Graffiti in Antiquity Ancient graffiti hundreds of thousands of informal ephemeral texts spanning millennia offer a patchwork of fragmentary conversations in a variety of languages spread across the Mediterranean world. Cut painted inked or traced in charcoal the surviving graffiti present a layer of lived experience in the ancient world unavailable from other sources. Graffiti in Antiquity reveals how and why the inhabitants of Greece and Rome men and women and free and enslaved formulated written and visual messages about themselves and the world around them as graffiti