Written in house 9,9,f entryway and inside the door near the Doctor’s House, in a narrow space between insulae 8 and 9, the poem articulates crucial tropes of erotic poetry: lines 1-2 create a pathetic appeal for the joys of love, lines 3-4 develop the fickleness of the beloved and the invitation not to trust men. The concluding lines, finally, voice the sufferings of the lover, who meditates on the instability of fortune.  

Strikingly, both the speaker and the addressee of this poem appear to be women, as suggested by the feminine vocative pupula (3) and by the feminine nominative participle perdita (5). We are therefore confronted with what can be interpreted as expression of affection between two women, either homoerotic or as that of friends meditating on love. Yet, although the voice overheard in the graffito is clearly that of a woman, the authorial status of the poem still represents a very much contested space in which to negotiate the tendentious readings in favour or against the recovery of a female poet. As Milnor (2014: 200) argues, this poem has been ‘reread and rewritten in order to fit particular disciplinary paradigms of women’s experience in ancient Rome’.  

In order solve the aporia posed by the text’s two feminine forms and in order to respond to the gender relations here represented, critics have offered various responses, often explaining away a communication between two women. By either taking perdita as an ablative in agreement with nocte (Magaldi: 1930 and Della Valle: 1937), or by postulating a scarce literary command of the graffito writer and the inability to present the gender relations within the poem, scholars have argued that the poem’s speaker was masculine (Copley: 1939; Gigante: 1979). Della Corte (1958) believes that the text performs a fictitious dialogue between a man and a woman and features a change in speaker. Further, Lindsay (1960) has argued that the poem is a soliloquy and that the vocative is addressed to poet’s spirit. 

Not only the identification of the gender of the speaker, but also the authorial status of the graffito has attracted critical debate. Courtney (1995) and Copley (1939), for instance, contend that the graffito author was a man impersonating a woman. The hypothesis that a male author embodies the woman’s voice here should not be left unquestioned. 

Notwithstanding how problematic is to ascertain what would constitute a definite indication of female authorship and despite the impossibility to access the reality of authorship, the particular nature of graffiti, their anonymous status, helps us to disrupt traditional perspectives on epigraphic poetry and to put into question the gender performances thereby negotiated. Although we cannot prove any secure identification between the female speaker and the graffito author, the hypothesis that we are dealing a poem both voicing a female perspective and authored by a woman should and cannot be dismissed. As Graverini (2012: 9) writes, one has to admit that, ‘if we refuse to believe in female authorship in dubious cases only because of the scarcity of proofs for female authorship in general, we end up by dismissing potentially important documents only on grounds of circular reasoning’.  

Studies by Woeckner (2002), Sarah Levin Richardson (2013), and Hauser (2016) have demonstrated that techniques of close reading, analysis of the linguistic fabrics of poems, as well as graffiti’s material environs advocate for ways to approach the phenomenon of female authorship and to engage seriously with the possibility of recovering poetic female voices. As Varone (2002), Graverini (2012), and Milnor (2014) suggestively argue, the graffito might have been originally authored by a woman, circulated orally, and thereafter inscribed by a scribbler on the wall.  

Whether or not we believe in the hypothesis of female authorship, the anonymous nature of this poem constitutes a powerful site from which to resist the marginalisation of women and to challenge critical assumptions about gender negotiations. If the quest for female authored texts must remain, somewhat, only speculative and, sometimes frustrated, the research of the too often un-heard female voices in inscribed poetry is a fruitful one. Graffiti raise crucial questions about us as critics and about our politics as readers and interpreters of ancient literary texts. Anonymity has the potential to twist our perspectives on and engagement with power and gender dynamics, and to disclose the implications of and dangers enclosed in the practises of interpreting female authors as male authors in disguise.