Graffiti are not just a modern phenomenon of bathroom stalls and subway cars. New recording and imaging methods are bringing into view scratches and inscriptions across archaeological sites that were made by ordinary people — enslaved workers, soldiers, visitors and bored residents — leaving behind immediate, personal statements carved into walls.
The richest trove of these informal writings is in Pompeii, the Roman city buried by Vesuvius in AD 79 and preserved under meters of ash. For much of the history of excavation the spotlight fell on elite houses, frescoes and mosaics. Over the past 15–20 years scholars have shifted attention to the spontaneous marks left in situ by everyday inhabitants, and interest in ancient graffiti has surged.
Historian Rebecca Benefiel, founder of The Ancient Graffiti Project, has worked to digitize inscriptions from Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum. Graffiti — from the Greek graphein, “to write” — are casual, in-place words and drawings rather than formal public inscriptions, and they appear all over the city: on shop fronts, corridors, house walls and theater approaches. Nineteenth-century archaeologist August Mau dismissed many of these scratches as trivial, but modern researchers treat them as valuable social evidence that captures voices often absent from literary or official records.
Some of the most moving examples come from people rarely named in other sources. An enslaved woman known as Methe scratched a prayer to Venus, asking for favor and a shared heart with Chrestus — a simple, intimate plea that otherwise would have been invisible. Graffiti also reproduce and play with poetry: lines from Virgil’s Aeneid appear alongside parodies and riffs, including a humorous variant that replaces epic opening images with everyday, jokey elements: “I sing of dry cleaners and a hoot owl, not arms of a man.”
Technical advances are expanding what scholars can read. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and similar methods use changing light and digital enhancement to reveal hairline scratches that are invisible to the naked eye. Marie-Adeline Le Guennec (University of Quebec) and colleagues at the Sorbonne recorded hundreds of graffiti in a corridor that led to a theater, adding about 80 previously unknown inscriptions to a surface once thought fully documented. Unlike many modern markings that are quickly removed, some ancient scratches have remained legible for more than a century.
Recurring motifs run across Pompeii’s scratched walls: detailed boats, numerous images of gladiators, portraits, animals, numbers and personal names. The abundance of gladiator doodles suggests people routinely sketched familiar figures, and names from the eastern Mediterranean point to travelers and soldiers who left their own versions of “I was here.”
Taken together, these casual etchings give distinct, immediate voices to a broader population and help reshape our view of daily life in antiquity. As imaging, digitization and sharing of graffiti continue to improve, these ordinary inscriptions will keep enriching our picture of Pompeii beyond the villas and public monuments.