I mean to tell you, he knew how to blow that thing

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

The thing I loved most about my one year of high school Latin was the pains our teacher took to show us that the Romans were pretty much just like us, and that human beings are pretty much the same bastards no matter how far back in time you go, and will be laughing at poop jokes when the final trumpet (or space rock) sounds. They're comforting, those poop jokes.

[sovay]

that the Romans were pretty much just like us, and that human beings are pretty much the same bastards no matter how far back in time you go, and will be laughing at poop jokes when the final trumpet (or space rock) sounds. They're comforting, those poop jokes.

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.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

True, but there are comforting similarities.

[sovay]

True, but there are comforting similarities.

Oh, yeah. People will always chalk stuff on walls.