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

[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?