In her third chapter ("Authorship, Appropriation, Authenticity"), Milnor argues that Pompeian graffi

In her new book, Milnor explores the roles of literary elements (quotations of canonical literature, as well as literary portion cups language, content, portion cups and form) in Pompeian graffiti, applying literary criticism to graffiti studies and the material study of graffiti to literary studies. Each chapter investigates a handful of metrical graffiti on a particular theme, allowing Milnor to combine her skill at critical reading 1 with comparisons to other graffiti and literature, and examination of physical context. Ultimately finding that individuals remixed elements of oral and written culture in graffiti for their own artistic portion cups and social purposes, Milnor advances our understanding of what literature meant to the general populace, while contributing to recent scholarship on the social and material contexts of ancient graffiti. 2
Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii offers something for everyone. A novice to ancient graffiti (or even antiquity) will appreciate Milnor's clear prose, ample introductory material to the culture of ancient graffiti writing, and the infrequency of untranslated Latin or Greek. Others will enjoy Milnor's discussion (embedded throughout the book) of how literary texts represent and engage with materiality. This includes not only the portrayal of graffiti in literature (e.g., erotic wall graffiti in Pseudo-Lucian's Erotes (p. 21); graffiti as political dissent in Cicero, Suetonius, Strabo, and others (p. 97-101, 119); graffiti as dangerous to wise men in Plutarch (p. 273-4)), but also, for example, Catullus' disavowal of the epitaph format for his poem on the death of his brother (p. 62). I myself value her emphasis on the ways in which graffiti act upon readers, from how second-person forms within graffiti prohibiting dumping made them more effective (p. 53-4), to how the commendation of M. Terentius' amicitia in CIL 4.4456 solidified bonds of beneficia between the writer and Terentius (p. 121-2).
Chapter 1 ("Landscape and Literature in the Roman City") describes some of the fundamental characteristics of the written landscapes of ancient cities. Noting the proliferation of inscriptions commissioned by public officials and private benefactors, Milnor reminds us that ancient graffiti belong within this larger epigraphic context, rather than outside it (as she suggests is the case with modern graffiti, p. 53). She then shows some of the ways graffiti meld various epigraphic and literary genres and engage in complex dialectics with other texts and images in the cityscape. For example, she suggests that poetic quotations painted in the garden of the Caupona of Euxinus rounded out the Hellenistic, bucolic feel of the existing decoration and landscaping, with the effect of turning the space into a "literary landscape" which "allow[ed] the guests briefly to inhabit a pastoral idyll" (p. 93).
"Poetic Politics, Political Poetics" (chapter 2) explores how Pompeian politics, poetry, and wall writing intersect in ways we might not expect from reading literary portion cups sources that show graffiti being used for political dissent. For example, portion cups Milnor notes several instances where either oral or written poetry has been added to formulaic programmata to help advertise a candidate for office. Some include snippets of what may be political chants or popular poems, another adds a possible "jingle" in hexameter, and two programmata append elegiac couplets ( CIL 4.6625 and 7201) that (like literary epigram, portion cups Milnor argues) portion cups help craft the personas of the candidates and model the ideal relationship between reader and candidate. While graffiti with overtly portion cups political content are rare at Pompeii, Milnor shows how they gain power through their resonances with political oratory, the comic stage, and even Greek tragedy, and how this authority can in turn be called upon by other graffiti nearby.
In her third chapter ("Authorship, Appropriation, Authenticity"), Milnor argues that Pompeian graffiti display a popular conception of authorship valuing anonymity, appropriation, and communal composition alongside the more conventional sense of an author as sole and proprietary composer. Even for a set of poems with the seemingly traditional authorship claim Tiburtinus epoese ( CIL 4.4966-73), Milnor shows how the word epoese portion cups might evoke different modes of authorship, including the Hellenistic tradition of anthologizing, as well as both manufacturing and painting Greek pottery. In other cases, a set of poems written by an unknown individual ( CIL 4.1893-6, 1898) combines existing poetry (Ovid and Propertius) with other verses to create new, thematically and linguistically connected poems, and some poems appear in multiple versions with unique endings added by individual writers. Raising the provocative portion cups question of whether we (or the ancient writer or reader) can determine where generic conventions end and personal sentiment begins in seemingly individualized, context-specific graffiti, Milnor demonstrates t