My colleagues and I developed this project — the full instructions and rubric for which you will find below — to supplement what our first-year students were reading about the government of the Roman Republic and to give them an opportunity to attempt some simple composition. The students are tasked with reproducing Pompeian political graffiti, filling in the blanks of the five templates with which they’ve been provided with the appropriate forms of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Three of the graffiti must encourage the reader to vote for a specific candidate, while the other two (one somewhat slyly, the other quite bluntly) must attack that candidate. The graffiti on which I’ve based the templates can be found in Richard LaFleur’s Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes (Collins Reference), an invaluable compilation of inscriptions and other short texts for introductory Latin courses.
I recommend that the students provide me with a first draft of their graffiti, so I can give them an opportunity to correct their errors before crafting the final product. Most of the mistakes which I recently encountered pertained to noun-adjective agreement, or not understanding how to incorporate an unfamiliar word which they’d looked up in a dictionary (i.e., trying to turn a noun into a verb, or taking a fourth-declension noun — a declension we’ve not yet covered — and giving it second-declension endings). Once they have corrected their text, the students create a fake wall (and they must do what they can to make it look authentic — no neon-green posterboard!) and, using Roman cursive (a handy guide to which can be found here), paint their graffiti on it. While many of the campaign graffiti from Pompeii are, of course, written in a more legible script, the students find the cursive more aesthetically pleasing, and a fun challenge can be had in asking the students to try to read their peers’ posters!
Roman Political Graffiti Project
