Pompeii Was the Roman Internet

Forget marble Latin for a moment. Forget Cicero's polished speeches and the textbook sentences about farmers praising their daughters. The first Latin most of us meet is too clean. It smells like chalk.

Pompeii smells like walls.

Before Vesuvius buried the city in 79 CE, its residents scratched messages into plaster nearly everywhere: names, jokes, insults, prayers, campaign slogans, declarations of love, gladiator fandom, and the ancient version of "I was here." Some of it is elegant. Some of it is crude. A surprising amount of it is tender. Almost all of it proves a quiet, durable fact about people: we have always wanted to be noticed.

Not the comic relief. The evidence.

It is tempting to treat graffiti as a footnote to "serious" Latin. It is closer to the opposite. Scratched walls are primary evidence for how widely ordinary people could read and write, for how public space actually worked, and for the texture of humor, desire, rivalry, and politics in a real Roman town. The wall was a feed. The corridor was a thread. The city was talking to itself, out loud, in the language you can still learn.

The archive is still growing

In January 2026, a project called Bruits de couloir ("corridor noise"), led by researchers at the Sorbonne and the Université du Québec à Montréal together with the Pompeii Archaeological Park, published a fresh reading of the graffiti packed into a passage beside the city's theaters. Across two field campaigns, in 2022 and 2025, the team reinterpreted nearly 300 inscriptions. Seventy-nine of them had never been recorded before, including a declaration of love and a sketch of two gladiators.

The trick was light. Using Reflectance Transformation Imaging, the researchers photographed each surface dozens of times under shifting light, then let software reconstruct the shadows into a model they could relight from any angle. Marks too faint for the naked eye stepped forward. The comments section had survived all along. It just needed better lighting.

A whole world in three words

You do not need much Latin to feel at home on a Pompeian wall:

• amat, "he loves" or "she loves." The graffiti are full of love, and full of its complaints.
• hic, "here," as in hic fuimus, "we were here."
• vale, "farewell," literally "be well," the word you close with.

A name, a verb, a place. That is already a sentence. It is already a person reaching across two thousand years to say something to you directly, with no translator standing in between.

That is why PRAVIEL does not start you with Rome as a dead empire. It starts with Rome as a noisy street. Give a learner a wall, a name, and amat, and Latin stops being a monument and becomes what it always was: words that real people pressed into wet plaster because they wanted someone else to notice.

Sources

• Pompeii: international research project sheds light on unseen ancient graffiti (Sorbonne Université)
• "Bruits de couloir": Shedding new light on ancient graffiti (Pompeii Archaeological Park e-journal)
• Digital scans unveil new love notes and sketches on ancient Pompeii wall (Reuters)
• The Ancient Graffiti Project