If you think graffiti that say “I was here” belong only to modern bathroom stalls, think again. New techniques are exposing inscriptions scratched into ancient sites, bringing to light the voices of ordinary people from antiquity — from enslaved individuals to bored soldiers who carved their names into walls.
The richest source for this research is Pompeii, the Roman city buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and preserved beneath meters of ash. Excavations since the 18th century have focused on the colorful frescoes, mosaics and luxurious homes of the elite. In recent years, however, scholars have turned their attention to the more ephemeral marks left by everyday residents.
Historian Rebecca Benefiel, who started the Ancient Graffiti Project to digitize graffiti from Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum, says interest in these informal writings has surged over the past 15–20 years. Social media has helped spread the discoveries, and online platforms make graffiti accessible to researchers and the public.
The term graffiti comes from the Greek graphein, “to write” or “to draw.” Unlike formal inscriptions or commissioned texts, graffiti are spontaneous scribbles made by ordinary people, often in the places where they lived and worked. That immediacy gives historians direct insight into daily life in antiquity.
When graffiti were first uncovered in the 1830s and 1840s there was initial excitement, but an influential 19th-century archaeologist, August Mau, dismissed many of the marks as trivial — the ancient equivalent of tourist name-scratching. His view delayed serious study of vernacular writing for over a century. Now researchers argue that graffiti appear across the whole city and in every kind of space, not just as the work of a few youths.
Some of the inscriptions give voice to people who rarely appear in traditional histories. One prayer by an enslaved woman named Methe appeals to Venus: “Methe loves Chrestus, may Pompeian Venus be propitious in her heart to each of them and may they both live of one heart.” Benefiel highlights this as an intimate glimpse into the feelings of someone otherwise invisible in the record.
Other graffiti quote Latin poetry, such as lines from Virgil’s Aeneid. These literary fragments function like popular music might today — a shared soundtrack people could jot down and expect others to recognize. One parody replaces Virgil’s famous opening “I sing of arms and a man” with “I sing of dry cleaners and a hoot owl, not arms of a man,” showing playful alteration of canonical texts.
New imaging technologies are widening what can be seen. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), which uses varied lighting angles to reveal surface details, has exposed scratches in plaster invisible to the naked eye. A team led by Marie-Adeline Le Guennec (University of Quebec) with Eloise Letellier-Taillefer and Louis Autin (Sorbonne) applied RTI to a corridor in Pompeii that once led to a theater, recording hundreds of graffiti and documenting 80 previously unknown inscriptions on a surface thought to be well cataloged.
Unlike many modern graffiti that authorities remove quickly, ancient marks often remained for centuries, suggesting they were tolerated or ignored. Thematically, the newly documented graffiti include carefully drawn boats, numerous gladiator images, portraits, animals, numbers and names. The prevalence of gladiator sketches near a theater suggests casual interest rather than strict attention to theatrical performances.
Some names and inscriptions point to long-distance connections: writing in scripts and languages from the eastern Mediterranean suggests soldiers or visitors from afar stayed in Pompeii and left their marks, the ancient equivalent of an “I was here” message.
As imaging methods and digitization efforts continue, researchers expect to recover many more voices from the past. Each inscription represents an individual perspective, expanding understanding of Pompeii beyond elite material culture to the full population that once animated the city. Edited by Elizabeth Grenier