Municipal Politics in Pompeii

Of the three colleges of officials which most towns in Italy show, Pompeii had only the chief magistrates, who presided over the local senate and popular assembly, and the market officials. With the functions of these officers and the method of electing them we have acquired some familiarity from a study of Roman epitaphs, but most of our definite information on these points comes from the model municipal law which Julius Cæsar drew up the year before his death and from the charters of the towns of Salpensa and Malaca found near Malaga, Spain, in 1861. ¹ But from none of these sources do we get much light upon the methods 4which candidates for town offices used in securing a nomination and in canvassing for votes, or upon the actual state of municipal politics under the Roman Empire. For information upon these matters we must turn to the political notices found on the walls of Pompeii. Almost fifteen hundred of these have been brought to light in the portion of the city already excavated and have been published in the great collection of Latin inscriptions or in its supplements. These notices and other similar announcements, serious and frivolous, seem to have been as numerous and as offensive to some of the Pompeians as bill-boards in our modern cities are to us, for an indignant citizen has scratched on a wall in one of the streets: “I wonder, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins from supporting the tiresome productions of so many writers.” ¹ It will be remembered that the Romans deposited the ashes of their dead by the side of the roads leading from the city, and the tombstones and monuments which were raised 5over them often furnished too tempting a location for a political poster to be resisted. A monument near Rome bears the inscription: “Bill-poster, I beg you to pass this monument by. If any candidate’s name shall have been painted upon it may he suffer defeat and may he never win any office.” ¹