Asellina’s name survives on a wall in Pompeii. Above it stands a candidate’s name and the office he wanted. The small word rog. presents her as asking for his election. A woman who could not cast a municipal vote nevertheless appeared in the campaign, offering a recommendation for other people to act upon.
That combination is the starting point for this chapter. In the first-century town buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE, election notices put public support onto street-facing plaster. Following their words and locations lets us distinguish a legal right from a political voice—and ask how everyday relationships might have carried influence beyond the people admitted to the ballot.
PLACE & TIME
Campaigning on the street
Pompeii
Campania · present-day Italy
1st century CE · before the eruption of 79 CE
The setting
A name beneath the candidate’s
The notice catalogued as CIL IV 7873 recommends Ceius Secundus for duumvir, one of the town’s chief magistracies. It closes with Asellina’s endorsement. The university catalogue places it east of entrance IX.11.3, beside the neighbouring bar at IX.11.2. That precise address keeps the surviving wall separate from a story we might be tempted to tell about it.
IN THE SOURCE
Asellina rog(at)
The wording does a particular job. It attaches a supporter to a candidate and turns a name into a public recommendation. It is not a record of a vote already cast, and it gives no total of people persuaded. Still, Asellina is more than a background figure here: the campaign presents her backing as something worth putting before an audience.
We should also separate the person named from the person holding the brush. This text identifies an endorser, not its painter. It cannot tell us whether Asellina dictated the wording, arranged its production, discussed it with someone else or painted it herself. Her public presence is visible; the steps that brought her name onto the wall remain less accessible.
The ballot and the campaign were different spaces
Liisa Savunen’s study of women’s endorsements starts from their exclusion from municipal voting and magistracies. The notices do not overturn that legal boundary. They show participation in a campaign around it. A woman could be named as supporting a male candidate without being eligible to vote for him or seek his office herself.
Thinking only in terms of a ballot misses the work of persuasion. A recommendation addresses people who can make a choice; it may draw on familiarity or reputation. That gives us a way to investigate influence without quietly granting a right that women did not possess. It also keeps “influence” from becoming a vague substitute for equal political power.
TERMS TO KEEP
Read the request before drawing a conclusion
Programma
A painted election recommendation; programmata is the plural. It is not a modern party manifesto.
Duumvir
One of a pair of chief municipal magistrates. The notice for Ceius Secundus specifies the jurisdictional office.
Rog(at)
“Asks”: an abbreviated verb expanded by an editor. Here it marks a request for the candidate’s election.
What a wall tells us that a name alone cannot
A printed transcription makes the words easy to follow. The frontage adds another dimension: these requests stood beside entrances, where public writing met the movement of a street. Candidate names could occupy broad stretches of plaster while smaller words supplied the office, praise or endorsement. Our own reading needs both scales—the conspicuous campaign and the quieter individual name.
Look at the actual remains before imagining their original audience. Weathering and overlapping paint complicate what survives, and today’s protective roof belongs to the conservation history. An archaeological photograph is not a view of the wall on election morning. It shows why a recorded reading and location matter alongside the visible letters.
LOOK CLOSELY
A campaign around a doorway
Street-facing writing
Painted recommendations occupy the frontage rather than a private room. Their position puts the campaign beside everyday movement.
Names at different scales
Large candidate lettering draws attention. The smaller endorsement needs closer reading and a checked transcription.
A surviving setting
Entrances help locate the notices. Modern roofing and fittings protect remains; they do not reconstruct an ancient campaign day.
Street frontage associated with the bar conventionally called Asellina’s, IX.11.2, photographed in 2019. Modern protective fittings are visible.
The wall was a surface through which a campaign could enter ordinary routines. Someone might encounter a recommendation while passing an entrance, collecting food or meeting another person. Those are possible encounters suggested by a street setting, not events recovered from this photograph. The useful question is where political messages could be noticed, rather than how every passer-by reacted.
Asellina was not the only woman named here
Jeremy Hartnett’s analysis of this frontage brings Asellina together with Maria, Aegle and Zmyrina, whose names appear in nearby electoral texts. Maria and Aegle supported Helvius Sabinus for aedile. Asellina’s notice backed Ceius Secundus for duumvir. The cluster therefore contains several named endorsements, rather than a single exceptional woman standing outside the whole campaign.
These names are compelling because they offer contact with individuals. But contact is not a complete biography. Hartnett cautions that their legal positions are uncertain; it is also unclear whether Asellina owned the bar. A traditional label for the premises cannot supply missing proof of ownership, enslavement or a particular relationship between the women.
KEEP THE DISTINCTION
Three forms of political participation
Voting
Casting a ballot within the municipal electoral system.
Women’s endorsements do not establish voting rights.
Public support
Putting a name behind a candidate in a recommendation.
The painted requests directly attest this kind of campaigning.
Influence
Helping shape the choices made by people who could vote.
Relationships offer a plausible route; these texts do not measure votes won.
A careful account can retain the individuality of the names without turning each into a character sketch. The endorsement tells us whom a woman publicly backed in that text. It does not tell us whom she liked in private, every candidate she opposed, or whether her customers agreed. Those missing details are reasons to keep the request in focus, rather than fill the wall with imagined conversations.
Everyday familiarity could become a resource
A bar’s entrance connected a working interior with a public street. Hartnett interprets this setting as a place where repeated contact with customers and neighbours could create knowledge and social connections. That offers a plausible route for influence: people encountered through ordinary business might also be people whose political decisions mattered.
Another notice makes a neighbourhood connection explicit. CIL IV 3527 places Appuleia alongside Mustius, described as a neighbouring fuller, and Narcissus in a request for Pupius’s election. It gives us a relationship and an occupation within the recommendation itself. We need not invent a tavern conversation to see that campaigning could cross the everyday ties explored in the previous chapter. The text does not, however, say what each supporter contributed or how the voters responded.
- Begin with the surviving request: who supports whom?
- Locate it: which entrance and street setting surround it?
- Then ask about persuasion: what relationship might have made the support matter?
A familiar formula could carry a woman’s name
Savunen found that women’s recommendations used the same kinds of abbreviations and supporting formulas as men’s. The naming of a woman did not require a separate visual language of campaigning. That observation matters: it places these endorsements within the campaign’s ordinary repertoire instead of treating them as evidence of a special “women’s election” running beside it.
Shared wording does not erase unequal rights. It reveals a narrower but consequential point: the form of a public recommendation could accommodate a woman as its named supporter. A formula joins the candidate, office and request; an individual name gives that request a social attachment. The resulting text belongs to political life even though its endorser was excluded from the vote.
KEY IDEA
A name on the campaign wall could matter without opening the ballot.
Test the most tempting conclusion
The surprising combination—female supporter, male candidate—can invite an overcorrection. Once we notice a woman in the campaign, it becomes tempting to conclude that she must also have voted. But the notice’s own words still describe a request. Its significance is clearer when we let it establish that public action without asking it to prove a different one.
TEST THE EVIDENCE
Does the name prove a right to vote?
Asellina’s name on an election notice proves that she could vote.
- SHOWS
- The checked text names Ceius Secundus, the office sought and Asellina as the person asking for his election.
- SUGGESTS
- Her named backing was presented as useful public support within the campaign.
- CANNOT PROVE
- That she cast a ballot, owned the wall or delivered a particular number of votes.
A better-supported statement
The notice presents Asellina as publicly recommending a candidate; it does not establish voting rights.
Ancient text: CIL IV 7873 · companion collection · Plaàtarte · CC BY-SA 3.0 · resized
What kind of voice has survived?
Eumachia’s public honours and the work of bakers and fullers have already shown how status shaped visibility in this town. Election walls add another route into public life: a person’s name presented as a reason to support someone else. The scale is smaller than a monumental dedication, but its action is specific. An endorsement asks its audience to choose.
The strongest answer is therefore neither that women had equal electoral power nor that exclusion made them politically absent. Pompeii preserves women as named participants in public campaigning. Their requests expose a boundary between the people allowed to decide formally and the wider relationships through which decisions could be encouraged. That boundary makes the wall more interesting, not less.
- Asellina’s endorsement is a surviving public request.
- Her ability to persuade voters is plausible, but its effect cannot be counted from the text.
- Her vote, ownership and legal status are separate questions requiring separate evidence.
The next chapter reaches the eruption of 79 CE. Before that final event, these notices ask us to see Pompeii as a town still making choices: supporting candidates, maintaining relationships and putting names into public view. Asellina’s brief request survives because the wall survived. It gives us a political action to read, even where much of the person’s life remains out of reach.
