In stairwells, doorways, bars, baths, and temples, people left quick marks that rarely make it into official history. In Pompeii a wall by the stairs carries a blunt boast—VENUSTUS, “Charming.” Nearby, someone scratched a merchant ship with a swollen hull and tight rigging. A brothel wall keeps a coarse exchange; a theatre corridor celebrates a gladiator; and on Rome’s Palatine Hill a schoolboy mocked a Christian classmate with a donkey-headed figure on a cross. These are not marble dedications cut by paid masons. They are the unfiltered voices of sailors, servants, barmaids, bricklayers, devotees, and drifters—written, painted, or incised straight onto the city’s skin. This is a guide to hearing them clearly, without turning every scrawl into poetry or every joke into doctrine.
What counts as ancient graffiti?
Ancient graffiti covers everything from names and numbers to sketches and prayers. Some marks were scratched with a stylus, nail, or knife into plaster, stone, wood, or pottery. Others were painted (dipinti) with a brush in red or black. People drew ships, gladiators, gods, animals, and caricatures; they recorded tallies, prices, dates, loves, insults, and brief petitions. While some owners repainted or smoothed walls, many spaces—house fronts, columns, baths, brothels, theatres, shrines—were expected to collect informal writing. Graffiti could advertise a shop, cheer a candidate, mark a visit, tease a neighbour, flirt, boast, or pray.
How we read whispers cut into plaster
If you like method more than romance, this is the part to keep handy. Context comes first: epigraphers record the exact room, wall, height from the floor, nearby marks, and repainting phases because a wall text answers to its place. Light matters: raking light and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) bring up faint strokes and separate overlaid hands; multispectral imaging can recover faded red or black paint and thin carbon lines. 3D scanning and photogrammetry capture the surface so stroke order and tool type can be studied later. Language helps date and locate a hand—letter shapes, spelling, ligatures, and code-switching between Latin and Greek all carry clues. Finally, the wall itself is an artefact: repairs, replastering, and paint phases tell us whether a graffito sat in a freshly decorated room or on a long-used surface, which changes how we read intent.
Why these marks matter
Formal inscriptions show how elites wanted to be remembered. Graffiti show what people could not help saying in the moment: jokes and quarrels, prices and shifts, prayers and boasts, party slogans and fan chatter. Read in place, they reveal who used which rooms and when, how tenants and families shared space, how crowds moved through theatres and baths, and how messages travelled across a city long before posters and print.
Case study: Pompeii’s speaking walls
Pompeii preserves thousands of items because soft plaster invited writing and Vesuvius sealed it all at once. Election notices (programmata) painted in red or black back local candidates and carry endorsements from tavern-keepers, mule-drivers, and guilds—maps of neighbourhood loyalties in brushstrokes. Inside houses, bedrooms, kitchens, atria, and stairwells hold verse fragments, tallies for flour and oil, names of lovers, taunts, and quick doodles; the densest writing often sits where people paused between rooms. Workshops and bars post prices; baths and brothels mix boasts with laments; theatre corridors carry fan graffiti and quoted lines. One house even takes its nickname—Casa della Nave Europa—from a large scratched cargo ship, proof that maritime identities came home on inland walls. Read together, such clusters trace “micro-publics”: circles of readers only a few metres wide.
Case study: devotion carved at Philae
On the island temple of Philae, travellers and pilgrims—Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Nubian—cut names, short prayers, and small images into doorframes and columns. Some incised a little boat beneath a dedication to Isis, echoing processions where the goddess travelled by barque. Others wrote in Greek at the edge of empire to mark a crossing into Nubia. Far from mindless damage, these marks perform presence—“I came; I prayed; remember me”—and braid imperial, local, and religious identities at a frontier shrine.
Case study: Dura-Europos and the edges of empire
Perched above the Euphrates, Dura-Europos sat on routes of armies, merchants, and ideas. Its houses, gates, and sanctuaries carry quick portraits, names, and short notes in several scripts. A small figure scratched beside a few words on a temple lintel acts as both prayer and proof of presence. In a town famous for painted synagogue walls and a Christian meeting-house, the graffiti record ordinary movement through sacred thresholds—soldiers off duty, traders waiting in shade, passers-by testing a stylus on soft mortar. Where formal art sets out doctrine, these marks record footfall and habit.
Case study: mockery on the Palatine
The Palatine’s Alexamenos graffito shows a youth raising a hand toward a crucified figure with a donkey’s head. The Greek caption reads roughly, “Alexamenos worships [his] god.” It is casual ridicule—probably schoolyard in tone—but it fixes a moment when a small Christian presence met sharp Roman scorn. The drawing matters not for its artistry, but because it is unsupervised: a sneer never meant to be kept that survives as one of the earliest visual contacts between Christianity and the wider public.
What the hands are saying (and to whom)
Graffiti are written for nearby readers. A love note carved low beside a doorway aims at people passing in and out. A tally by a counter awaits the shopkeeper who returns to the same spot each day. A gladiator boast placed in a theatre corridor rides the crowd. A brothel quip looks for a laugh within arm’s reach. Cities are acoustic spaces; these are echoes you can see.
Language, spelling, and voice
Pompeian Latin often departs from classroom norms. Misspellings, phonetic spellings, dialect words, and easy switches into Greek are not “wrong”; they record live speech. Monumental inscriptions are drafted and proofed. Graffiti are performed. For historical linguists this is gold: you can watch people drop h, blur b and v, or use colloquial verb forms. For social historians, the fact that a barmaid or mule-driver could scratch a line of verse at all says a great deal about informal literacy.
Figural graffiti: drawing on the run
Ships appear with convincing rigging; gladiators stand with shields angled right and nets thrown; horses, phalluses, mythic beasts, and quick portraits pack margins. These are not childish “doodles.” They show professional knowledge (a net-fighter’s kit rendered correctly) and cultural memory (a god signalled by attribute). A few cuts can carry years of habit.
Myth vs evidence
Myth: Graffiti were always criminal vandalism and universally despised. Evidence: Some owners banned or painted over marks, but widespread, layered writing in houses, baths, taverns, theatres, and sanctuaries shows that many zones tolerated, even expected, informal texts.
Myth: Graffiti are worthless scrawls. Evidence: They map movement through buildings, chart local politics and work, preserve spoken language, and register devotion that formal monuments ignore.
Myth: Only Pompeii preserves graffiti. Evidence: Herculaneum and Stabiae offer rich corpora; frontier towns like Dura-Europos; sanctuaries from Delos to Philae; and big centres like Rome and Ostia all keep comparable material. Pompeii is a centre, not the only case.
How bright were the dipinti?
Painted notices in red or black could be crisp against fresh plaster, then fade with smoke, sun, and touch. Many walls carry multiple layers: an older red line ghosting under a later black hand; a list overwritten by a parody. Multispectral imaging now recovers pigments the eye cannot, sharpening our sense of tempo—how fast walls filled and how often they were renewed.
Ethics: when is a graffito an artefact?
A modern reflex is to scrub a wall clean. With ancient material the mark and its setting are the artefact. Responsible work means:
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Record before removal: photographs, RTI, 3D capture, and a context plan.
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Stability over whitening: conserve fragile surfaces; avoid over-cleaning that erases thin strokes.
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Publish uncertainty: separate ancient strokes from later scratches and modern repairs.
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Open access where safe: share images and transcriptions so more readers can weigh the evidence.
Common questions
Is a graffito an “official” source? Yes—if documented with care. It is a primary source for speech, movement, devotion, prices, and politics, especially when read with its wall and room.
Can we always tell who wrote it? Rarely. A name can be a boast, a taunt, or a dedication; hands imitate other hands. Height from the floor, room use, and clustering suggest likely authors and audiences.
Were women writing? Some texts sit in women’s spaces or speak in a first-person female voice; others fit patterns of movement and height. Gender is hard to prove from strokes alone, but nothing about a stylus belongs to men.
Are the brothel walls typical? They form a distinct register—explicit, commercial, sometimes funny—but similar jokes and boasts appear in houses and baths. The strength of graffiti is range, not shock value.
What about Christians and Jews? Beyond the Palatine sneer, pious invocations, symbols, and names appear across the empire. Graffiti catch contact points where minority faiths met majority habits—sometimes gently, sometimes sharply.
Key terms (quick definitions)
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Graffito / graffiti: single mark / plural marks; informal writing or drawing on a surface.
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Dipinti: painted inscriptions or images.
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Programmāta: painted election notices in Roman towns.
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RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging): light-based method that enhances shallow surface features.
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Palaeography: study of letter forms; used to date and localise hands.
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Squeeze: paper impression of an inscription; useful on stone, rarely safe on fragile plaster.
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Context recording: plan, elevation, photos, and notes that fix a graffito in its room and building.
Why “voices of the forgotten” isn’t just a slogan
A scratched ship in a stairwell is not a masterpiece, but it knows how a hull carries weight and where a sail takes wind. A bathhouse boast is not literature, but it knows that laughter sticks. A prayer on a temple jamb is not a hymn, but it knows how to ask. Together these marks return the city’s noise—not to be scrubbed away, but to be transcribed, translated, and understood.
