Supported by the University Lectures Committee.
Co-sponsored by Departments of History, Art History, and Integrated Liberal Studies, and the Digital Collections Center, Classics Graduate Forum, and Classics Society.
In the year AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted with devastating force, burying the nearby town of Pompeii under more than thirty feet of volcanic debris. Pompeii was wiped off the map, yet below the surface the material remains of the town were preserved in remarkable detail. While best known for its art and architecture, Pompeii also offers a colorful glimpse of daily life and culture through its ancient graffiti — thousands of messages written on the walls of the city. This talk confronts this widespread phenomenon of public writing occurring in the first century. From public advertisements to handwritten messages, these graffiti reveal members of all levels of society reading, writing, and engaging in this active mode of communication.
About the Speaker
Rebecca Benefiel is Professor of Classics at Washington and Lee University, where she teaches Latin literature and Roman archaeology. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Roman Empire, particularly as seen through epigraphy. She has authored numerous articles and co-edited the volumes Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World (2016, Brill) and Inscriptions and the Epigraphic Habit: The Epigraphic Cultures of Greece, Rome, and Beyond, (2023, Brill). She is currently co-editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Pompeii and Environs (Oxford University Press). Dr. Benefiel has been a national lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America, a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, a Fellow of the American Academy of Rome, and President of the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy. She isDirector of The Ancient Graffiti Project (ancientgraffiti.org), which is editing and makingaccessible thousands of handwritten inscriptions from the first century.
Her work has been featured in National Geographic, USA Today, Science News, Forbes, and Smithsonian magazines. She has been interviewed on NPR’s Radio IQ, and on documentary television programs on the History Channel, PBS, and the Smithsonian Channel.