Graffiti was a powerful form of protest in ancient Rome – as Gladiator II shows

Warning: this article contains minor spoilers for Gladiator II.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II features a scene in which a senator, seated at a pavement cafe in Rome, reads a printed newspaper. The moment has caused history buffs around the world to wince – the printing press wouldn’t be invented for another 1,200 years. But the film also depicts a much more authentic form of mass communication in the ancient city: writing on walls.

This includes not only the formal and well-planned inscriptions shown on buildings and triumphal arches, but the informal scratchings, painted notices and charcoal messages scribbled on the walls of the city.

The hero of the first Gladiator film, Maximus (played by Russell Crowe in 2000), has his name crudely carved onto his makeshift secret tomb in the Colosseum. Elsewhere his name has been erased from a list of gladiatorial victors in a parody of damnatio memoriae, the process by which the name and image of a person was removed from public inscriptions and buildings.

This is rather like the way the real Emperor Geta (played by Joseph Quinn) had his name and image erased from Rome following his murder at the hands of his brother Caracalla (Fred Hechinger).

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Latin-literate viewers may spot a particularly obscene threat to the emperors – “irrumabo imperatores” – painted on an external wall of Rome in the background of one scene. This most likely draws on Roman poet Catullus’s Poem 16, a work deemed so offensive that it wasn’t even translated into English until the 20th century.

While the language may seem gratuitous – it roughly translates as “I will orally fuck the emperors” – this is precisely the sort of vernacular that survives on the walls of Pompeii. Archaeologists have uncovered quotes from the poet Virgil, greetings to friends, price lists, practice alphabets, the scribbled drawings of children and the doodling of adults. Yet much of the graffiti would not look out of place on the back of a toilet door.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the walls of Pompeii’s brothel were a particular hot-spot for sexual graffiti.

One anonymous customer boasts that he had “fucked many girls there”, but similar comments are found on the walls of taverns, bathhouses and in the slightly shady area of tombs on the roads just outside of Pompeii.

Political protest

Yet there was also a serious side to ancient graffiti. The plot of the first Gladiator film centred on the memory of a democratic Rome that had once been a republic, in contrast to the oppression, cruelty and political intrigue of the city as ruled by Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). The Rome of Gladiator II is similarly portrayed as one of political unrest. It’s ruled over by two tyrannical brothers, Geta and Caracalla, who are entirely ill-suited to leadership.

In such circumstances, graffiti can be an important form of political expression and resistance. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), Romanes eunt domus daubed on a wall in Jerusalem, is famously parsed by John Cleese’s Roman soldier as “People called Romanes, they go, the house” and corrected to Romani ite domum or “Romans go home”.

This fictional scene may be the most famous example of political graffiti from the Roman world, but there are plenty of real-life instances from ancient literature. They indicate that graffiti was an established way for the people of Rome to communicate their displeasure about the actions of their leaders, writing on walls, columns and on placards hung around the necks of statues.

Brutus, for instance, was encouraged to join the conspiracy against Julius Caesar by graffiti written in Rome under the cover of darkness. When Emperor Tiberius’ stepson Germanicus died and Tiberius was suspected of having had him murdered, notices appeared on walls in Rome demanding, somewhat unfeasibly, Germanicus’ return.

In the latter years of Emperor Nero’s reign and at a time of high food prices when people must have found Nero’s theatrical excess particularly galling, mocking graffiti appeared around the city. Emperor Domitian apparently erected so many triumphal arches in the city that someone wrote “It is enough” in Greek on one of them.

People in Rome had every reason to feel aggrieved by the actions of Caracalla and Geta, both in the film and historically. The film versions of the emperors are portrayed as out-of-touch with reality, living a life of luxury and focusing only on the arena. Caracalla even makes his monkey a consul, an echo of Roman historian Suetonius’ famous claim that Emperor Caligula was planning to bestow the same honour on his horse.

The historian Cassius Dio paints a picture of the brothers abusing women and boys, embezzling money and hanging out with gladiators and charioteers in Rome. Later, Caracalla was ruthless in removing any potential threats to his power, including Geta and 20,000 of his followers as well as his own wife, Fulvia Plautilla.

The obscene graffiti directed against Caracalla and Geta in Gladiator II then is part of a long tradition of political resistance in Rome. The anonymous author undercuts the tyranny and pomp of the emperors by rendering them sexually passive – an insult to their masculinity in a Roman context – and slightly ridiculous.

Unlike the senator sitting outside the cafe with his newspaper, the daubing of “irrumabo imperatores” on a wall of Rome by cover of darkness is perfectly believable.

Claire Holleran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.