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I mean to tell you, he knew how to blow that thing
I am not dead. I seem to have spent the last two weeks solid interacting with people and I am now in hibernation. I spent Saturday at a cherry blossom viewing party at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kenjari's, Sunday at eredien's fantastically vegan Alice-in-Lud dinner. Yesterday I watched Séraphine (2008) with Viking Zen and it reminded me that I still haven't written up The Horse's Mouth (1958), which I saw in January and also loved. Or any of the plays I've seen since the weekend before last. Or the ballet. I did read some awesome graffiti in Latin.
Technically I found it last week when I was checking attestations of irrumo for a conversation withgrimmwire; I should have posted it then, but I am engaged in losing a game of catch-up with my life. It was scratched on a wall of the basilica at Pompeii:
NARCISSUS
FELLATOR
MAXIMUS
(CIL IV 1825a)
Quite possibly this is the best thing I've read off a wall in my life. Because on the one hand it's your basic for-a-good-time-call graffito: Narcissus [is] the greatest at sucking cock. But on the other, it's completely a parody of Roman tria nomina—praenomen, nomen, cognomen ± agnomen, Quintus Fabius Maximus, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Gaius Fuficius Fango,1 etc. Thus proving that if you could go back in time and show Monty Python's Life of Brian to a Roman audience in first-century Judaea, they might be a little confused by the alien abduction,2 but they'd think Biggus Dickus was hilarious.
1. My favorite Roman name, belonging to one of the great sad gits of the ancient world: the Octavian-appointed governor of Africa in 41 BCE who famously mistook a passing herd of hartebeest for enemy cavalry (being engaged at the time in a territorial skirmish with Titus Sextius, Antony's preferred candidate for the job) and committed suicide. I have no reason to believe I would have approved of his politics or liked him in person, but if I ever start keeping more of a household shrine than three coins, a Yule goat, and a shipwrecked glass bottle, I may light candles for him or something, if only apotropaically. His cognomen is Oscan for "mud."
2. Of course, modern audiences are, too.
kenjari's, Sunday at eredien's fantastically vegan Alice-in-Lud dinner. Yesterday I watched Séraphine (2008) with Viking Zen and it reminded me that I still haven't written up The Horse's Mouth (1958), which I saw in January and also loved. Or any of the plays I've seen since the weekend before last. Or the ballet. I did read some awesome graffiti in Latin. Technically I found it last week when I was checking attestations of irrumo for a conversation with
grimmwire; I should have posted it then, but I am engaged in losing a game of catch-up with my life. It was scratched on a wall of the basilica at Pompeii:NARCISSUS
FELLATOR
MAXIMUS
(CIL IV 1825a)
Quite possibly this is the best thing I've read off a wall in my life. Because on the one hand it's your basic for-a-good-time-call graffito: Narcissus [is] the greatest at sucking cock. But on the other, it's completely a parody of Roman tria nomina—praenomen, nomen, cognomen ± agnomen, Quintus Fabius Maximus, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Gaius Fuficius Fango,1 etc. Thus proving that if you could go back in time and show Monty Python's Life of Brian to a Roman audience in first-century Judaea, they might be a little confused by the alien abduction,2 but they'd think Biggus Dickus was hilarious.
1. My favorite Roman name, belonging to one of the great sad gits of the ancient world: the Octavian-appointed governor of Africa in 41 BCE who famously mistook a passing herd of hartebeest for enemy cavalry (being engaged at the time in a territorial skirmish with Titus Sextius, Antony's preferred candidate for the job) and committed suicide. I have no reason to believe I would have approved of his politics or liked him in person, but if I ever start keeping more of a household shrine than three coins, a Yule goat, and a shipwrecked glass bottle, I may light candles for him or something, if only apotropaically. His cognomen is Oscan for "mud."
2. Of course, modern audiences are, too.
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What is a yule goat, and how do you fit it in your household shrine?Sorry--I was guilty just then of posting before checking Wikipedia and the Internet at large. Now I know!
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This one is watercolor on cardstock;
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Cool. Now I really want to know how the joke-Roman names are translated in other versions of the film.
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Optime.
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---L.
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He doesn't seem to be well-known; he rates a mention in Cassius Dio and Cicero's Epistulae ad Atticum and there is a debatable emendation to Catullus 54 that might be his name; otherwise no one knows him from Fufluns. I feel this situation should be remedied.
His name -- it's so ... fluffy. It's like the name you'd give to a Roman mascot for a brand of marshmallows.
It's a lot of fun to say.
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They weren't identical to us. People at the beginning of the twentieth century weren't identical to us. (And us, of course, is an immensely relative concept.) But they weren't different in the ways we're brought up to believe, I think.
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Oh, yeah. People will always chalk stuff on walls.
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Absolutely. Fellator is an insult as well as a trade description; graffiti of this type could be real advertisements or praise for the services of a prostitute (likelier for inscriptions found inside the lupanar or specifying a price, although the latter doesn't exclude the your-mom-does-it-for-five-dollars school of communication) or they could be exactly what you read in bus stations. I mean, I have no idea how to interpret this one:
Isidorum aedilum oro vos faciatis
optime cunnlincet
(CIL IV 1383)
Vote Isidorus for aedile
He licks cunt the best
But I think it's brilliant that it exists. It's like finding out that classical statues were painted.
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I think you are completely right about them being amused by Life of Brian.
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The ending might leave a Plautus-expecting audience a little nonplussed, but you can go home humming it . . .
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"Gnor am I in the least like that dreadful hartebeest..."
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"Call me bison or okapi and I'll sue!"
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Thanks for sharing the amusing Latin grafitti. And I'd never heard of Gaius Fuficius Fango--I'm glad to have learnt of him now.
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You're welcome. I just wish I could get Kate Beaton to make a cartoon of him.
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Maybe she has an e-mail address . . .
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She definitely should. If there's ever any sort of a petition, let me know and I'll sign it.
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I saw! I am absolutely going to watch it, and have informed my parents of the same.
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the Equitai Gaius Cassius Scipio (Sir John Fall Staff)
Correus Cordialis (Corey Hart)
Viridovix Saggitus (Green Archer)
...as well as a priestess of Dionysus named Vertica Thyrsopher (cue the Horizonta jokes) and a pair of Mithraist lawyers named Tauricus and Scipio who founded a Mithraeum. After the campaign, a real Mithraeum was discovered in the region with images of Taurus and Scorpio in it...
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That rocks.
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Three weeks later Heaven's Gate hit the headlines. We said, "Jim, what did you do?" He said, "That would be telling."
I'm running a Lovecraftian game set in 18th-century Venice and I cannot make shit up. Historical research yields more evidence of horrible supernatural goings-on than I could have come up with on my own as a game master...
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So, share?
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Whichever is most convenient for you?
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Also, my friend
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You, too! Are you likely to be at Tea on Sunday?
Also, my friend orichalcum is an expert on Roman prostitutes -
Okay, that's awesome.
I wonder if she's encountered this piece of graffiti in her research.
It's just in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Roman graffiti makes me very happy.
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