SPEAKER_02: Hey, this is Jacob Pinner. I'm a producer here at Overheard, and today we've got something special for you. We're replaying one of our favorite episodes. It's all about Pompeii and the surprising insights you get from ancient graffiti. You know, we love to uncover clues from the past here at Overheard, maybe you've noticed. And we've got good news for archaeology buffs because you can read more about Pompeii in this book Nat Geo is releasing on November 2nd. It's called Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs, 100 Discoveries That Changed the World. And we're talking page after page of the most monumental archaeological finds ever. Pompeii's in there, obviously, discovery number 62, in fact. And for a more detailed preview of the book, you can check out the November issue of National Geographic magazine. Also, coming soon we'll have a brand new episode about another one of those great discoveries, the mysterious Cahokia Mounds, discovery number 82 in the book, by the way. Native Americans built these massive mounds near present-day St. Louis. We'll hear from researchers piecing together everyday life in Cahokia so they can understand how this sprawling Native American city just disappeared. Okay, on to Pompeii. Here's Peter.
SPEAKER_03: I remember this faded reference book when I was a kid. It was about Pompeii. It had photos of villas that were filled with colorful frescoes, stone walls, and marble columns. And there were also all these plaster-white figures frozen into all sorts of weird positions by the volcanic ash that buried the city. And for a long time I thought, that's Pompeii, done and dusted. I mean, people have been digging it up for centuries. By now we should know all there is to know about the city of Pompeii, right? Oh my gosh, Pompeii has so much more to offer us.
SPEAKER_03: Rebecca Benafield teaches Latin literature and Roman archaeology at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. And she says some of the most telling details about Pompeii are written all over the city's walls. Literally written.
SPEAKER_01: People didn't notice them for a while because ancient graffiti are really small.
SPEAKER_03: Really small, but also all over the place. People are writing everywhere. They're writing
SPEAKER_01: for their family and their friends and visitors.
SPEAKER_03: All that writing is bringing the people of Pompeii into focus like never before.
SPEAKER_01: What are they thinking about? What are they doing? What matters to them? This is something that we can use to see into the lived experience, to see what the Pompeians themselves were like.
SPEAKER_03: I'm Peter Gwynn, and this is Overheard at National Geographic, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, the social media of ancient Pompeii. It took the form of words scratched into plaster walls, and today it's helping reveal some of Pompeii's secrets. More on that after the break.
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SPEAKER_03: Rebecca Benafield spends her summers scouring the walls of Pompeii for graffiti. She says most of the graffiti isn't very big. Think about handwriting on a Post-it note.
SPEAKER_01: We're talking about very delicate writing in most cases, and that to me was just so eye-opening, it made me realize, okay, our modern ideas about graffiti are nothing like what was going on in the first century.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, so no spray painting on subway cars and overpasses.
SPEAKER_01: Vandals and teenagers. Really, that's not what was going on in Pompeii. But it turns out it's not entirely separate from what was going on in Pompeii either.
SPEAKER_01: Graffiti is actually an adjective meaning scratched in Italian. And so graffiti was born as a technical term for scratched, handwritten inscriptions in Roman ruins. Oh wow. So the term itself actually comes from this place.
SPEAKER_03: It does. Oh my gosh, I had no idea. It does, it does. Rebecca says you can find ancient graffiti in other Roman cities, but Pompeii? It's a treasure trove thanks to Mount Vesuvius and its famous outburst in 79 A.D. Vesuvius is an ominous, ominous mountain and it's still incredibly dangerous.
SPEAKER_00: Kristen Romy is a colleague of mine here at Nat Geo who covers archaeology.
SPEAKER_00: We do have an account, an eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius written by a Roman named Pliny the Younger. Pliny the Younger didn't live in Pompeii. He lived on the other side of the Bay of Naples.
SPEAKER_03: But he watched the eruption while his uncle attempted to rescue people by boat. And then a few decades later he wrote letters to a Roman historian about what he witnessed that day. And Kristen has a copy of one.
SPEAKER_00: Then we saw the sea sucked back, apparently by an earthquake, and many sea creatures were left stranded on the dry sand. From the other direction over the land a dreadful black cloud was torn by gushing flames and great tongues of fire like much magnified lightning. And Kristen says for two days ash and volcanic rock rained down on Pompeii.
SPEAKER_00: If you came back to Pompeii after this eruption, you would see, you know, the Colosseum of Pompeii poking up above the ash. And then you might see some of these larger monuments, but then everything else, it's just a poisonous, dead landscape.
SPEAKER_03: Basically Pompeii was erased from the map for a long, long time. The first big archaeological digs didn't start until the 1800s. And it wasn't until the end of that century that a German archaeologist wrote a book that brought Pompeii to the masses. Rebecca Benafiel says it was translated into a bunch of languages. And in that book, towards the very end, he has a small chapter on graffiti and he says,
SPEAKER_01: you know, the graffiti generally don't give us much information because the type of people who would scroll their name on walls are not the type of people that we're interested in. And so there's this idea that we really are interested in the elites of town, kind of the leading citizens, the ones who have the nice homes with the good art.
SPEAKER_03: That was the thinking back then, but not anymore.
SPEAKER_01: Right now people are also interested in knowing what was the entire population like. We're no longer at that point where we say, well, let's just not study anyone who was poor.
SPEAKER_03: And Rebecca says there's all these discoveries that have been ignored. Unlike other Roman ruins, when Pompeii was rediscovered, it still had its plaster walls. In the fancy villas, they were covered with colorful frescoes of food and ancient gods and myths. But even the less fancy homes had drawings on the plaster.
SPEAKER_01: We get drawings of gladiators and sometimes you have gladiators labeled with their name and their record of wins. Kind of like the stats on a baseball card.
SPEAKER_03: And when you draw a gladiator, you don't just draw a little person.
SPEAKER_01: You draw a gladiator with the particular type of equipment that he held because every gladiator had a particular type of equipment. So did they have a short round shield? Did they have the net and the trident? Did they have a curved sword or a straight sword? But Rebecca says there's something for everyone on the walls of Pompeii.
SPEAKER_03: From sports to politics to religion, people wrote all kinds of stuff. So the graffiti include prayers to the gods. They include quotations of literature.
SPEAKER_01: So we get a lot of the opening lines of Virgil's Aeneid. They include grocery lists, which often are very helpful because they include prices next to the products. They sometimes include math problems. They include a lot of messages about family. So Cessus writes to his brother and sends him lots of loving greetings.
SPEAKER_03: Nat Geo's Kristin Romy has a favorite, and it's not a loving greeting. On the wall, in the exterior wall of the tavern, some disgruntled customer wrote,
SPEAKER_00: Don't drink the wine here. It's watered down. Go down the road.
SPEAKER_03: It's like a Yelp review right there on the wall. Exactly. Kristin says one of the weirdest examples of graffiti she's come across is from a site buried near Pompeii. And it was written by this guy Apollinaris, and he says, I am Apollinaris. I am the doctor of the emperor Titus.
SPEAKER_00: I defecated very well here. It was on the wall of the latrine. What is Apollinaris?
SPEAKER_03: Apollinaris was a doctor. He was a doctor for the Roman emperor, and he took the time to carve into the wall of the latrine that he had a particularly enjoyable stay.
SPEAKER_00: That is bizarre.
SPEAKER_03: And to our minds, it is bizarre.
SPEAKER_00: This is like Roman social media. You've got bad wine reviews. You've got a guy saying that this is a good latrine.
SPEAKER_03: But the other interesting thing is if you're looking at who identifies themselves in this graffiti, we've got graffiti from people that we wouldn't assume were literate.
SPEAKER_03: People like women and Roman slaves. Rebecca Benefiel says this next one was written outside of a theater in Pompeii. It says, Metha, the slave of Caminia, loves Crestus. May Pompeian Venus be propitious in her heart to both, and may these two always live harmoniously.
SPEAKER_03: A prayer written by a slave. Rebecca says she started telling other scholars about this, and they found it hard to believe.
SPEAKER_01: It was just, I think, so hard for people to think, well, no, why would a woman be writing, and why would a slave be writing? But I think it was more problematic that a woman would be writing, and so people were like, but how can we say this? How can we prove this? Maybe by showing that it wasn't just one woman writing.
SPEAKER_01: We can look and see, actually, you know, there are a couple of hundred graffiti where women are writing. In fact, everybody seemed to be writing on the walls. Rich people, poor people, slaves, women, men, even people just passing through Pompeii.
SPEAKER_03: Rebecca says that's the magic of the graffiti.
SPEAKER_01: It shows you how human the Pompeians and visitors to Pompeii were, and that's kind of really the thing that sends shivers down my spine about studying this graffiti, is that these are real people. I think that's what the graffiti do. They help us envision the ancient city full of life, and full of people who are sharing their thoughts, and often communicating with each other. It really shows us people living together and writing to each other and sharing moments. And that sounds a lot like us. We're still sharing our thoughts all over the place.
SPEAKER_03: Scholars have gained all sorts of insights into daily life from the graffiti in Pompeii, but Rebecca says the graffiti, it's fragile.
SPEAKER_01: So they were scratched in very small letters on plaster, and if that plaster is exposed to sun and rain, it eventually crumbles. And that's one of the saddest things. One of the trips I went when I was working on my dissertation, I went to Pompeii looking for this one wall. And I found the wall, but it was in fragments and plaster dust on the floor, because it's plaster, and especially if you get these hard freezes, the plaster detaches from the wall. It's not meant to be forever. That's why Rebecca and her students spend their summers documenting as much graffiti as they can, and they post it in an online database which anyone can access.
SPEAKER_03: But some of the graffiti that's been found isn't scratched in plaster. There are new digs going on in Pompeii right now, and the site's director posted a recent discovery on Instagram. So it was written in charcoal, which is essentially like us writing in pencil.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, even more fragile than the graffiti scratched in plaster.
SPEAKER_01: You could erase charcoal very easily. All you had to do was essentially kind of brush against it or wipe your hand against it, and charcoal disappears. Rebecca says hardly any charcoal inscriptions survive because it's just too easy to erase.
SPEAKER_03: But this one did survive, which means it probably wasn't written too long before Mount Vesuvius erupted. And that's sparking a lot of interesting conversation.
SPEAKER_01: Because it has a date in it. October 17th, but no year.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, so here's why that date could matter. Remember those letters from Pliny the Younger about the eruption? Scholars relied on copies of those letters for the date of the eruption, August 24th. But a lot of archaeological material that has been studied and found would suggest that we should probably be looking later in the fall.
SPEAKER_01: Because you have things like grapes and pomegranates that have recently been harvested, and you don't harvest grapes in August. You harvest grapes usually in late September and October. And when we look at the clothes that the victims are wearing in Pompeii, it looks like they're wearing pretty heavy clothes that you wouldn't want to be wearing in Pompeii in August.
SPEAKER_03: So there was some evidence that maybe Mount Vesuvius didn't erupt in the summer, but instead in the fall. And then this graffiti is discovered dated mid-October, written in charcoal. Ephemeral charcoal. And some people think that means it was written the same year of the eruption, and then buried and preserved in volcanic ash for another 2,000 years, before it was found just recently. Do you think this is the smoking gun? Is this sort of like, does this put the stamp on it? We really, okay, later date for explosion. I think we have...
SPEAKER_01: I'm putting you on the spot here. I'm totally putting you on the spot. I think we have a lot of evidence, and I love when it all comes together. And I think this is a puzzle piece, and it is another piece of the puzzle that does suggest there's a lot of evidence that's, yes, going for a later date.
SPEAKER_03: You're totally hedging here. Come on. No, I'm teasing you. I'm teasing you. But that's fascinating. So what other pieces would we need for you to be more certain? Is it the kind of thing we could ever be certain? I think that academics and scholars tend to speak in probabilities, and I'll say there's a high probability now. I think we have a lot of evidence that points to a later date.
SPEAKER_03: So you mentioned this, that there's a date, but what does the actual inscription itself say? So the actual graffito itself is not hugely illuminating beyond the date, but essentially it says that on this date in October, someone overindulged in food.
SPEAKER_01: He ate too much. So it's the sort of thing... You're kidding. That's the thing. I am not. I am not. We are hedging the discovery of the new date of Vesovius' eruption on a guy who had indigestion.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, or maybe he ate too much. He was just a big old glutton.
SPEAKER_03: Archaeologists are still debating just how long before the volcanic eruption this gluttonous graffiti was written. And while it may not be definitive proof that Vesovius exploited in the autumn instead of in the summer, it does add one more piece to the puzzle that is Pompeii, a place I thought we'd figured out a long time ago. Only to discover there's so much more to learn. Who knows what else is in Pompeii? Still buried or scratched on its walls? Just waiting for somebody to come along and pay attention. More after the break. Check out the graffiti Rebecca Benafield has been documenting. And we also have some tips about how to stay safe if you ever find yourself near an erupting volcano. You'll find the links in our show notes. And if you want another story about Roman ruins left after a natural disaster, check out Digging Up Disaster, our episode about Caesarea and its lost harbor.
SPEAKER_03: Overheard at National Geographic is produced by Emma Jacobs, Robin Miniter, Brian Gutierrez, and Jacob Pinter. Our senior producers are Kristen Clark and Janae West. Ibi Caputo edits Overheard. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Our deputy director of podcasts is Emily Ochsenschlager. Hans Dale Su composed our theme music and engineers our episodes with additional help from Interface Media Group. Special thanks to Steve Ellis, Christina Milnor, Jacqueline DiBiase-Sammons, Emily Richardson-Lorente, and Kozuma Amelang. Overheard is a production of National Geographic Partners. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences. Susan Goldberg is our editorial director. And I'm your host Peter Guinn. Thanks for listening and see y'all next week.
