CLASSICAL CORNER

262: KILROYUS WAS HERE

There are 11,000 or so graffiti on the walls of Pompeii – such scribblings were not, of course, unique to this town, and they are also a motif in some classical literary texts. They are collected in volume 4 of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Various websites provide selections in English. Greater abundance in Jack Lindsay’s The Writing on the Wall (1960) and Matteo Della Corte’s Loves and Lovers in Ancient Pompeii (tr. A Van Buren, 1960). Best modern analysis by Kristina Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (2014). Robert Reisner’s Graffiti: Two ThousandYears of Wall Writing (1971) entertainingly encapsulates their generic history.

The Pompeian scribblings scene in which John Cleese corrects the errors in Graham Chapman’s graffito in .