Cecil Weatherly

“ Graffiti are of some importance to the palaeographer and to the philologist as illustrating the forms and corruptions of the various alphabets and languages used by the people, and occasionally guide the archaeologist to the date of the building on which they appear, but they are chiefly valuable for the light they throw on the everyday life of the “man in the street” of the period, and for the intimate details of customs and institutions which no literature or formal inscriptions can give. The graffiti dealing with the gladiatorial shows at Pompeii are in this respect particularly noteworthy ”

“ These “graffiti,” either scratched on stone or plaster by a sharp instrument such as a nail, or, more rarely, written in red chalk or black charcoal, are found in great abundance, e.g. on the monuments of ancient Egypt. The best-known “graffiti” are those in Pompeii and in the catacombs and elsewhere in Rome. They have been collected by R. Garrucci (Graffiti di Pompei, Paris, 1856) , and L. Correra (“Graffiti di Roma” in Bolletino della commissione municipale archaeologica, Rome, 1893; see also Corp. Ins. Lat. iv., Berlin, 1871) . ”

“ The most famous graffito yet discovered is that generally accepted as representing a caricature of Christ upon the cross, found on the walls of the Domus Gelotiana on the Palatine in 1857, and now preserved in the Kircherian Museum of the Collegio Romano. Deeply scratched in the wall is a figure of a man clad in the short tunica with one hand upraised in salutation to another figure, with the head of an ass, or possibly a horse, hanging on a cross ”