Graffiti are of some importance to the palaeographer and to the philologist as illustrating the forms and corruptions of the various alphabets and languages used by the people, and occasionally guide the archaeologist to the date of the building on which they appear, but they are chiefly valuable for the light they throw on the everyday life of the "man in the street" of the period, and for the intimate details of customs and institutions which no literature or formal inscriptions can give. The graffiti dealing with the gladiatorial shows at Pompeii are in this respect particularly noteworthy; the rude drawings such as that of the _secutor_ caught in the net of the _retiarius_ and lying entirely at his mercy, give a more vivid picture of what the incidents of these shows were like than any account in words (see Garrucci, _op. cit._, Pls. x.-xiv.; A. Mau, _Pompeii in Leben und Kunst_, 2nd ed., 1908, ch. xxx.). In 1866 in the Trastevere quarter of Rome, near the church of S. Crisogono, was discovered the guardhouse (_excubitorium_) of the seventh cohort of the city police (_vigiles_), the walls being covered by the scribblings of the guards, illustrating in detail the daily routine, the hardships and dangers, and the feelings of the men towards their officers (W. Henzen, "L' Escubitorio della Settima coorte dei Vigili" in _Bull. Inst._ 1867, and _Annali Inst._, 1874; see also R. Lanciani, _Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries_, 230, and _Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome_, 1897, 548). The most famous graffito yet discovered is that generally accepted as representing a caricature of Christ upon the cross, found on the walls of the Domus Gelotiana on the Palatine in 1857, and now preserved in the Kircherian Museum of the Collegio Romano. Deeply scratched in the wall is a figure of a man clad in the short _tunica_ with one hand upraised in salutation to another figure, with the head of an ass, or possibly a horse, hanging on a cross; beneath is written in rude Greek letters "Anaxamenos worships (his) god." It has been suggested that this represents an adherent of some Gnostic sect worshipping one of the animal-headed deities of Egypt (see Ferd. Becker, _Das Spottcrucifix der römischen Kaiserpaläste_, Breslau, 1866; F. X. Kraus, _Das Spottcrucifix vom Palatin_, Freiburg in Breisgau, 1872; and Visconti and Lanciani, _Guida del Palatino_).