Yard signs of Pompeii

Status: Already answered

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Yard signs of Pompeii. Joins modern campaign geography to Pompeian electoral epigraphy. Political scientists mapping yard signs and canvassing find both decay with distance from the candidate's home, because campaigns run on the candidate's own network of neighbours, clients, and friends, and that network is spatially concentrated. Pompeii's painted electoral endorsements — the programmata still covering its street walls — are the same artifact in plaster: wall space was granted by supporters, and supporters lived near the candidate. The claim is that programmata are spatial campaign residue obeying the lawn-sign law. It predicts that a candidate's endorsement density decays exponentially with walking distance from his securely identified house, on a scale of a few hundred metres; that his share of all programmata near his own doorstep runs at least double his citywide share; and that his named endorsers (rogatores) cluster on his home street rather than on comparable control streets.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For the candidates of the final Pompeian campaigns whose residences are securely identified, programmata density per 100 m of street frontage declines with network walking distance from the candidate's house with an exponential scale of 150-400 m; each candidate's share of all programmata within 100 m of his own house exceeds his citywide share by at least 2x; and named endorsers (rogatores) with identifiable premises cluster on the candidate's home street more than on comparable control streets.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: geolocated programmata corpora built from CIL IV with mapped house attributions. A spatially flat distribution, or home-neighborhood shares matching citywide shares, kills it.

In the atlas

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Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The same analytical move is published: the Viitanen-associated GIS programme maps ~1,500 accurately located programmata, finds clustering near candidates' own residences and at loci celeberrimi, and explicitly tests rogator-residence-versus-placement (385 placed notices with rogator data). The exponential decay-scale fit and the 2x-within-100m ratio were not located, but the connection is an active published program.

Viitanen et al., 'Campaigning For Votes in Ancient Pompeii - Contextualizing Electoral Programmata' — The GIS residence-vs-placement program

Predictions

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