"Dozens of graffiti messages have been discovered at Pompeii, shedding light on the violence and intimacy of everyday life-as well as its cosmopolitan social fabric. Archaeologists have analysed 79 new scribblings carved into the plaster wall of a corridor. The space was once a passageway between two theatres, in which chatting residents socialised, took shelter from the heat and occasionally participated in less innocent pastimes."
"One inscription indicates that Tychè, a sex worker, was paid to have sex ad locum ("in this place") with three men. Others reference less physical forms of passion. "I am in a hurry. Farewell, my Sava, make sure you love me!", one message reads. "Erato loves...", states another partially readable inscription. "It's a kind of notice board... where people left messages, history, greetings, insults, drawings and much more," says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the park's director, in a video circulated by the park."
"The discoveries also include a faint sketch of two fighting gladiators, one of whom leans backwards in a feint or parry pose while holding his pointed sword horizontally in a bent arm."
Seventy-nine newly analysed graffiti were carved into plaster along a corridor that once linked two theatres. The corridor functioned as a social passageway where residents chatted, sheltered from heat, and engaged in sexual encounters. Around 200 inscriptions were already known from the 27m passage since its 1794 excavation, and many faint scribblings have now been deciphered using state-of-the-art digital imaging. Inscriptions record paid sex with Tychè, urgent love messages to Sava and Erato, a sketch of fighting gladiators, a note reading "Tertiani lived here", and Safaitic names suggesting proto-Arabic soldiers, revealing intimacy, violence, and cosmopolitan connections.
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
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