The object
A section of wall plaster with a scratched drawing: a donkey-headed figure on a cross, a young man raising his hand towards it, and a line of Greek beneath.
The inscription
The Greek reads as follows. The verb is spelled the way it was pronounced, a common feature of informal writing:
ΑΛΕΞΑΜΕΝΟΣ ΣΕΒΕΤΕ ΘΕΟΝ: “Alexamenos worships his god”
Discovery
The plaster was found in 1857 in the Paedagogium on the Palatine Hill. Many other graffiti were scratched on the walls of the same building. One, in Latin, reads “Alexamenos fidelis”, “Alexamenos is faithful”, and may be a reply by Alexamenos or a friend.
The donkey slander
Tertullian, writing in Carthage around AD 197, says that some people imagined the Christian God to have a donkey’s head, and he traces the rumour to an older slander against the Jews. Minucius Felix, a Christian writer in Rome, puts the same charge in the mouth of a pagan critic. The graffito shows that this was not just a literary charge but a joke current among ordinary people in Rome.
The cross
Christian art of the second and third centuries rarely depicted the crucifixion; the Good Shepherd and other symbols were preferred. Here, one of the earliest surviving pictures of Jesus on the cross was made by an opponent, who saw the cross as the most ridiculous thing about Christianity:
“… we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks …”
What it establishes
That by about AD 200 there were Christians among the household staff on the Palatine, that outsiders identified them by the worship of a crucified god, and that the donkey slander reported by Christian writers was in popular circulation.
Open questions
The date rests on the building’s history and the style of the writing and cannot be fixed precisely. Nothing more is known of Alexamenos than these two scratched lines.
Where it is now
Palatine Museum, Rome.
