The inscription just mentioned suggests an opportunity for giving a short account of similar ones; we speak not of inscriptions cut in stone, and affixed to temples and other public buildings, but such as were either painted, scrawled in charcoal and other substances, or scratched with a sharp point, such as a nail or knife, on the stucco of walls and pillars. Such inscriptions afford us a peep both into the public and the domestic life of the Pompeians. Advertisements of a political character were commonly painted on the exterior walls in large letters in black and red paint; poetical effusions or pasquinades, etc., with coal or chalk (Martial, _Epig._ xii. 61, 9); while notices of a domestic kind are more usually found in the interior of the houses, scratched, as we have said, on the stucco, whence they have been called _graffiti_.
The numerous political inscriptions bear testimony to the activity of public life in Pompeii. These advertisements, which for the most part turn on the election of ædiles, duumvirs, and other magistrates, show that the Pompeians, at the time when their city was destroyed, were in all the excitement of the approaching comitia for the election of such magistrates. We shall here select a few of the more interesting inscriptions, both relating to public and domestic matters.
It seems to have been customary to paint over old advertisements with a coat of white, and so to obtain a fresh surface for new ones, just as the bill-sticker remorselessly pastes his bill over that of some brother of the brush. In some cases this new coating has been detached, or has fallen off, thus revealing an older notice, belonging sometimes to a period antecedent to the Social War. Inscriptions of this kind are found only on the solid stone pillars of the more ancient buildings, and not on the stucco, with which at a later period almost everything was plastered. Their antiquity is further certified by some of them being in the Oscan dialect; while those in Latin are distinguished from more recent ones in the same language by the forms of the letters, by the names which appear in them, and by archaisms in grammar and orthography. Inscriptions in the Greek tongue are rare, though the letters of the Greek alphabet, scratched on walls at a little height from the ground, and thus evidently the work of school-boys, show that Greek must have been extensively taught at Pompeii.