Laudator Temporis Acti

Antonio Varone, "Newly Discovered and Corrected Readings of iscrizioni 'privatissime' from the Vesuvian Region," in Rebecca Benefiel and Peter Keegan, edd., Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 113-130 (at 115, 117, footnotes and figures omitted):

And so it is always with a certain emotion and hopeful apprehension that a decoder approaches the field of excavation and sees traces that a stylus or some other writing instrument has left on the wall. The examination of these traces, the ductus, the handwriting, the analysis of markings I have defined elsewhere as "extraneous"—all this must be investigated as thoroughly as possible to recover that message put in a bottle and entrusted to the sea of time, which one imagines can be quite valuable or at least illuminating.

By chance this happened to me at Stabiae in the Villa San Marco, during the recent excavations conducted there in 2008-2009. These excavations brought to light numerous graffiti that will enrich the next fascicle of CIL vol. IV, and they have allowed us to recover this particular pearl, which I present here. It was found on the wall of a room that was not fully excavated, but which was later revealed to be a latrine, and was written in a sure hand in well-traced out capital letters, which denote a certain familiarity with writing on the part of its author (Fig. 6.1):

Cacavi et culu non extersi

I shit and I did not wipe my ass.

This was accompanied by a drawing, below, of a head in profile facing left (the self-portrait of the author of the heroic gesture?). The drawing appears to mock anyone who had used a bit of time and care to decrypt the "precious" message that emerged from the mists of the past (Fig. 6.2).

Obviously this inscription will not change the fate of humanity, but it does show, on the one hand, the disappearance of the final "-m" of the accusative, a characteristic that was deeply rooted in spoken Latin already in the first century AD. At the same time, it also enriches Latin terminology with the expression extergere culum ("to wipe the ass"), which appears here for the first time.

Of course cacavi in the inscription is in the perfect tense, just like extersi. The Oxford English Dictionary gives various forms of the past tense of shit, including shit, shat, and shitted.

Labels: noctes scatologicae