Heikki Solin

Vulgar Latin and Pompei,

in «Latin vulgaire - Latin tardif» actes du VIII Colloque International sur le Latin Vulgaire et Tardif (Oxford 6-9 septembre 2006) a cura di R. Wright, Hildersheim 2008, pp. 60-68

As all of you know, the eruption of Mt Vesuvius on 24th August 79 caused sudden and painful death for some 20,000 people living in Campania Felix in the settlements of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, Oplontis, and in many villas lying in the surroundings. Yet the immense tragedy for the contemporary inhabitants has turned into a unique opportunity for modern scholarship, since from the very beginning of the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, extremely valuable documentation of civic life and material culture in all its aspects, ranging from architecture and art to the various facets of everyday life, has come to enhance our knowledge of the circumstances of living in this area of Campania.

One of the most striking phenomena arising from that human tragedy are the numerous wall-inscriptions which the lava coming from the eruption of Vesuvius has kept safe over the centuries until the beginning of the excavations have vanisched after their factors. These inscriptions forma a unique corpus of some 9,000 inscriptions (a few years ago, I counted the total number of all Pompeian wall-inscriptions, and it came to 8,615; but this concerns only Pompeii and published inscriptions). Most of them are graffiti scratched with a sharp writing instrument called a stilus into the surface of the walls or in the other, sometimes surprising, places. A small proportion of them are dipinti, as we are used to calling them, inscriptions skilfully painted on the walls, mostly on the outside of those walls.

In my talk, I will concentrate on the graffiti proper, leaving the dipinti aside. These painted inscriptions present, in the great majority of cases, a less vulgar form of language, as they are of a more technical nature, Peter Kruschwitz, in an excellent paper presented here at Oxford a few months ago in a conference on “Buried linguistic treasure”, showed how the dipinti represent various cases of technical text-types, especially the so-called electoral programmata, written for purposes of political canvassing, the advertisements for gladiatorial games, and a further type that Kruschwitz calls a technical language of consumption.

But today we are dealing exclusively with the graffiti Their value for the study of many aspects of civic life, education, leterary culture, the psychology of the ordinary man, etc. is extremely high. Above all, these texts provide a unique corpus for the study of Latin palaeography and the Latin and, to a smaller degree, the Greek language, not to forget that there is also a certain number of Oscan texts. The contribution of the graffiti to the study of the history of Latin cannot be overestimated, On the other hand, I must at once state that there is also a danger of a certain abuse of these odd documents when scholars try to detect phonetic and other laws behind what are simple misspellings...

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