Word: pompeiis
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...volcano erupted and covered Pompeii with ash. Eighteen hundred years later, archaeologists found that the Pompeians' bodies, long since dust, had left molds of themselves in the impacted cinders. The scientists poured in liquid plaster, and when it set, the casts were lifted out and put in a local museum...
...human ambition to defy convention and authority-and both convention and authority, down the ages, have diligently worked overtime trying to scrub the walls clean. They can never, of course, successfully purge the record of these irreverent footnotes, which proliferate in both written and pictorial forms. When archaeologists unearthed Pompeii beginning in the 18th century, they found scores of graffiti that, after some two millenniums, have not lost their topicality: "Here I enjoyed the favors of many girls"; "Here Arphocras pleasured himself with Drauca for a denarius"-about a penny...
...Sweden was bad, but Sweden hasn't gone near to the depths of various sex deviations and obsessions that we have gone. I suppose there are sections of this country that have sunk as low as anything in history, because in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah and Pompeii and Rome they didn't have the presses or the motion pictures to stimulate all of this...
Sometimes Reisner lectures on graffiti in history, from Pompeii to frontier America, or examines ways in which graffiti illuminate social or political frustrations. But more often the class will repair to a nearby bistro for a firsthand look at the living art. Reisner, who systematically began scrutinizing lavatory walls four years ago and has published two paperback collections of graffiti, believes that the golden age of the graffito is here. In addition to the wit on washroom walls, there is the contemporary lapel-button fad, which he describes as "walking graffiti." The fact is, says Reisner, that "graffiti...
...kind became fashionable. From the many Hellenistic and Roman busts of marble that have survived we know how the ancients saw and depicted themselves. But the moist climates of Greece and Italy have long since sent most classical paintings (except those buried under the ashes and lava at Pompeii and Herculaneum) crumbling into dust...