“You can easily shovel the lapilli into a bucket,” said Benefiel. It buried the city with a light pumice stone called lapilli that gradually covered the houses to about the second story during a period of 36 hours. Pompeii is unique in its preservation of life as it was in 79 A.D., when Mount Vesuvius erupted. “But you’re probably not going to see any brand-new excavations any time soon, for that reason,” she said. ![]() Benefiel said that the authorities have been putting a great effort into preserving the city in the last few years. Two-thirds of Pompeii has been uncovered and is now deteriorating from exposure to strong sunlight, rain, creeping vegetation and tourists. “They contain a wealth of details about popular culture of the Roman Empire,” she said.īenefiel added that it was fortunate that the graffiti had been recorded, because many of them have now vanished as the wall plaster they were written on has crumbled. Benefiel had worked earlier with stone inscriptions from Rome, but since coming to W&L has focused her studies on the wall-inscription from Pompeii. “They were fundamentally interesting, and I realized that the majority of them had never been studied,” she said.Ī major international project begun in the late 1800s documented and cataloged all the Latin inscriptions from the ancient world in every country. She first came across them in 2005 while researching her dissertation. “The graffiti were basically ignored because as one scholar put it, “The graffiti are not written by the kind of people we are most interested in meeting,'” explained Benefiel. The reality is that Benefiel is one of few scholars to really study this ancient graffiti of Pompeii. You would think that graffiti nearly 2,000 years old would have been studied extensively by now and that there would be little left to write about. She also has two books in progress and says she has ideas for 15 more articles. ![]() So far, she has two articles on graffiti in print, with four more articles forthcoming this year. USA Today also featured Benefiel’s work in an article during the summer of 2009, and she has been interviewed for two programs on the History Channel, due to be aired in early 2010. By fall 2009, Benefiel will have spoken at three of them. In the past three years, four conferences have been devoted to the topic. Interest in the subject has also been surging among other academics. It’s the sort of discovery that fascinated and enchanted Benefiel about ancient graffiti. But even so, the people didn’t go back and erase all their previous declarations of love.” However, after Nero kicked his pregnant wife, killing her and the baby, his popularity waned. But I also found them in places like kitchens and hallways where they could have been put up by servants of the house or slaves. I found a lot of the graffiti at the entrances to houses of the wealthy (who would have had a stake in declaring their support of the imperial regime). “He was incredibly popular and people loved him. Of the 100 graffiti praising the different emperors, Benefiel estimates more than half were for Nero. Benefiel came across numerous graffiti saying “Neroni Feliciter,” which roughly translates into “Long Live Nero.” Benefiel said she sees the graffiti as the voice of the people and a lens through which to view ancient society.įor example, while history has not treated the Emperor Nero kindly, he was in fact very popular with the locals in Pompeii. The graffiti present a combination of writing and drawings, with writing being the more common form of expression. “It’s the only site where we have an entire city’s worth of these messages,” she said. Rebecca Benefiel, assistant professor of classics at Washington and Lee University, has spent the last three years studying the more than 11,000 graffiti in Pompeii. They wrote on the exteriors of houses up and down the street, in bath houses and in kitchens. ![]() Today, a kid spray painting a wall with graffiti would probably get arrested.īut 1,900 years ago in Pompeii, Italy, everybody was doing it. Search Feature Stories Campus Events All Stories Stories by Discipline
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