I posted several days ago about a recent visit to the Palatine during which I was able to see the new display of the famous Alexamenos graffito and the newly opened paedagogium in which the graffito was originally found. I returned to the Palatine hill today to visit the ongoing excavations at the Horrea Agrippiana. On our way out of the site, I stopped by the paedagogium again to snap a few additional photos only to find that a new barrier had cut off access to the rooms of the paedagogium:

Palatine paedagogium, Room 7, view from the southwest, July 2018

So, it looks like the authorities have decided not to leave this part of the area open to the general public. It’s an understandable move. The plaster on the walls is quite fragile, and an inadvertent bump could easily knock it loose. But it is frustrating for those of us who would like to inspect details more closely. If anyone needs pictures of the rooms, I took quite a few on my previous visit. (It should also be noted that the trail that runs past the paedagogium now closes at 1 p.m.; so any visit out there should be planned for the morning.)

Also, while I was writing up my previous post on the graffito, I was a little surprised by some of the modern…uses? adaptations? contexts? of the graffito. Among them are the Alexamenos dog t-shirt (a bit expensive, to my mind)…

…and, lest we fear the object of Alexamenos’s worship simply died on that cross, the animated gif  below shows the donkey-headed figure is in fact alive and well as of earlier this year (you’ll have to click the link in the previous sentence to see the animation; I couldn’t embed the tweet properly):