Ovidian graffiti: love, genre and gender on a wall in Pompeii: a new study of CIL IV 5296 - CLE 950

CIL IV 5296 is a very intriguing graffito, not only because it is one of the longest and most complex carmina Pompeiana, but also because it is, apparently, one of the few ancient documents that preserve a female poetic voice. The article begins with a thorough analysis of this poem, proposing possible solutions to its many textual and prosodic problems. It also discusses the poem’s physical location, which was wrongly identified in several prior studies: in fact, the graffito is in a private space, inside a small nondescript house and not outside the rather grand “doctor’s house.” This is an important detail that allows to challenge the poem’s usual classification as a paraklausithyron. The poem was probably composed by a woman and addressed to another woman, but it is hard to say if it is a straightforward expression of lesbian desire. The last line, which has always baffled previous interpreters, is clearly written by a different hand; it is a truncated quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV 73), a poetic comment left by an unknown casual rea- der of the graffito.