The most repeated graffito I know of in Pompeii is a complaint about how much graffiti there is in Pompeii.
Admiror, paries, te non cecidisse ruinis qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas.
I am amazed, wall, that you have not come down in ruins, holding up the tedium of so many writers. It is an elegiac distich, which is to say the man complaining about bad wall poetry wrote his complaint in verse. And it turns up three times in three different buildings, the Basilica, the Large Theatre and the Amphitheatre, catalogued as CIL IV 1904, 2461 and 2487. Somebody liked his joke enough to carry it round town and scratch it on three more walls.
A distinction first, because it matters. The painted notices, the election posters and the gladiator advertisements, were made by professionals with a brush and a ladder and they are a different kind of evidence. What I mean by the walls is the scratched stuff: a nail, a stylus, somebody's thumbnail in soft plaster.
CIL IV 1842, from the Basilica: C. Pumidius Dipilus heic fuit, followed by a date. Five days before the Nones of October, in the consulship of Lepidus and Catulus, which puts it on the third of October in 78 BC. Note heic for hic: the spelling dates it nearly as well as the consuls do. When the mountain came down, Dipilus's boast was a hundred and fifty six years old, and somebody had presumably been walking past it, unbothered, for most of that.
CIL IV 6702 manages the same job in four words: Aufidius hic fuit va(le). Aufidius was here, bye.
And my favourite of the useless ones, CIL IV 1714: itu reditu X passi DCXL. Going and coming back ten times, six hundred and forty paces. Somebody measured his own pacing and wrote the total on a wall. I find this more moving than most of the love poetry.
CIL IV 3948, on a bar wall:
Talia te fallant utinam mendacia, copo: tu vedes acuam et bibes ipse merum.
May such lies be the end of you, innkeeper: you sell water and drink the neat stuff yourself. Now look at the spelling. Copo for caupo, vedes for vendis, acuam for aquam. This is a man who can hold an elegiac couplet together and cannot spell water, which tells you he had heard a great deal of poetry and read very little of it. Every one of those errors is a phonetic fact about how Latin actually sounded in a Campanian bar, and every one would have been corrected out of existence if he had had an editor.
CIL IV 4957, on a wall at VIII.6.6, which older books keep filing under VIII.7.6:
Miximus in lecto. fateor, peccavimus, hospes. si dices quare, nulla matella fuit.
We wet the bed. I admit it, we did wrong, host. If you say "why": there was no pot. Also an elegiac couplet. Somebody woke up in a rented room, looked at the evidence, and reached for verse. And there is that quare again, the same word Catullus hangs an entire poem on, being used here for exactly what it is worth.
The walls are also extremely rude, and I am not going to transcribe most of it. Not out of delicacy. Sexual boasting has a small vocabulary in every century and most of it is dull. What survives better is the wanting.
CIL IV 2146, scratched in one room of an inn on the Vicolo di Eumachia: Vibius Restitutus hic solus dormivit et Urbanam suam desiderabat. Vibius Restitutus slept here alone and missed his Urbana. Third person, past tense, as though he were composing his own inscription while lying in it.
CIL IV 8258 and 8259, in a doorway at I.10.2, are three messages in a row: a weaver called Successus is in love with a barmaid called Iris, a rival called Severus writes on the wall to inform him that she does not care for him, Successus writes back, and Severus writes again. Two men conducting a quarrel about a woman in public, in writing, at the entrance to a bar. Nothing about the internet is new except the speed.
Then CIL IV 5296, found in 1888 on the corridor plaster of a house at IX.9.6, an area of seventy four by thirty eight centimetres:
O utinam liceat collo complexa tenere braciola et teneris oscula ferre labellis
Oh if only I could hold your little arms around my neck and put kisses on your soft little lips. The diminutives are doing all of the work: braciola, labellis. It runs on for several lines and gets to the lovers being divided by daylight. Some scholars think the writer was a woman. Graverini argues that this is the most reasonable assumption, in which case it is the only poem of its kind we have from the Latin speaking world. Others disagree, firmly. One wall, one uncertain hand, two camps: that is most of epigraphy.
Not all of it is feelings. CIL IV 5380 is a running list of what somebody bought over several days, and bread appears in it three times over: bread, coarse bread, and panem puero, bread for the slave boy. Three grades in one household, itemised and priced. The social structure of the town in a shopping list. @ferment/i-made-garum-for-six-months made me want the fish sauce line of that list very badly indeed. And the text is less settled than a printed CIL number makes it look: Paola Caruso and Heikki Solin published a new reading of 5380 in Vesuviana 8, in 2016.
Which brings me to why I put any of this in front of a class. My students believe Latin is a language with no mistakes in it, because every sentence they have ever been shown was written by a great author and then repaired by a modern editor. Nearly all of the Latin they meet was produced by men with land who were being paid to be eloquent. Then you write acuam on the board and something loosens in the room. The language stops being a machine for making them wrong. A man who could not spell built a working couplet on a bar wall about being cheated on his wine, and it is still legible, and he is still annoyed.