Arma virumque cano… the incipit of the Aeneid is easy to remember as it is to find it in anthologies and textbooks. Less usual is to find it on a brick. But somebody wrote the incipit of the Aeneid on a brick in Italica, during the first half of the first century CE, and did it before the brick was even cooked. Punctuation in this text as well as the form of the cursive writing, similar to that on the walls of Pompei, helps to date the text. But this is only one of nearly 40 attestations of the Aeneid not in books. Since Romans learned to write copying Virgil’s Aeneid, these could be writing exercises of a student. Scholars think that this is not a planned inscription or a school product, but rather a piece of casual writing by somebody who learned to write but was not a professional writer. The script is capitalized cursive.
