Inscribing Anonymity

In a largely male dominated world, the rediscovery of the poetess Sulpicia, whose elegies have been long ascribed to the Appendix Tibulliana and thought to be written by a male poet, exemplifies how gender has persistently shaped cultural and poetic reception. Since the production of epigraphic texts was chiefly controlled by men, uncovering authentic female voices within epigraphic poetry has proved challenging. There are many graffiti and inscriptions which ventriloquise female voices and use female adjectival forms to identify the anonymous authors as women.

Pompeii constitues an exceptional site from which to uncover the overlooked voices and agencies of female authors and to question the political assumptions at play in the still common practice of interpreting female writers as male authors in disguise.

Across Pompeii quotations from Latin literary texts populate the city fabric alongside quotidian messages, similar graffiti are repeated in different locations, while poetic syntagms are recombined with new hemistichs and re-signified in different material and literary contexts. One point in case is CIL IV 1520, an erotic poem which bears an unconventional signature and sheds important light on our interpretation of the complex negotiation of authorial claims in graffiti.

Candida me docuit nigras odisse

puellas. / Odero si potero; si non,

invitus, amabo.

Scripsit Venus Fisica Pompeiana

‘A fair girl taught me to scorn dark girls. I will scorn them if I can; if not … I will reluctantly love them. Venus Fisica Pompeiana wrote this’.

The graffito is key to understanding the intersectionality between graffiti poetry, gender relations, and race. The text polarises a contrast between a candida (a ‘bright brown woman’) and a nigra (a ‘bright black woman’) puella, suggesting that ‘skin color was one of many factors in the Roman construction of difference’ (Haley 2009: 30). In her article Haley (2009) discloses the unquestioned scholarly assumptions about themes of gender and race and the implications of the hypothesis about male authorship. The reading of the present graffito along with the Venus plagiaria of CIL IV 1410, its attribution to a Venus fisica, however, bound us to question the male-authored nature of the text and to take into serious consideration how the unconventional ascription to the goddess challenges the ways in which we conceive of the gendered mechanics of this poem.

Venus, who boasts to have produced her own witty remake of popular loci from Latin literature, by appending her own signature to the graffitied poem (scripsit Venus Fisica Pompeiana), becomes the mouthpiece for the mechanisms of literary contamination, appropriation, and adaptation that are proper to graffiti writing culture, a locus for re-reading gender relations in graffiti poetry. The authorial status attributed to Venus in this graffito offers a new three-dimensionality to the semantics of plagiaria we find in CIL IV 1410:

Venus enim

plagiaira

est; quia exsanguni

meum petit,

in vies tumultu

pariet: optet

sibi, ut bene

naviget,

quod et

Ario sua r(ogat)

‘Venus is a weaver of webs; from the moment that she sets out to attack my dearest, she will lay temptations along his way: he must hope for a good voyage, which is also the wish of his Ario’.

Not only is Venus a weaver of amatory webs, endowed with seductive force. She is also capable of weaving complex literary links. The graffito has engendered a live scholarly debate, not least because of the difficult interpretation of plagiaria and exsangune. In this text, Venus features as the goddess who ensnares men in her alluring nets, whose seductive powers bewilder human mind. How to interpret the epithet plagiaria remains open to speculation. The scholarly consensus accepts Gigante’s reading of the word plagiaria as deriving from the word plaga, namely ‘net’.  Therefore, we could translate Venus plagiaria as Venus ‘weaver of webs’. This interpretation well captures the goddess’s seductive arts.

Interestingly, Amedeo Maiuri advanced the hypothesis that plagiaria is linked to the crimen plagi, the juridical terminology used for the kidnapping of slaves. In this sense, Venus could be appropriately interpreted as ‘the one who commits indebt appropriation’, Venus the ‘thief’ (ladra), who enslaves Ario’s lover through the arts of seduction. Although Maiuri’s argument has acknowledged less fortune than Gigante’s, it is not possible to exclude this interpretation a priori. A unique attestation of plagiarius as the technical term for literary plagiarist appears in one of Martial’s epigrams (1.52), which belongs to the so called ‘impostor’ cycle in Book One. In the light of the comparative reading with Martial’s epigram, it is intriguing to interpret Venus plagiaria of CIL IV 1410 as articulating the processes of literary appropriation within the graffiti culture of quotation.

 As Milnor (2014: 136) suggests, the graffiti culture of quotation entails ‘an aesthetics of fragmentation’ according to which ‘tags were repeated and recombined in different ways to express different ideas’. The poem’s repetition across the wall and its unique interaction with quotations from Virgil leads us to imagine radically different responses from readers/viewers entering both the caupona and the House of the Scientists. On a further level, one which centres on the problematic gendered dimension of the text, important question arise:

How should we interpret Venus’s act of meta-poetically becoming the mouthpiece and author of this invective? How can a female reader take on the subjectivity of the graffito? How does this claim of authorship put into question the implicit suggestion that we should identify the female characters as mere passive objects of desire?

Venus’ fictive authorship, we might be tempted to suggest, conquers back the space of male discourse and masculine identity for women’s identification and assertion of subjecthood. The fictional authorial signature and the anonymous status of the graffito author allow us to reconsider traditional scholarly interpretations about the gendered relations negotiated within the graffito and to imagine how it disrupts conventional modes of consuming the text, affording a space to recover un-heard female voices from antiquity.

References

Gigante, M. (1979) Civiltà delle forme letterarie nell’antica Pompei. Naples.

Haley, S. P. (2009) ‘Be not afraid of the dark: critical race theory and classical studies’ in L. Nasrallah and E. Schüssler Fiorenza (eds) Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies. Minneapolis. 27-50.

Hauser, E. (2016) ‘Optima tu proprii nominis auctor: the semantics of female authorship in ancient Rome, from Sulpicia to Proba’ Eugesta 6: 151-186.

Kayachev, B. (ed.) (2021) Poems without Poets: Approaches to Anonymous Ancient Poetry. Cambridge.

Maiuri, A. (1945) “Due iscrizioni veneree pompeiane” Saggi di varia antichità: 299-302.

Milnor, K. (2014) Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii. Oxford.

Varone, A. (2002) Erotica Pompeiana. Iscrizioni d’amore sui muri di Pompei. Rome.