A couple of days ago I was reading this review by Emily Gowers of Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii, by Kristina Milnor, in TLS:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1493961.ece
My thoughts were stimulated by this:
. . . In [Milnor’s] view, one reason graffiti should intrigue us is because it shows how permeable the borders were between elite and popular culture. . . .
One of the most extreme forms of high–low exchange takes the form of engagement with Virgil’s Aeneid. Published three generations before the destruction of Pompeii and already consecrated as Rome’s national epic, this would seem to be the perfect example of a unified textual corpus. But, as Milnor shows, Virgil was almost instantly atomized into bite-sized snippets which permeated the popular consciousness and embarked on their own creative afterlife . . . It would be nice to find something significant in the Pompeians’ choice of Virgilian lines . . . . But mostly they are mindlessly ludic, especially when they use the momentous opening, “Arms and the man”. . . . “Everyone fell silent”, the audience’s preparation for Aeneas’ narrative of his post-Troy adventures, is knowingly redeployed in a mural context. Milnor has to conclude that most quotations, above all those of Virgil’s opening words, are “meaningless, not meaningful”. Aeneas had already become a kind of Everyman, his poem a dispersible symbol of authority and national spirit available for all Romans to imprint on its segments their individual stamp. Yet such authorship as is claimed is of an offbeat kind – opportunist and ultimately irresponsible.
It occurred to me that these Vergilian snippets such as “Everyone fell silent”, i.e., conticuere omnes, from the beginning of Book II of the Aeneid–this "extreme form of high-low exchange–were “mindlessly” scrawled on a Pompeian wall by someone who had been required to memorize these lines in school. Vergil had become a school text in his own lifetime and probably anyone who learned to read and write read some of the Aeneid in the process. They were required to memorize these snippets just as I was in 4th year Latin about 53 years ago when I was 16. I can still recite conticuere omnes from memory down to et quorum pars magna fui. Here I found a connection with someone in Pompeii not quite two millenia ago.
And when I thought about this further, it occurred to me that I was part of a chain of schoolboys (and some schoolgirls, too) who had been required to memorized these Vergilian snippets–probably many of the same ones I memorized–extending over the entire course of the two millenia since Vergil’s death, undoubtedly even in some places during the period from the 6th to the 8th centuries when some people still learned Latin and must have read Vergil.