‘Balbus was Building a Wall’: An Allusion in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Elsewhere

Abstract

In the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus is at Clongowes School, he considers a piece of graffiti seen ‘behind the door of one of the closets’ of ‘a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:/Balbus was building a wall’. ¹ Jeri Johnson in her notes for the Oxford World’s Classics edition of A Portrait glosses this as referring to ‘the boys’ Latin lessons; here, from Cicero (106–43 BC) in his Letters to Atticus, xii. 2: [Balbus] is building [new mansions for himself]: for what cares...