An ancient Greek graffito points to an overlooked culture of popular verse
Think of ancient Greek verse and what often springs to mind are those great beacons of literary achievement, the epics of Homer, the odes of Pindar, the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the lyrics of Sappho. But the canon is only a reflection of the limits of our knowledge; vast swathes of ancient literature do not survive, and there are whole realms of cultural activity that never even got as far as a manuscript, leave alone the opportunity to withstand history’s vicissitudes. New research suggests that there was a substrate of more demotic, more everyday verse that has remained largely invisible to modern eyes.
Prof Tim Whitmarsh of the University of Cambridge has examined a short verse that survives not because it was copied down by Byzantine monks, preserved through the medieval age then “rediscovered” in the Renaissance, like much canonical classical literature, but because it was inscribed into semi-precious stones as cameos, and, in one instance, scratched on to a wall as a graffito.
