IT SEEMS THAT ONE DAY SOMEONE WALKING ALONG THE VIA DELL’ Abbondanza in Pompeii had had enough with a property and its owner (Plate V, Fig. 26). Enough with trudging up or tripping over the extra course of stone on the sidewalk, which elevated the owner's frontage above his neighbors’. Enough with the garish paint job: a checkerboard of green, red, yellow, and white squares that covered the three-doorway façade and contrasted markedly with its staid surroundings. Or enough with the two figures of Romulus and Aeneas painted at eye-level on each side of the central doorway. On the left jamb, Romulus stood triumphant, bedecked with armor and carrying the spoils of his conquered enemy; on the right, Aeneas fled Troy, carrying his father and pulling his son by the hand. Rome's mythical founders, the embodiments of virtus and pietas, were poor fits, the riled individual could have groused, for a setting related to fulling – the process of purging cloth of impurities by treading upon it in vats of urine.

Whoever was fed up came along and started scratching. Near the figure of Romulus, the painted surface was gouged to reveal the white of the underlying plaster. The graffito read: fullones ululamque cano, non arma virumq[ue], “I sing of fullers and the screech owl, not of arms and the man.” By adapting the opening line of Vergil's Aeneid, the nay-saying pedestrian deflated the building's puffed-up claims, moving beyond the “façade” of arma virumque and unveiling what it sugarcoated, fullones ululamque. The screech owl may have lent the graffito a more personal note: not only was this animal associated with fullers, but its name, ulula, also puns on the cognomen of the building's likely proprietor, a man named Fabius Ululitremulus, “the owl-fearer,” who endorses candidates among the façade's electoral posters. The scrawled retort thus personalized matters, undercutting Ululitremulus's attempted association with the national heroes and lumping him in with the fullers.