Kristina Milnor’s Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii is a study of part of the corpus of graffiti found in Pompeii. As the title indicates, Milnor is primarily interested in graffiti that have some connection to Roman literature; indeed, she remarks early on that “one of the things which distinguishes Pompeian graffiti writers, however, is how many of them show familiarity with authors whose works emerged from the highest of ancient literary culture: Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, Ennius” (5). Milnor’s book surveys the graffiti in six chapters, an introduction plus five thematic chapters that examine the physical contexts of the graffiti; the politics of the graffiti; the problems of “authorship, appropriation, and authenticity” in the graffiti; “gender and genre” in the graffiti; and finally the “culture of quotation” of the graffiti.

Milnor examines the graffiti primarily as a classical philologist and as a scholar interested in the application of modern critical theory to ancient texts. Milnor’s study often offers useful readings of individual graffiti, but it is marred by her inability to imagine how cultures with limited literacy work. Indeed, the almost complete absence of modern works on orality and literacy or graffiti in her bibliography shows that Milnor does not ground her work in modern work on these topics. Rather, Milnor tries to fit the graffiti into Latin literary norms, and thus she consistently turns to literary theorists and concepts to try to explain folk and popular cultural phenomena; in doing this she misses a great deal of importance.

For example, variants as well as accurate citations of the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid are found in the graffiti along with recognizable fragments of poetry from other authors. The range of quotations is, however, very narrow, but Milnor nonetheless proposes a model of Pompeian literacy that imagines a wide and deep knowledge of Latin literature among the graffiti writers. Given the very limited range of the quotes, which are often restricted to the same passage from a given author, it seems more likely that these quotations were probably school texts that the graffiti writers memorized while learning their letters. This would better account for the limited range of quotes from any author as well as the mistakes that the graffiti writers make, which may represent poorly remembered school texts rather than a deep knowledge of classical Latin literature. Rather than indicating widespread popular knowledge of elite Latin literature, then, the texts probably tell us more about what texts were used in schools.

Milnor does have a sense that the graffiti are not part of the classical Latin literary culture, writing, for example, that “it is important never to lose sight of the popular oral verse culture of which the graffiti are traces” (205), but her approach to the graffiti consistently obscures that culture, and thus too often makes the graffiti into poorly reproduced versions of elite literary materials.

This is not an introduction to Pompeian graffiti for the general reader (some of the Latin is left untranslated), but, if they use the book cautiously, Latinists and folklorists will find much of interest here.

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[Review length: 514 words • Review posted on December 15, 2015]