This attractive little book is the catalogue of an exhibition at Lausanne in 2008 of inscribed Roman wall-plaster from Switzerland and France, arranged in thematic chapters illustrated by line-drawings and coloured photographs of the fragments on display. These ‘whispering walls’ are more than words and names like those collected for Britain in RIB II.4, 2447; they include many simplistic drawings of what appealed to their artists. So they are social history. The editors are experts in Roman wall-painting, and have been assisted by epigraphists, but they have not intended an exhaustive corpus; they provide an excellent bibliography, for example, but no index.
Each chapter is followed by catalogue-entries for the more important items, consisting of a formal description, transcription and translation when required, and commentary. This arrangement makes for some awkwardness in use, since there are inevitable duplications and occasional inconsistencies between text and catalogue, while the catalogue-entry is always at some pages' remove from the illustration. Thus, fig. 64 is a line-drawing of a stag and two gladiators overseen by two imperial(?) busts, perhaps alluding to games for Hadrian and Antinous. In the text the gladiators are identified as secutor and retiarius, but in the caption and catalogue-entry as Thracian and paegnarius; for detail of one bust, turn back 26 pages to fig. 37, but for a detailed description forward 19 pages to the catalogue-entry. Illustrations of some groups of conjoining fragments may be over-reduced, but there are splendid exceptions, for example fig. 123, the calligraphic script in which Quintous recorded his night of love with D[…] on the Nones of March.
Graffiti are idiosyncratic, allusive and tantalisingly incomplete. A fragmentary head in profile wears a laurel wreath (fig. 35): the editors suggest a boxer with cauliflower ear — but why not the emperor? Teucer was at Glanum on 29 March 32 b.c. (fig. 13); someone at Narbonne listed ‘bread, sardines, olive oil, wine’ (fig. 9), but his prices have been lost. Many graffiti were only 80–100 cm above ground-level, without necessarily being the work of schoolchildren like the alphabets at Périgueux (figs 48, 49): diners at Fréjus also scrawled their maxims at couch-height (figs 147, 148), whereas the only Swiss example of a phallus (fig. 121A) is appropriately at ‘man-height’.
Gladiators are popular, crudely drawn in pairs but differentiated by their armour and weapons; with their padded shoulders, the editors tartly remark, they resemble American footballers. Hunting-scenes are also popular, with antlered stags or bristle-backed boars being chased in amphitheatre or forest. Other quadrupeds include a leonine horse (fig. 97), and an almost invisible but ithyphallic donkey (fig. 100) ambiguously glossed ‘multis annis vivam’, ‘May I last many years’. Birds include peacocks, an eagle between military standards(?) (fig. 98), a recognisable goose (fig. 102), and a crane identified as gru(s) (fig. 105). Maritime subjects are unusual, except for a superb ship at Cucuron (figs 30, 116). Sex is fairly common: mostly one-word and fragmentary, but there is the erotic couplet about an angry cunt (fig. 128) also found at Pompeii, and Tiberius is told to ‘lick me’. However, the photograph (fig. 127) suggests that ma[…] should be read instead of me.
Religion and mythology are much less common, but there is a Greek palindrome also found at Pompeii which implies that some schoolboy knew Homer, and an offering to Mercury (fig. 134) which might refer to the future emperor Claudius. A fish glossed in faulty Greek (fig. 137) may be a Christian rebus. What looks like […]RATO (fig. 142) is optimistically read as SATOR with reversed S, and thus part of the famous word-square. The catalogue concludes with a long list of personal names, some with photographs of their laboured signatures. They include the anomalous dative Iulio Agricolae (fig. 156), ‘To Julius Agricola’. Perhaps the Agricola, it is suggested.
This well-catalogued wealth of inconsequential ephemera defies summary. Readers according to their preference will enjoy the meticulous ship, the muscle-bound gladiators, the goddess Diana with her bow confronting a bemused stag (fig. 131), but this reviewer was most delighted by the Latin for ‘woof woof’. It is scratched above a cylindrical hound coursing stags at Périgueux (figs 86, 87): VAVA, pronounced ‘wah-wah’.
