Ancient Graffiti in Context by J. A. Baird and Claire Taylor (review)

This volume is a collection of ten papers from a workshop organized by the editors at the University of Leicester in November, 2008. The editors' opening essay, "Ancient Graffiti in Context," presents a excellent introduction to this field of classical scholarship, identifying its problematic parameters, its history of scholarship, and some of the new directions of research illustrated by the other papers.

An overriding theme of many of the papers is how scholarly views of graffiti have changed. Influenced by studies of modern graffiti, past scholars have generally viewed ancient graffiti as made by members of the lower classes, less educated and literate, who comment on their daily lives, or express subversive views, or write scatological remarks (not that any of these groups are exclusive). The volume's papers demonstrate how current research provides a more nuanced picture of ancient graffiti.

Rebecca Benefiel ("Dialogues of Graffiti in the House of the Four Styles at Pompeii") points out that many graffiti appear on the interior house walls of wealthy Pompeians and clearly were inscribed by the elite as a social activity. From her examination of the graffiti in this elite house, and particularly those inscribed by several women friends on the walls of its tablinum, she concludes that people not only had a strong interest in creating graffiti, but that graffiti were "a flexible and accepted means of communication" (41). J. A. Baird's paper ("The Graffiti of Dura-Europos: A Contextual Approach") demonstrates how "writing on walls in ancient Dura was in many ways a fundamentally different practice from modern graffiti" (65) and how these graffiti were made by different "communities" (e.g., the military), providing evidence of the "linguistic tendencies" of different communities (i.e., bilingual communities) and the movement of such community members within the urban space (66).

Graffiti can give evidence of groups that are otherwise hard to detect in the literary or archaeological records. Katherine Huntley's article ("Identifying Children's Graffiti in Roman Campania") employs a developmental psychological approach of children's drawing to demonstrate how graffiti provide evidence of young children's activities, to show that "there were no specific areas of Roman houses dedicated solely to children . . . with the exception of the atria/front halls, the kitchens and the tablina" (87), and that children were present in public facilities such as the baths, theater corridors, and other large city buildings, though not in work areas such as taverns and workshops. Claire Taylor's analysis of rock-cut graffiti in Attica ("Graffiti and the Epigraphic Habit") shows that most were made by quarry workers "communicating with one another epigraphically," but also situating "themselves, as individuals, within (nonelite) groups" (101).

Taylor's article clearly shows that graffiti formed an important part of the discourse of the nonelite. But they were also an important discourse of the elite as Alexei Zadorojnyi's study of elite literature shows ("Transcripts of Dissent? Political Graffiti and Elite Ideology"). He concludes that "graffiti in the ancient historical narration constitute an avenue for trying out the potentialities of written dissent while staying cushioned by the orthodox socio-cultural prejudice, as well as by the chronological distance" (129).

The intriguing article by Katerina Volioto ("The Materiality of Graffiti") dissects one graffito as a sensory experience of a person handling the lekythos on which it was inscribed. Other articles look at groups of graffiti in terms of socialization. Rachel Mairs examines clusters of graffiti in her article, "Egyptian 'Inscriptions' and Greek 'Graffiti' at El Kanais in the Egyptian Eastern Desert," demonstrating that travelers were aware of a tradition of inscribing prayers to Pan (and, indeed, often dialogued through their graffiti) and concluding that these graffiti show "a more immediate connection with the desert landscape dedicators sought Pan's protection from" (163). Finding the categories of memory (as identified in the Rhetorica ad Herennium) useful...