Political advertising

Today on CBC Radio 1's show The Current, there was a discussion of recent Canadian Conservative attack ads on new federal Liberal leader Stephane Dion. CBC went to the trouble of putting this effort in a long context by referring to the thousands of grafitti carved and painted on the walls of Pompeii. Some of these were ads, positive and negative, for local elections. In this part of Italy in the first century AD (CE), local electoral politics clearly had some vitality.

You can look at translations of and commentary on the graffiti, political and otherwise, here and here.