12/27/2023 0 Comments Pompeii graffitiJeffrey (edd.) Women Writing Latin From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge): 67-83. (2002) “Women's Graffiti from Pompeii,” in Laurie Churchill, Phyllis R. (1988) “The Social Structure of the Roman House,” Papers of the British School at Rome, 56: 43-97. Levick (eds.), Women in Antiquity: New Assessments (London: Routledge ):194-206.Varone, A. (1995) ‘Women and elections in Pompeii,’ in R. Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory. (2005) Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life. (1960) Loves and Lovers in Ancient Pompeii: A Pompeian Erotic Anthology. Jashemski (New Rochelle, 1988): 1-18.Della Corte, M. Curtis (ed.), Studia Pompeiana and Classica In Honor of Wilhelmina F. (1988) ‘Pompeian Women and the Programmata,’ in R.I. (2010) ‘Dialogues of Ancient Graffiti in the House of Maius Castricius in Pompeii,’ AJA 114: 59-101.Bernstein, F. By making a careful study of female-authored romantic graffiti in Pompeii, I demonstrate that both matrons and non-elite women, perhaps even slaves, participated actively in the written social conversations of Roman life and used inscriptions to declare both love and hatred for their sexual partners. 8824, another domestic inscription in which a presumably slave female writer rejects her master’s attempt to call her “domina.” Within the public sphere, I examine the motivation behind public accusations of impregnation (CIL IV 10231) as well as women’s public denunciations of men for poor romantic behavior. quanti quantque VIR VEN.orum.” - ‘I don’t want to sell my husband for any price.’ This text, CIL IV.3061, serves as an excellent foundation for a discussion of intended authorship and audience. If we argue that the owners of the household wrote all these texts, why did they choose to immortalize publicly their relationship with their own slaves or their extramarital affairs with prostitutes? In house VII 2, 51 in Pompeii, a partially preserved graffito reads: “Virum Vendere Nolo meom. We must significantly adapt our theories of Roman interfamilial dynamics to imagine literate slaves writing erotic graffiti to or about each other or to their masters on the walls of their masters’ homes. What would cause a woman to announce a love or pregnancy in the basilica or the necropolis, and to whom was she writing?Graffiti within the home also raise questions concerning interactions between slaves and family members. If the graffiti found in public locations like the Pompeian basilica or on tombstones are authored by respectable wives, however, we must expand our notions of acceptable public spaces for women and their acts in such places. In the first case, the literacy of both Roman prostitutes themselves and of their expected audience of clients is quite remarkable. In this paper I focus particularly on graffiti about private relationships, as women’s inscriptions about elections and economic issues have already been exhaustively analyzed (Bernstein 1998 Savunen 1995).Past scholarship, especially that of Antonio Varone (1994) and Elizabeth Woeckner (2002) has generally presumed that public female romantic or sexual statements are all authored by prostitutes or other non-elite working women like the innkeeper Hedone, whereas domestic texts are authored by wives and addressed to their husbands. By considering the authors and audience of these texts, I reshape scholarly understanding of the Roman sense of privacy and provide insight into the question of ancient female literacy (Wallace-Hadrill 1988, Milnor 2006). Female-authored graffiti reveal the daily lives and experiences of Roman women, particularly when we examine the physical context of the text and contrast domestic and public graffiti. While perhaps less elegant than the poems of Sulpicia or Sappho, Pompeian graffiti from the first century CE can offer a rare glimpse at non-elite Roman women’s feelings and attitudes. The most intractable problem in the feminist study of the ancient Mediterranean world is the lack of ancient female perspective in surviving texts.
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