Alexamenos Graffito

On a plastered wall in the servants' quarters of the imperial palace in Rome, somebody drew a man worshipping a crucified figure with the head of a donkey, and wrote underneath: Alexamenos worships [his] god. It is the earliest surviving picture of the crucifixion, and it is an insult.

Object: A graffito scratched into wall plaster — a drawing with a three-word Greek caption
Found at: A room of the paedagogium in the domus Gelotiana, south-western slope of the Palatine Hill, Rome
Found in: 1856 or 1857 — accounts differ, and neither is preferred here
Found by: The excavation of the domus Gelotiana on the Palatine. No individual finder is recorded
Dates from: Proposals run from the late first century to the late third century AD; late second or early third century is the most commonly held Disputed dating
Now held at: Palatine Museum (Antiquarium del Palatino), Parco archeologico del Colosseo, Rome, on display

A Wall in the Palace Servants' Quarters

In the mid-1850s — accounts give 1856 and 1857 — excavation on the south-western slope of the Palatine Hill in Rome uncovered a building known as the domus Gelotiana. It had been absorbed into the imperial palace and was later used as a paedagogium, a training house for the boys who served in it. When the palace was extended, the street beside it was walled up and filled, which is the only reason the plaster survived at all. The graffito was cut into the wall of one of its rooms. The Palatine graffiti were published as a full corpus in 1966 by H. Solin and M. Itkonen-Kaila, under the direction of V. Vaananen, in the Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae.

The plaster was cut from the wall and moved more than once before ending up in the Palatine Museum, part of the Parco archeologico del Colosseo, where it is displayed at eye level. One practical warning from B. Nongbri, who has photographed it: most of the images reproduced in books and on websites have been retouched to darken the lines. The actual scratches are much fainter than the pictures suggest, and a reader who arrives expecting the textbook version will be surprised.

The Shape of the Insult

The drawing is crude and entirely legible. A figure hangs on a cross, seen from behind, with the head of a donkey or mule. To the left a smaller figure stands with one arm raised in a gesture of worship. Between them, in irregular Greek, runs the line ALEXAMENOS SEBETE THEON — Alexamenos worships [his] god, the bracket marking a word the original does not have, with the verb spelled the way it was drifting in ordinary speech rather than the way a schoolmaster would have wanted it.

Both halves of the joke need explaining now, because neither is obvious to a modern reader. Crucifixion was the death Rome kept for slaves and rebels, deliberately public and deliberately degrading; to a Roman, being told that somebody's god had been crucified was an absurdity before it was an offence. And there was a standing slander, aimed first at Jews and then at Christians, that they worshipped a donkey. Tertullian describes a caricature of Christians with ass's ears carried about in public — "in that city of yours", he says, which the Ante-Nicene Fathers editors gloss as Rome rather than his own Carthage — and the same accusation is answered in the second-century Octavius. The drawing simply stacks the two insults on top of each other.

In a nearby room a second graffito was found reading Alexamenos fidelis — Alexamenos is faithful. It reads like a reply, and it may be one, though nothing establishes that it is by the same hand or from the same season.

What It Can and Cannot Carry

The date is not fixed. Proposals run from the late first century to the late third, and the range narrows to the late second or early third on the basis of the wall's construction phases, the painting styles around it and the letter forms. So the customary description — the earliest known depiction of the crucifixion — is accurate, provided the word known is doing its work. It is a statement about what has survived, not about what once existed.

The interpretation is not unanimous either. Nineteenth-century writers, J. P. Lundy among them, read the animal head as Anubis and the whole scene as Egyptian. More recently I. Soon has argued that it could be Christian self-parody rather than mockery from outside, and J. E. Taylor has suggested the crucified figure is being cast as a kind of demigod. The mainstream reading remains that this is a jeer, and the second graffito supports it, but a reader should know that specialists have proposed otherwise.

What it does establish is not small, and it is worth stating precisely. Within roughly a century and a half of the crucifixion, somebody attached to the household of the Roman emperor knew a man by name who worshipped a crucified god, knew it well enough to mock him for it, and expected the joke to land with whoever else read that wall. Christianity was inside the palace, and it was known for the one thing about it that made it ridiculous. Paul had said as much in advance — a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks — and the peculiar value of this drawing is that it is the folly seen from the far side, by someone who found it funny. It is not evidence that the crucifixion happened; the case for that runs through the sources, not through a scratch on plaster. It is evidence of how the claim looked to people who heard it and did not believe a word of it.

Scripture references

1 Corinthians 1:23 — A stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks — the reaction, described from inside
Galatians 3:13 — Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree
Hebrews 12:2 — He endured the cross, despising its shame
1 Peter 4:14 — Insulted for the name of Christ

Sources

Holding institutionPalatine Museum, Parco archeologico del Colosseo — Parco archeologico del Colosseo, Rome · The holding institution's page for the museum. It gives the museum's history and collection overview but does not itemise the graffito, so it is cited for the location onlySupports: Current location
ScholarshipH. Solin and M. Itkonen-Kaila, Graffiti del Palatino I: Paedagogium — Heikki Solin and Marja Itkonen-Kaila, under the direction of Veikko Vaananen · Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae III (Helsinki, 1966) — the critical publication of the graffiti scratched on the walls of the paedagogium, of which this is one. Print-onlySupports: The corpus publication of the Palatine graffiti
Primary textTertullian, Ad Nationes I.14, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers — Tertullian, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation edited by Philip Schaff; public domain, hosted at Wikisource · Read in full. A man "carried about in public a caricature of us with this label: Onocoetes. This (figure) had ass's ears, and was dressed in a toga with a book, having a hoof on one of his feet." Tertullian places it "in that city of yours", and the editors' footnote reads "In ista civitate, Rome" — which is why this article does not say Carthage, as popular accounts do. The parallel passage in Apology 16 says only "in that great city"Supports: The donkey-worship slander as a named ancient author actually reports it
ReferenceB. Nongbri, "The Palatine Alexamenos Graffito" — Brent Nongbri, historian of early Christianity · Includes an undoctored photograph and the warning that the images usually reproduced have been retouched; notes the customary third-century dating and the 1966 corpus publicationSupports: The state of the actual plaster, the retouched-image problem, and the publication history
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Alexamenos graffito

Reflect

Somebody drew this to make a Christian look ridiculous, and it survived precisely because it was scratched on a wall nobody thought mattered. What are you willing to be laughed at for?