Pompeiisites.org reports on an interesting find:
Mummified remains, along with the hair and bones of an individual buried in an ancient tomb have been found at the necropolis of Porta Sarno, to the east of the ancient urban centre of Pompeii. On a marble slab located on the pediment of the tomb, a commemorative inscription to the owner Marcus Venerius Secundio makes reference, extraordinarily, to performances at Pompeii that were conducted in Greek, direct evidence of which has never before been found. […]
The figure of Marcus Venerius Secundio – who also appears in the wax tablet archive of the Pompeian banker Cecilius Giocondus, owner of the domus of the same name on Via Vesuvio – was a public slave and custodian of the Temple of Venus. Upon being freed, he reached a certain social and economic status, as can be understood from the rather monumental tomb, and the inscription: in addition to joining the ranks of the Augustales, or the college of priests dedicated to the Imperial Cult, as the epigraph recalls he “gave Greek and Latin ludi for the duration of four days”.
“Ludi graeci are to be understood as performances in the Greek language”, – observes the Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Gabriel Zuchtriegel – “It is the first clear evidence of performances at Pompeii in the Greek language, which had previously been hypothesised on the basis of indirect indicators. Here we have another tessera of a large mosaic, namely the multi-ethnic Pompeii of the early Imperial Age, where Greek, the then lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, is indicated alongside Latin. That performances in Greek were organised is evidence of the lively and open cultural climate which characterised ancient Pompeii, similar to how the special exhibition of Isabelle Huppert, held in French at the Large Theatre a few weeks ago, showed that culture has no borders.”
Hurray for multicultural cities, say I.
Oh dear, someone tried to reverse-engineer the Italian… well, they tried.
“Investigating the Archaeology of Death” t-shirts are the hot fashion item of the moment.
I must have seen marble-carved uncial lettering before, but I don’t remember that. It’s amazing to me that it’s possible.
Lucius Caecilius Jucundus…
https://www.pompeiiinpictures.com/pompeiiinpictures/R5/5%2001%2026.htm
I’m more curious about the special exhibition of Isabelle Huppert.
I presume they’re referring to this performance of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard (from Facebook):
Another source (“spettacolo in lingua francese con sottotitoli in italiano”).
Me too. But a lead role in a Chekhov play is sadly conventional compared to what I imagined.
There are certainly transliterated Greek words to be found in the graffiti of Pompeii, and there is other evidence of Greek cultural influences (although not necessarily of fluent written or spoken Greek). Indeed, there is a long history of people presuming that Greek poetry was a significant component of the city’s culture. The House of the Tragic Poet is so named because of its many murals depicting scenes from Greek mythology and culture. The style of the artwork is somewhat Romanized, but the subject matter is mostly from Greek mythology, especially scenes from the Trojan Cycle,* which may be significant, since the Romans had claimed Trojan ancestry for themselves. (Quotes from The Aeneid—the early verses, at least—are also very common in Pompeiian graffiti.) In The Last Days of Pompeii,** Edward Bulwer-Lytton made the owner of the house, the protagonist Glaucus, an actual Greek poet.
More generally, I don’t think there has ever been an entirely clear picture of how much of the Greek culture found in medieval southern Italy was something that had been surviving there from pre-Imperial times, versus how much had been brought over from the Byzantine Empire after the fall of Rome to the barbarians. At the times of the Crusades and then the Norman conquest of the Two Sicilies, the area had been under Byzantine control, off and on, for hundreds of years, and there was a sizable Greek-speaking population in southern Italy in the twelfth century.
* Among the Classical Greeks, there were two popular cycles of war legends, describing the exploits of the Bronze-Age Myceneans. The Trojan Cycle is still well known, and part of the reason has to be that two of the epic verse settings of the stories have survived. However, in Classical Greece, the stories of the wars of the other Greeks against Thebes were supposedly just as popular, and there were verse epics telling the stories of the Seven Against Thebes, the Epigonoi, and other related matters. (Loosely construed, this cycle would also have included the history of Thebes itself, especially Oedipus and his ill-fated family.) These war epics (both Trojan and Theban), with their many mentioned characters, could have served as a repository into which the ancestors of many Greek noble families could be inserted; or, as the tales became more standardized, the nobility of Classical Greece could claim ancestry from the existing heroes in the tales. (The kings of Sparta claimed descent from Heracles—the supreme Greek hero, about which we know there were also epics in verse—but lesser aristocratic families mostly had to content themselves with less distinguished Heroic Age genealogies.) However, in the Roman period, interest in the stories of the Theban wars waned somewhat. Perhaps Homer’s poetry was really that much better than anything composed about the Seven; perhaps the Romans and other peoples of the Empire were less interested in the Theban wars, which were a matter purely internal to Greece (which had emerged as a more coherent ethno-political region than it had been during the era of the poleis); we will presumably never know the full story of why the wrath and fame of Achilles eventually so eclipsed those of Polynices.
** I think it is amusing that, in the years since Bulwer-Lytton’s book was published, there have been a fair number of other historical novels written about Pompeii, and it may well be that every last one (certainly every English-language historical novel with “Pompeii” in the title that Amazon currently shows me that it has on sale) are about those very same “last days.”
Man, I’d love to see a novel about Pompeii that completely ignores the last days — you keep waiting for premonitions, rumblings, the approach of the end times, but you just get a novel about city life. Maybe it could be about three sisters who dream about moving to Neapolis…
In high school I wanted to write a short story about Lenin (previously “grandfather Lenin”, like a Santa jsut without presents, and now a bloody tyrant). I just was a bit tired with propaganda and anti-propaganda and wanted something humane and down to Earth (and apolitical). But I did not go farther than attempting reading his материализм и эмпириокритицизм from this humanist perspective:) Similarly, when I read LotR (if not the first fantasy Iever read then almost so) I wondered if there are books describing ordinariy lives of ordinary citizens in such world (like boring films I saw on TV), withour heroic staff. After all it was clear that the world is a large part of what attracts readers, then why the plot must be… But something similar exists: there are numerous fantasy detective stories.
Hat: I like this a lot. Or, if you want to be a bit corny, a forbidden Romeo/Juliet kinda thing with a poor Oscan and a rich Roman, which does not end with them escaping the inferno to start a new life together (because after that we’re all just humans), nor with them buried in the ashes in each other’s arms (for the ghoulish thrill of latter day tourists).
Last I read, Salentine Greek was brought over by Byzantine refugees, but Calabrian Greek really is ancient.
Evan S Connell’ s “Mrs Bridge” and “Mr Bridge” are about a man and wife who lead completely boring lives. “These books are more respected than read” says one critic, and I haven’t read them.
Set in Kansas City , though, where uneventfulness is expected.
They could always write about hooliganism at the Games and the Pompeii-Nuceria riot.
😉
The good old days when the ultras were carrying gladii?
I suspect this interpretation of the inscription is probably correct, but it’s worth noting that ludus is also the regular Latin word for athletic contests and other kinds of competitive spectacles, so the phrase ludi graeci might just as easily be applied to Greek-style athletic events (as opposed to Italian gladiatorial games). The meaning of the phrase in the relatively few ancient sources in which it appears — the earliest is Cicero, I think — is not always clear, and it’s not certain that it must in every case refer to theatrical performances in the Greek language.
Ah, that’s very relevant information indeed.
Hat and other interested readers: There are references to “Ludi osci” in Southern Italy too, and scholars today are likewise undecided as to whether these shows made use of the Oscan language or not.
Of course, we do know that there was and had been Oscan-Latin bilingualism and language contact in Southern Italy. For those of you upthread who have been talking about wanting to read or write a historical novel set during this period, the lives of the two women who wrote this fine piece of evidence of Latin-Oscan language contact-
https://katherinemcdonald.net/2016/01/14/four-footprints-two-languages-one-tile/
-would probably make for a fine fictional subject: there is a LOT we do not know, and which thus could be filled by a good writer’s imagination.
Out of Lindsey Davis’ Falco novels, only one visits Pompeii, Shadows in Bronze, and then only for a less than half the book. Still, it provides a counterexample.
(Alas, Davis could not resist the lure, and her later novella “Vesuvius by Night” goes back to Pompeii for the fateful last days.)