM QVI PEDICAT VRIT MENTVLAM

which basically means

HE WHO FUCKS ARSE BURNS HIS COCK AS KINDLING

I mean, why would you write that on a building? I just don't understand! You can tie it into the issues and anxieties surrounding penetration, which was a Big Deal in the Roman (Stoic) psyche, because you didn't just get penetrated in nasty sex (in which, oh noes, even if you're doing it right you can't penetrate somebody without them being being penetrated - and that means you're having good sex right next to someone begetting nastiness, and HOW DO YOU AVOID TEH SHAME??), but by stabby feelings of hunger and disease and overwhelming emotion (*cough* Cupid shoots arrows *cough*). So the fear of getting burnt up when you as Mr. Man are doing pretty well is perhaps not such a surprising sentiment to see... But, at the same time, who comes up with that sort of aphorism and decides that it is SO TRUE that they have to go into the forum and write it up for everyone else to read?? Do we think they were drunk?

I think one of the things I really like about looking at this sort of stuff is that it can be so random. You get Virgil quotes in amongst the multitude 'XXX woz ere' and 'VOTE YYY', and random people playing around - one graffito I loved that I got shown a while ago now was from a doorway, where someone had written 'fullones ululamque cano, non arma uirumque' ('Of fullers and an owl I sing, not arms and a man') - I still think it has the most amazing wistful tone, even though it's essentially just silly. It's like when I went in a public loo a few weeks ago and someone had taken a black marker pen to the sanitary bin, writing 'DOUBT THOU THE STARS ARE FIRE'. Why?? We're never going to know...

Best street lit. I've ever seen, though, was this poem written inside a suitcase wired to a fence above a bicycle, in Berlin a couple of years back:



I don't know if I can translate it properly, but I think(?? - someone help me here!) an English version would be something like:

You World by Me. 17/18/4
she's grew up in transition
Vodaphone transmission
feel suffer love control
think sideways on the plains
headroom ferroconcrete
timber brickwork balcony
roughly finished from a funnel
the poet scrapes you high prayer
everything screams to measure is made from money
you're all gold what the world measures

.

How brilliantly random is that???

Comments

[sister_luck]

Indeed brilliantly random and a brilliant translation, too.

The last-but-one line is especially difficult - I find it hard to find a subject for ist and thus would ignore it in a translation:

everything screams for a measure made of money (is)

[quinara]

Oh, I'm glad the translation's all right! (My working vocab really isn't up to it, so I was pondering with Beolingus a lot of the time...)

And yeah about that line... I'm wondering now, maybe there would be a comma in between 'Mass' and 'aus' - so something like:

everything screams to measure, is made from money

[sister_luck]

That works a little better and gives ist something to do - it's slightly counter-intuitive - I'd expect it to be ist aus Geld, but then the rhyme would disappear. Either way, not much sense-making.

[quinara]

Either way, not much sense-making.

*nods* Mmmm... I do wonder how long it took the author it compose (and so how quickly they were reaching for the rhymes) - because on the one hand it's been scrawled in an old suitcase, but on the other hand it's been written in a suitcase and carefully fixed to the fence...

[sister_luck]

I'm not sure, but I assume the poem was written for this location specifically - or at least for a building site because we've got three lines about construction and pouring concrete. Whether it's been composed in situ there's no way of telling.

[quinara]

I do like the idea of a poet walking round the corner with half a suitcase and a marker pen, only to be suddenly struck with inspiration...

[stultiloquentia]

What a great post.

Your burning cock sounds to me like a heartfelt warning about venereal disease.

I volunteer in a high school on Saturdays. I was musing just last week on the poignancy and hilarity to be found on the walls of the girls' bathroom.

[quinara]

I aim to spread the Classics love far and wide, one post at a time... *haz a plan*

This is entirely possible (ningloreth was suggesting urethritis over on LJ...) - but it still seems like a strange message to want to share with the world. (On the other hand, casual metaphor FTW! They sound a bit like one of Ethan Rayne's demons, with the exaggeration and blank verse...)

Oh, good times! I remember at school there was one toilet that had a graffiti conversation going on for years until the school decided it had to paint over it. I can't remember how it went - it started something like 'FUCK OFF'; 'YOU FUCK OFF' and slowly escalated into these amazing heights of rhetoric... *should have got a photo - damn the lack of phone cameras*

[sobsister]

Oh Romans indeed. I remember in high school our Latin teacher telling us about the cocks carved into the pavement at Pompeii, and the entire class seemed to decide right then and there we would visit there at least once in our lives.

It's nice to know graffiti is a human constant.

[quinara]

Hee! Excellent. Alas, I'm not sure I've ever actually seen a cock carved into the pavement of Pompeii, but there are plenty of cocks to be seen - comically embiggened and everything in murals. (These books of inscriptions, which have all their notes written in Victorian Latin, have their own fun sometimes when there's been a carving - one of the 'Phoebus sucks cock' inscriptions (PHOIIBVS FIILAT) comes with a little note in tiny italics 'hominis facies cum phallo' - 'face of a man with penis' - on its left. You can only imagine what that was a picture of...)

I wonder if we've ever stopped scrawling on walls since the cave paintings?

[evilawyer]

I sometimes think everyone is drunk. Only that explains the randomness. But re: the Pompeii "burning cock" scrawl --- I don't necessarily think of the Roman empire as suffering from rampant homophobia, but maybe a few homophobes here and there got loose with chalk?

[quinara]

Everyone probably is drunk...

I don't necessarily think of the Roman empire as suffering from rampant homophobia, but maybe a few homophobes here and there got loose with chalk?

The thing is, there wasn't really a stable concept of homosexuality to get homophobic about. There was plenty of shaming people who received penetration, so I suppose it's plausible someone being shamed in that way might want to turn the tables a bit. Hmm, also, it was always one of the 'weird' things about Emperor Claudius that he would only sleep with women, so presumably there were some people around who felt exclusively heterosexual (in our terms) - but whether the conditions would be right to let that manifest as homophobia, I don't know.

[evilawyer]

We'll, we've still got the "everyone is drunk" theory to fall back on.