A Tour of Ancient Rome’s Best Graffiti: “We Have Urinated in Our Beds … There Was No Chamber Pot” & More


Apart from the likes of bra­vo and piz­za, graf­fi­ti must be one of the first Ital­ian words that Eng­lish-speak­ers learn in every­day life. As for why the Eng­lish word comes direct­ly from the Ital­ian, per­haps it has some­thing to do with the his­to­ry of writ­ing on the walls — a his­to­ry that, in West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, stretch­es at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire. The Fire of Learn­ing video above offers a selec­tion of trans­lat­ed pieces of the more than 11,000 pieces of ancient Roman graf­fi­ti found etched into the pre­served walls of Pom­peii: “Mar­cus loves Spe­dusa”; “Phileros is a eunuch”; “Secun­dus took a crap here” (writ­ten three times); “Atime­tus got me preg­nant”; and “On April 19th, I made bread.”

Crude though some of these may sound, the nar­ra­tor empha­sizes that “many, many of the promi­nent pieces of graf­fi­ti, espe­cial­ly in Pom­peii, are too sex­u­al or vio­lent to show here,” com­par­ing their sen­si­bil­i­ty to that of “a high-school bath­room stall.” You can read more of them at The Ancient Graf­fi­ti Project, whose archive is brows­able through cat­e­gories like “love,” “poet­ry,” “food,” and “glad­i­a­tors” (as decent a sum­ma­ry as any of life in ancient Rome).

Romans did­n’t just write on the walls — a prac­tice that seems to have been encour­aged, at least in some places — they also drew on them, as evi­denced by what you can see in the fig­ur­al graf­fi­ti sec­tion, as well as the exam­ples in the video.

Anoth­er rich archive of ancient graf­fi­ti comes from a sur­pris­ing loca­tion: the Egypt­ian pyra­mids, then as now a major tourist attrac­tion. Rather than post­ing their reviews of the attrac­tion on the inter­net, in our twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry man­ner, ancient Roman tourists wrote direct­ly on its sur­face. “I vis­it­ed and did not like any­thing except the sar­coph­a­gus,” says one inscrip­tion; “I can not read the hiero­glyph­ics,” com­plains anoth­er, in a man­ner that may sound awful­ly famil­iar these mil­len­nia lat­er. “We have uri­nat­ed in our beds,” declares anoth­er piece of writ­ing, dis­cov­ered on the door of a Pom­peii inn. “Host, I admit we should not have done this. If you ask why? There was no cham­ber pot.” Con­sid­er it con­firmed: the ancient world, too, had Airbnb guests.

Relat­ed con­tent:

High-Tech Analy­sis of Ancient Scroll Reveals Plato’s Bur­ial Site and Final Hours

Demys­ti­fy­ing the Activist Graf­fi­ti Art of Kei­th Har­ing: A Video Essay

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

The Only Writ­ten Eye-Wit­ness Account of Pompeii’s Destruc­tion: Hear Pliny the Younger’s Let­ters on the Mount Vesu­vius Erup­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.





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