Pompeii

by Mary Beard

  Inevitably, this raises the question of the levels and uses of literacy in Pompeii. It is very easy to get the impression that the city was a highly literate, even cultured place. More than 10,000 pieces of writing, most in Latin, but some in Greek or Oscan, and at least one in Hebrew, have been recorded there. Election posters, graffiti and all kinds of notices – price lists, advertisements for gladiatorial games, shop signs – cover the walls. Much of the graffiti is of a familiar kind, from pleas for help (‘A bronze jar has gone from this shop. Reward of 65 sesterces for anyone returning it’) to laddish boasts (‘Here I fucked loads of girls’). But some of it conveys a more highbrow impression. We find, for example, over fifty quotations or adaptations from well-known classics of Latin literature, including lines of Virgil, Propertius, Ovid, Lucretius and Seneca, not to mention a snatch of Homer’s Iliad (in Greek). There are also many other snatches of poetry, either original compositions from some Pompeian versifier or part of a more popular repertoire.

  68. Found in the House of Caecilius Jucundus, this bronze portrait may be the banker himself or perhaps, more likely, one of his extended family or ancestors. Either way, it is a vivid image of a middle-aged Pompeian, warts and all.

  Modern students of Latin who have been puzzled by that strange genre of Roman love poetry, which imagines the lover locked outside his girlfriend’s house, addressing his words of anguish to the closed door, will be amused to find just such a poem in Pompeii, actually written up in a doorway:

  Would I might hold around your neck my arms entwined

  And place kisses on your lovely lips ... etc.

  Critics have judged it a rather feeble poetic effort, probably a compilation of various misremembered lines of verse into a not entirely satisfactory whole. They have, moreover, found it hard to decide whether to take literally (or as further evidence of a botched job) the fact that the poem appears to be written by a woman to a woman.

  The recent fashion among historians and archaeologists has been to pour a good measure of cold water on the idea that, appealing and evocative though this material is, it demonstrates widespread literacy and high cultural aspirations among the populace in Pompeii. The snippets from the great works of literature make a strong impression at first sight. But if you look at them more closely you find that they tend to cluster suspiciously around the beginnings of works, or their most famous one-liners. So, for example, twenty-six of the thirty-six quotations from Virgil’s Aeneid are the first words of either the first or second book of the poem (and four more are the first words of the seventh or eighth books). This looks more like a familiarity with famous sayings than evidence of serious literary knowledge. The ability to scrawl on the walls ‘Arma virumque cano ...’, (‘Arms and the man, I sing ...’, Aeneid, I, I) no more indicates close acquaintance with the text of Virgil than ‘To be or not to be’ indicates close acquaintance with Shakespeare.

  There have also been doubts raised about quite how far below the elite the ability to read and write extended. It may be convenient to imagine that crude graffiti about sexual exploits were the work of the poorer and less cultured members of Pompeian society. But, in fact, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that the upper echelons of the town were beyond boasting about their conquests (and, for what it’s worth, one of the quotations from the Aeneid was actually found in the brothel). It has also been pointed out that many of the graffiti were not street writing at all, but were found on the inside walls of houses – rich houses at that, and not always very high up the wall. They were not written then by the average streetwalker, but by the members of wealthy families, and sometimes (to judge from the height) by the children.

  These are all important warnings against taking the literate veneer of Pompeii too much at face value. Yet to argue, as is now often done, that the ability to read and write did not extend much beyond the members of the town council, the rest of the male elite and a few trades- or craftsmen is not necessarily correct. The key here is not the graffiti, even though they are so appealing. Many of those may indeed have been scratched by wealthy kids. Nor is it in the election notices, which few people may have read or taken notice of. The key rather is the kind of documents we find in the dossier of Jucundus, or the carefully preserved loan agreement between Poppaea Note and Dicidia Margaris or the labels on the wine amphorae, recording where the stuff had come from and where it was to be delivered. From these it is clear that for many people well below the level of the wealthy inhabitants reading and writing must have been integral to the way they organised their lives, and to their ability to do their jobs and earn their living.

  The garum maker

  It is from the labels painted on various shapes and sizes of pottery containers, as well as from the mosaics in his atrium, that we can trace the garum business of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus and his family. Fish sauce was a staple of Roman cuisine and could be used as a condiment with almost everything. On the best, most optimistic interpretation, it may have been something similar to modern Far-Eastern sauces made from fermented fish (nuoc-mam from Vietnam, or nam-pla from Thailand). Alternatively it might have been a truly stinking concoction of rotten, salted seafood. The Romans seem to have shared our ambivalence about the product. In one squib, the first-century satirist Martial enjoys a laugh at a man called (ironically enough) Flaccus, who managed to get an erection even after his girlfriend had eaten six portions of garum. Elsewhere the same poet refers, apparently seriously, to the same substance as ‘noble’ or ‘lordly’. In general, there are plenty of ancient references to its pungent smell, like it or not.

  The process of manufacture mixed together pieces of seafood with salt and left it in a vat for a couple of months to ferment in the sun (in the kosher version (pp. 23–4), the maker presumably took particular care about exactly which pieces of seafood went into the mixture). Various different varieties of sauce were the result. The clear liquid that came to the top after the fermentation was the garum – though we do not know how that differed from the other term, liquamen, which is used. What was left in the bottom of the vats was allec, or sediment or lees, which could also be used in cooking. A brine known as muria was another side product. This main part of the manufacturing must have been carried out at Pompeii, for Pliny claims that the town was well known for its garum. But there is no sign of the equipment needed in the town itself. It was presumably done in large salt pans outside the city, near the coast. The garum shop within the city was concerned with distribution rather than production. The sauce was stored in bulk in six large dolia, then decanted – for sale at the front of the shop – into amphorae and other smaller vessels. Traces of allec, in the form of anchovy bones, have survived in the dolia.

  Umbricius Scaurus and his family certainly marketed, and probably made, all the various forms of fish sauce, carefully distinguished by the labels of the jars. These boasted of their top quality products with the usual hyperbole of a sales pitch: not just ‘best fish sauce’ (liquaminis flos), but ‘premium best fish sauce’ (liquaminis flos optimus) or ‘absolutely the best fish sauce’ (liquaminis floris flos); they also made a point of their pure-mackerel versions of garum, which were the most highly regarded by connoisseurs of this stuff. But the labels also give us a hint of the structure of trade and business connections that this family had. For some state clearly that the product was ‘from the manufactory of Scaurus’. Others refer, for example, to ‘the manufactory of Aulus Umbricius Abascantus’ or ‘the manufactory of Aulus Umbricius Agathopus’. These names suggest that the men in question had been slaves of Umbricius Scaurus and were now running workshops or other garum outlets that were still partly dependent on their old master. Other labels show that the Umbricii Scauri had other strings to their bow. One implies that they were also importing garum from Spain (the Roman world’s biggest mass producer of fish sauce) for resale in Pompeii.

  What is extraordinary about this garum business is the scale of the profit involved. The vast majority of the many trades and shops in Pompe
ii were small-scale and for most of those involved the profits would have been similarly modest, enough to survive and a little bit more. The amount of cash found with the corpses, or left (as it were) in the till, confirms this. It rarely goes above 1000 sesterces. But the size of the house and the quantity of his products surviving suggest that a small fortune was at stake. So far as we can tell, this family was not active or prominent in Pompeii before the first century CE. By the middle of the first century, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus had become rich on garum and his son of the same name had reached one of the highest offices in the local government of the town, as one of the two annual duoviri. He died early, before his father, and is commemorated in a memorial outside the Herculaneum Gate:

  In memory of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, son of Aulus, of the Menenian tribe, duumvir with judicial power. The town council voted the land for this monument and 2000 sesterces for his funeral and a statue on horseback to be put up in the Forum. His father Scaurus erected this to his son.

  This is not quite the lavish funding that they made available for the funeral of Marcus Obellius Firmus (pp. 3–4) at about the same time. But these are still grand honours being given to one of the most prominent men in the town. We should note, though, that if we did not have other evidence about the commercial activities of this family, we would never have guessed from the tombstone that the Umbricii Scauri were nouveaux riches, who had made their fortune out of rotten fish.

  This is one of the reasons why it is so hard to get to the bottom of the Roman economy and who, or what, made it tick.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHO RAN THE CITY?

  Vote, vote, vote

  The younger Aulus Umbricius Scaurus had done as well in the local politics of Pompeii as anyone might reasonably hope. He had been elected by his fellow citizens to serve for a year as one of the pair of duoviri, the ‘two men’ who were the most senior officials in the town. Although his tombstone does not mention it, he must earlier have been elected to the other annual office of ‘aedile’ (aedilis). For that junior position not only gave a man almost automatic entry to the local town council (the ordo of decurions) for life, but also allowed him to stand for the higher office. No one, in other words, could be duumvir (the correct singular form of duoviri) without having been an aedile first. Only one position in the town was more prestigious than that of the regular duoviri. Every five years the duoviri had the extra task of enrolling the new members of the council and updating the list of local citizens, a responsibility reflected in the special title duoviri quinquennales. These men were the really big figures in the town. One, whom we shall meet later in this chapter, had been duumvir five times, including two stints as quinquennalis. Successful as he was, Umbricius Scaurus had not reached those heights.

  The flavour of these annual Pompeian elections is vividly captured in the election posters, more than 2500 of them, painted in clear letters, red or black. These cover the outer walls of some houses, one overlapping the other, as the notices for each new year’s campaign were painted over those of the last. They cluster, unsurprisingly, on the main thoroughfares of the town, where they were likely to be spotted by the most people. But they are also to be found on tomb façades, even occasionally on the inside of large properties – such as the House of Julius Polybius, where there is a notice inside (as well as on the façade) urging support for Caius Julius Polybius to become duumvir.

  The notices conform to a fairly standard pattern. They give the name of the candidate and the position he seeks, aedile or duumvir (or they may even give the names of two candidates, who presumably had done a deal to run together as a team). They often, but not always, identify his supporters, and perhaps some reason for supporting him. ‘Please elect Popidius Secundus as aedile, an excellent young man’ or ‘Africanus and Victor are canvassing for Marcus Cerrenius to be aedile’ is the typical format. Occasionally, they even make a direct appeal to some potential voter: ‘Please elect Lucius Popidius Ampliatus, the son of Lucius, as aedile – that means you Trebius and Soterichus’.

  From time to time they give the names of the signwriters too, for it seems that the painting of these notices was an expert job. Altogether we have the names of almost thirty of these skilled propagandists, who no doubt sold their services for a fee. They were not full-time workers, of course. One member of a signwriting team identifies himself by his dayjob, as a fuller (‘Mustius, the fuller, did the whitewashing’). These men sometimes seem to have had a local ‘patch’. Aemilius Celer, for example, whom we spotted (p. 79) painting up an advertisement for a gladiatorial display ‘on his own by the light of the moon’, is found signing election notices, clustered in an area in the north of the city close to where he himself lived (to judge from another sign reading ‘Aemilius Celer lives here’). On one notice, urging support for Lucius Statius Receptus as duumvir, he signed off as ‘Aemilius Celer, his neighbour, wrote this’ and – obviously fearing that a rival group might turn up with a pot of paint or a handful of lime – he added this warning: ‘If you meanly blot this out, I hope you catch something nasty’. How any of these men chose the bit of wall on which to display their slogans we can only guess. But it must usually have been with the tacit agreement, at least, of the owner of the property concerned. If not, the risk was that those carefully painted words would have been painted over by the next day.

  Formulaic though the notices are, however, they do give all kinds of insights into the political life of Pompeii. The names of the supporters can tell their own occasionally curious story. Some appear to be simple personal recommendations, even if they were, likely as not, done at the gentle prompting of the candidate himself. A few appeal to Titus Suedius Clemens, the agent of the emperor Vespasian (pp. 48–9), who at one stage used his imperial position to influence (or meddle in) the town’s local government. They pointedly declare their candidate ‘backed by Suedius Clemens’. Others claim to speak for groups of the town’s citizens. The fullers, for example, the millers, the chicken-keepers, the grape-pickers, the mat-makers, the ointment-sellers, the fishermen, and the Isis-worshippers are all found parading their support for a particular candidate. A few of these groups are more enigmatic. Who are the ‘Campanienses’ who canvas for Marcus Epidius Sabinus to be aedile? Or the ‘Salinienses’ supporting Marcus Cerrinius?

  Here we are almost certainly getting a glimpse into the infrastructure of Pompeian voting organisation. The usual Roman method of conducting elections was to divide the total electorate into sub-groups. Each of these groups would vote amongst themselves to record a single group choice, and the winning candidate was the one who won the support of the majority of the groups. This is a system often compared unfavourably, for its complexity, to the simple mass-meeting show-of-hands adopted by the ancient Athenian democracy, but it is in fact much like the electoral system used by most modern states. In all likelihood the Campanienses and Salinienses, together with the Forenses and Urbulanenses found in other notices, refer to four voting groups, based on particular districts of the town, named perhaps after different city gates (we have already seen (p. 20) that what we call the Herculaneum Gate was for the ancient inhabitants the Porta Salis or Saliniensis). There would have been voting districts in the surrounding countryside too.

  On the day of the election, we must imagine that the local citizens would have turned up in the Forum, divided into their different districts, returned their district vote and then acclaimed as winning candidates those who had secured the votes of the majority of the districts. Exactly how they voted is not so clear, but almost certainly by some form of secret ballot. One ingenious recent suggestion is that the main purpose of the closing devices, still visible at the entranceways to the Forum, was to keep out those not qualified to vote on election days.

  All these voters were men. Leaving aside the occasional monarchy which produced a queen or two, there was no city or state in the Greek or Roman world that gave women any formal political power. Nowhere did women have the vote. But one of the surpris
ing facts about the electoral notices known in Pompeii is that more than fifty of them name a woman, or a group of women, as the candidate’s backers. Does this demonstrate an active interest from women in a political process from which they were excluded? In some cases, yes – even if it was not always a narrowly political engagement that was at stake. Taedia Secunda, for example, who put her name to Lucius Popidius Secundus’ attempt to win the office of aedile, was, as the electoral notice explicitly states, the man’s grandmother. On many other occasions family or personal loyalty must have been the reason for the women’s support. Nonetheless, the simple fact that it was felt worthwhile to parade their backing is another indication of the visibility of women in public life at Pompeii.

  But sometimes there might have been more to these slogans than at first meets the eye. Several women’s names are found on the outside wall of a bar on the Via dell’Abbondanza lending their support to different candidates: they were Asellina, Aegle, Zmyrina and Maria. It is a fair guess that these were the women who worked as the barmaids inside (the single names, two of them, Aegle and Zmyrina, decidedly Greek in origin, suggest that they were slaves). Maybe they had their favourite candidates and commissioned the local signwriters to display these preferences. Or maybe there is a joke, or a bit of negative propaganda, going on here. Some street-corner satirist, or political opponent, has arranged the usual kind of election notices – but inserted the local barmaids’ names as the supporters.