Imagine finding a two-thousand-year-old Tweet.
Not carved in marble by some emperor. Not written on expensive papyrus by wealthy senators. But scratched into a bathroom wall by someone who had too much wine and a sharp object.
“Secundus likes to screw boys.”
That’s a real inscription. Found in Pompeii. Written sometime before 79 AD.
And here’s the thing: it’s not the only one. The ancient Romans left behind tens of thousands of these messages. On tavern walls. Inside houses. Along busy streets. Some were political ads. Some were love letters. Many were just incredibly vulgar.
But here’s what nobody tells you about these ancient scribblings: they show something that every history book gets completely wrong about Rome. Because while historians spent centuries studying what emperors and aristocrats SAID they did, the graffiti tells us what ordinary people actually THOUGHT.
And the truth? It’s shocking. It’s hilarious. And it completely changes how we understand one of history’s greatest civilizations.
This is the story of Roman graffiti, the social media feed that survived two millennia. And what it shows about ancient Rome is something the elite never wanted anyone to know.
The Walls That Remember Everything
August 24th, 79 AD.
Mount Vesuvius erupts with a force that would make modern nuclear weapons look tame. The city of Pompeii, a bustling Roman town of about 20,000 people, is buried under 20 feet of volcanic ash in less than 24 hours.
Everyone knows this story.
But here’s what they don’t tell you: that ash didn’t just kill Pompeii. It preserved it. Perfectly. Like hitting pause on an entire civilization.
When archaeologists first started excavating in the 1700s, they expected monuments. Temples. Statues. The usual stuff that screams “Look how civilized we were!”
What they found instead was this:
“I screwed a lot of girls here.”
“The finance officer was here.”
“Lovers, like bees, lead a honey-sweet life.”
The walls were COVERED in writing. Tens of thousands of inscriptions. And not the fancy kind. The walls contained scratched, scrawled, and painted messages from regular people. Merchants. Soldiers. Bakers. Even slaves.
The scholars who discovered this needed a name for it. They called it “graffiti,” from the Italian graffiato, meaning “scratched.” But that word doesn’t capture what they’d really found.
They’d discovered ancient Rome’s internet.
Think about it. No printing press. No newspapers. No phones. If you wanted to communicate with your city, you had exactly one option: walls. Public walls. Private walls. Any wall that people might see.
And the Romans used them for EVERYTHING.
They used them to run for office. To advertise gladiator fights. To declare their love. To settle scores. To crack jokes. To complain about terrible service.
One guy literally wrote a Yelp review: “We pissed in the bed—I admit it, we were wrong, innkeeper. If you ask, ‘Why?’ there was no chamber pot.”
But here’s where it gets really interesting. The Romans had a whole system for this.
If you wanted to be official (to announce a political campaign or advertise your gladiator games), you hired a professional. They’d paint your message in big, bold letters using red ochre or charcoal. These were called dipinti. Think of them as billboards.
But if you just had something to SAY? You grabbed a nail, a stylus, or anything sharp, and you scratched it into the plaster yourself. These personal, spontaneous, unfiltered marks were graffiti, lowercase ‘g’.
The same wall might have an official announcement about the upcoming election painted in huge letters at the top, and twenty feet below, someone had scratched: “Chios, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much they hurt worse than they ever have before!”
Yes. That’s real. And yes, someone in ancient Rome REALLY hated Chios.
But wait—it gets better.
What The Walls Said (And Why It Matters)
Let’s talk about literacy.
For centuries, historians assumed that ancient Rome was like medieval Europe. Only the rich could read and write. Maybe 5-10% of the population. Everyone else? Illiterate.
The graffiti proved them spectacularly wrong.
Because you can’t have tens of thousands of wall inscriptions in one city if only the elite can write. The math doesn’t work.
And here’s the smoking gun: the handwriting is terrible.
No, really. We have examples of people misspelling their own names. Getting grammar wrong. Phonetically sounding out words. Professional scribes didn’t produce this. These are regular people who learned just enough to get their thoughts down.
A soldier scratched: “On April 19th, I made bread.”
That’s it. That’s the whole message. Why did he write it? Because he COULD. Because he was proud. Because he wanted to mark the moment.
Think about the implications. Women wrote on walls. Slaves wrote on walls. We have examples of street vendors keeping accounts and children practicing their ABCs on WALLS.
The Roman world was far more literate than anyone imagined. And they were using walls the way we use social media.
So what were they saying?
Politics: “Vote for Lucius Popidius Sabinus—his grandmother worked hard to get him elected.”
Wait—his grandmother? Imagine that campaign slogan today. But in Pompeii, family connections mattered. And they weren’t afraid to advertise them, even if it meant admitting grandma was pulling strings.
Or this one: “The petty thieves support Vatia for mayor.”
That’s not FROM the thieves. That’s an opponent’s attack ad. Roman politics was brutal. And hilarious.
Commerce: “Wine jars! Going cheap! No tasting allowed!”
“A copper pot has gone missing from this shop. A reward will be given for its return.”
Classified ads. Lost and found notices. Business promotions. The walls functioned as Craigslist.
Love and Lust: This is where it gets interesting.
“Health to you, Victoria, and wherever you are, may you sneeze sweetly.”
That’s actually adorable.
But then you have: “Restituta, take off your tunic and show us your hairy privates.”
Less adorable. Significantly less.
The Romans did not hold back. We have love declarations, pick-up lines, boasts about sexual conquests, and insults about rivals’ bedroom performance. All in public. All permanent.
Someone wrote: “I don’t want to sell my husband, even though he’s cheap.”
Marriage counseling, Roman style.
Literature and Learning: Here’s something that would shock most people. You can find parodies of famous literature on tavern walls.
Someone took a line from Virgil’s Aeneid (Rome’s greatest epic poem) and changed “I sing of arms and the man” to “I sing of the tavern keeper and the price of wine.”
That’s not an illiterate person. That’s someone educated enough to know Virgil and cheeky enough to mock him. In a bar.
But the graffiti also shows something darker.
We have messages from slaves. People with no legal rights. No property. No freedom. And they wrote things like: “Successus the cloth weaver loves Iris, the slave girl of Caesius. But she doesn’t love him back. Still, he begs her to take pity on him.”
Read that again. A slave, in love with another slave, pouring his heart out on a wall because he had no other way to be heard.
This goes beyond history. This is humanity.
The Democracy of Defacement
Now here’s where the story takes a turn.
Because what made Roman graffiti different from today’s graffiti isn’t just the content. It’s how society viewed it.
In modern cities, graffiti is vandalism. It’s illegal. You get arrested. It’s associated with urban decay and crime. There’s even a whole theory (the “Broken Windows Theory”) that says visible graffiti leads to more serious crime.
But in Rome? It was Tuesday.
There’s no evidence that Romans tried to stop people from writing on walls. No laws against it. No punishment. In fact, they seem to have just accepted it as part of urban life.
Think about what that means.
A slave could write on the same wall as a senator. A woman could respond to a political message. A child could practice letters next to an advertisement for gladiator fights.
The walls were the one genuinely democratic space in a deeply hierarchical society.
And this wasn’t limited to Pompeii. We find similar graffiti across the Roman world. In Rome itself. In military camps along Hadrian’s Wall. In Egypt. In Syria.
Wherever Romans went, they wrote on walls. It was their culture.
But Pompeii is special because of what happened next. Or rather, what DIDN’T happen next.
The city was frozen. No one came back to paint over the graffiti. No one cleaned the walls. No one “developed” the property. For 1,700 years, those messages sat undisturbed under volcanic ash.
And when we finally uncovered them, we got something historians almost never have: an unfiltered snapshot of daily life.
Because think about what usually survives from ancient civilizations. Monuments. Official inscriptions. Literature written by the wealthy. These sources tell us what the powerful WANTED us to know.
But graffiti? Graffiti tells us what people ACTUALLY thought.
The Voices From Below
Let me tell you about Secundus.
Remember him? From the opening? “Secundus likes to screw boys.”
We don’t know who wrote that. We don’t know if it was true. But we know Secundus was real because his name appears in multiple places in Pompeii. Sometimes in official records. Sometimes in casual graffiti.
And that’s what makes this so powerful. The graffiti gives us names. Individual humans. Not statistics. Not “the lower classes.” Actual people.
“Rufus loves Cornelia.”
“Sabinus was here with Primigenia.”
“Pyrrhus to his colleague Chius: I’m sorry to hear you are dead, and so, goodbye.”
That last one breaks my heart every time. An ordinary person mourning an ordinary friend in the most informal way possible. But he needed to write it down. He needed someone to know.
History usually erases these voices.
Women, for instance.
The official Roman literature (written almost exclusively by men) tells us women were quiet, submissive, confined to the home. The ideal woman was modest, silent, and obedient.
The walls tell a different story.
“Atimetus got me pregnant.”
She wasn’t silent. She was loud. She was public. She named her baby’s father for the whole city to see.
Or this: “Cornelia is in love with Rufus.”
Maybe Cornelia wrote that herself. Maybe someone else did. Either way, her name and her feelings were considered worthy of public record.
We have examples of women running businesses, owning property, participating in politics, all preserved in graffiti when the formal histories barely mention them.
Then there are the freedmen, former slaves who had been manumitted.
In the formal literature, they’re mostly invisible. When they appear at all, they’re often mocked by aristocratic authors who resented their wealth and social climbing.
But the walls tell us they were fully integrated into the social fabric of the city. They wrote. They loved. They complained. They made jokes.
“Felix the freed slave lived here.”
He wanted you to know his status. He was PROUD. His identity mattered enough to proclaim it.
Then there’s this one: “Marcus Aurelius Agatho, freedman of Marcus, living at the shop of Marcus Aurunculeius Saturninus, linen weaver of Pompeii, salutes Marcus Fuluius Eutychus.”
This was more than a greeting. It’s a complete social map: his patron, his business, his relationships. He’s announcing: I EXIST. I MATTER. I have connections.
And perhaps most telling: the humor.
Because you know what the elite Roman authors almost NEVER did? Make jokes.
But the walls? The walls are FULL of them.
“Weep, girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”
“On September 3rd, I gave my cloak to be washed. On September 7th, I gave a tunic and a towel.”
Why did someone write the second one? Was he tracking his laundry? Was he mocking how boring his life was? Was he making sure the laundry service didn’t scam him?
We’ll never know. But that uncertainty is EXACTLY the point.
Raw. Unfiltered. Human. That’s what these messages are.
When The Walls Went Silent
79 AD. Pompeii is buried.
But the practice of writing on walls didn’t die with the city. It continued across the Roman Empire for centuries.
Until it didn’t.
As the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, so did the urban infrastructure. Cities shrank. Literacy declined. The materials and techniques for making durable plaster walls became rare.
But more importantly: the whole SYSTEM changed.
Christianity spread, bringing new ideas about what was public and what was private. The Church became the primary educator and controller of literacy. Writing became more formalized, more controlled.
And as Europe entered the Middle Ages, public wall-writing largely disappeared from the historical record. It didn’t vanish entirely (we have some medieval examples) but it was never again the widespread, integrated practice it had been in Rome.
It would take nearly 2,000 years for something similar to emerge.
Philadelphia. 1960s. A teenager named Darryl McCray starts writing “Cornbread” all over the city.
New York. 1970s. Subway cars become moving canvases for an explosion of tags and murals.
Los Angeles. 1980s. Street art becomes intrinsically linked with hip-hop culture.
Modern graffiti was born. But it was born into a completely different world.
Because now? It was illegal. Subversive. Countercultural.
The very act that had been normal civic participation in Rome became an act of rebellion. Why?
Technology changed everything. The printing press meant you didn’t NEED walls to share ideas. You could publish. Radio. Television. And eventually, the internet.
Suddenly, walls weren’t the only option. They became the ALTERNATIVE option. The rebellious option.
Property laws became stricter. Public space became commercialized. The act of writing on a wall without permission became “vandalism” and “defacement.”
Modern graffiti artists don’t sign their real names. They invent tags and pseudonyms to avoid arrest. Banksy remains anonymous. THAT would be inconceivable to a Roman.
And yet the impulses remain exactly the same.
“Kilroy was here,” scratched by American GIs across World War II battlefields, is the direct descendant of “Gaius was here” from Pompeii.
The love declarations. The insults. The political statements. The jokes. The simple need to say “I EXIST.” It’s all still there.
We just criminalized it.
What The Walls Still Tell Us
So what does it all mean?
For over a century, scholars dismissed these ancient scribblings. Plutarch, a Roman author, called them “useless and ridiculous.” Just people writing that they “remember so-and-so.”
And he was right. They WERE writing that they remembered people. That they existed. That they loved, hated, joked, complained, and lived.
Far from useless, this captures everything.
Because here’s what the graffiti of Pompeii actually gives us: a time machine.
Not to the Rome of emperors and marble columns. But to the Rome of actual human beings. People who worried about their laundry. Who fell in love. Who made terrible jokes. Who got into petty arguments. Who wanted to be remembered.
The official histories tell us about wars and politics and great deeds.
The graffiti tells us about life.
And in doing so, it shows truths that the elite histories tried to hide:
That literacy was widespread enough for thousands to participate in public discourse.
That women had more agency and voice than formal literature suggests.
That slaves and freedmen were active participants in urban culture.
That Roman society was more vibrant, more diverse, more HUMAN than the marble-statue version we’ve been sold.
One message reads: “Nothing can last forever.”
Another: “Everyone writes on the walls but me.”
And perhaps my favorite: “If you are able, but not willing, why do you delay?”
That last one was found in a bedroom. We can only imagine what it meant. But the ambiguity and mystery make it powerful.
The messages were meant for the moment. For the person who walked by tomorrow. Next week. That’s all.
And yet they survived. While empires fell and emperors were forgotten, these humble scratches in plaster endured.
Closing
So the next time you see graffiti on a bathroom stall or a subway wall, don’t just see vandalism.
See the continuation of a tradition that stretches back millennia. See someone exercising the same fundamental human impulse that drove a Roman baker to endorse a politician, a soldier to commemorate his bread, and a lover to declare his feelings for someone who didn’t love him back.
The whispers on the walls of Pompeii reach beyond ancient history.
They’re proof that across the centuries, across cultures, across every social boundary humans have ever created, we share something profound:
The need to leave a mark. To say we were here. To speak our truth, even if only to strangers. To participate, to connect, to be HEARD.
The Romans understood something we’ve forgotten: that every voice matters enough to be written down. That the thoughts of ordinary people ARE history, not just footnotes to it.
They carved their lives into plaster with nails and stylus. We type ours into phones and post them into the void.
Same impulse. Different walls.
The only question is: what will survive from our era 2,000 years from now?
Will it be the official press releases? The carefully crafted corporate statements? The sanitized history books?
Or will it be our comments, our posts, our unfiltered thoughts? Our modern whispers on digital walls?
In the ruins of Pompeii, the answer is already written.
You just have to know where to look.