Time.news – To those who upon reading the title – “Beyond Pompeii: graffiti and other obscene inscriptions from the Western Roman Empire” – will have raised their eyebrows, or set their lips to a grin, or hinted at an embarrassed chuckle: your expression will stop as soon as you open the first page of this book, which is a text of the highest erudition and refined philology for the study of the evolution of the vulgar Latin language.
But this unsettling fact, that is an obscene lexicon scientifically analyzed by glottologists, does not prevent a decidedly amusing reading of the text. And the graffiti drawings, whose artistic quality need not be commented upon, in their crudely erotic characterization give the impression of a disconcerting topicality, because, as we read in the introduction, “they have the variety and the very tones of life, sometimes raw, but effectively real in connoting situations, feelings and yearnings of men who have not made history, but are certainly themselves moments of that history that affected the society of the time “.
The writings (often insults), graffitied with improvised tools, did not – in fact – have the purpose of passing into history, and their grammar and spelling are “low”: but for this very reason they are precious for documenting the evolution of the popular Latin language, anything but literary but still spoken by anyone educated enough to be able to write a graffiti on a wall, on a plate, on the collar of a slave.
These documents collected in very distant territories of the Empire, from Germany to Africa, over a period of a few centuries, are added to those already returned from the excavations of Pompeii (which, however, inevitably stop at the year of the eruption : 79 AD). The cultural unity of the Empire is documented by the uniformity of this low language and also covers everyone the anatomical, scatological and sexual terms, which the curators take care to translate with scrupulous precision into Italian, in all their crudeness. The translation, he writes in the introduction
Stefano Rocchi (who teaches classical philology at the University of Pavia) “is straightforward and free of inhibitions, as befits the topics dealt with, which will perhaps make you smile and think that in the end man little or nothing changes. The thought will certainly run to the writings on the columns of arcades and in the public bathrooms of our cities or to phenomenon of more or less anonymous haters active on social networks”.
Among the engravings found in the most incongruous places, there is no shortage of texts that are sometimes allusive, or even cultured, or enigmatic, or parody of love poetry with erudite quotations that further displace the modern reader. The volume, edited by Stefano Rocchi and Roberta Marchionni, is published by Deinotera Editrice.
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