A surviving piece of graffiti from Pompeii translates to "Gaius was here".
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It's the perfect distillation of the genre: an exercising of the ego, of the urge to shout into the void, "I exist!" (or, in Gaius' case, existed).
Graffiti is illegal in Tasmania under the Police Offences Act.
It can be a costly scourge on businesses and sometimes it's outright hateful and offensive, as we saw recently when the Launceston Synagogue was defaced with anti-Semitic scribblings.
Some of it's obscene and some of it's just plain ugly.
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But, while I'm wary of romaticising illegal conduct, graffiti is often more than just mindless vandalism.
When the subway graffiti subculture exploded in New York in the 1970s, the city was plagued by violence and wracked by austerity measures.
And when times are tough, it's minorities that feel the pinch of disadvantage the most.
Cultural critic Greg Tate has referred to graffiti as "reverse colonisation". Indeed, it was black and Puerto Rican kids who were the pioneers of subway graffiti, assuming secret identities just like their favourite superheroes and emblazoning their 'tags' - usually taking the form of snappy one-word noms de guerre - on train cars.
"In the ghetto, it is almost impossible to find some quiet location for your identity," Norman Mailer wrote in his 1973 long-form essay The Faith of Graffiti. "No, in the environment of the slum, the courage to display yourself is your only capital."
Like Gaius, the graffiti writers of New York were sending their names out into the world, seeking recognition. "Under oblivious eyes, the invisible autographed the world," says the narrator of Jonathan Lethem's 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude, which is set at the height of New York City's graffiti phenomenon.
The invisible endeavouring to render themselves visible. In this way, it might be argued that graffiti is an intensely human form of art, demonstrating our innate need to be seen.
With the arrival of colour television in the late 20th century, the associated proliferation of advertising and the rise of superhero comics, North American teenagers were being saturated with popular culture at nearly every waking moment.
When I was writing a thesis on graffiti culture five years ago, Skeme, a graffiti writer active in New York City in the 1980s, told me that "when you live in impoverished conditions it is natural to seek out heroes ... [superheroes] basically became our gods and demigods".
Superheroes are at once visible and invisible, their alter egos preserving their true identity while their daring exploits as masked crime-fighters make them famous.
It was a dichotomy the graffiti writers seemed to tap into. By throwing up their tags across the city in explosions of colour, they gained notoriety and, at the same time, preserved their true identities.
Today, graffiti remains a kind of outsider art, practiced on the fringes of society, violating the division of public and private space. It's inspired the works of legendary modern artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as street artists like Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey and Banksy.
Despite the prevailing eagerness to conceive of it simply as a bunch of dumb scrawls, graffiti is a product of its practitioners' environment.
Nancy Macdonald, in her book The Graffiti Subculture, wrote: "We are unaware that the city walls are alive with its social drama".
What do marginalised people get out of blowing up their names in technicolour across the urban landscape? Power and visibility.
Every time the name is written in spray paint, there's a moment of self-discovery, an assertion that the writer matters.
Despite the prevailing eagerness to conceive of it simply as a bunch of dumb scrawls, graffiti is a product of its practitioners' environment.
Before we write all graffiti off as mindless vandalism, we should consider why it's there in the first place.
Social dislocation, discrimination, inequality; they can all lead people to lash out.
Of course, they're not the root causes of every example of illegal street art, but it's difficult to deny that they represent the genesis of the subculture, as it arose from the ghettos of New York City in the '70s.
You don't have to like or accept graffiti. Especially if it's been plastered all over your own property.
But to say it's all bad is to discount the social ills that can lead to its proliferation.
After all, some people, whether they're New Yorkers or Tasmanians, just want to be seen