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MAIL AND POSTAL SERVICE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Roman mail coach
There was no postal service or mail delivery in ancient times. A person who wrote a letter had to track someone down who was heading to the same destination as the letter and that someone had to be persuaded and given incentive or money to deliver it.
One letter received in the A.D. 2nd century read: "I was delighted to get your letter, which was given to me by the sword maker; the one you say you sent with Platon's son, I haven't got." Another read; "I sent you two other letters, one by Nedymos and one by Kronios, the armed guard. I've received the one you sent with an Arab."
One daughter in Egypt wrote her mother: "I found no way I could get to you, since the camel-drivers didn't want to go to Oxyrhynchus. Not only that, I also went up to Antinoe to take a boat, but didn't find any. So now I've thought it best to forward the baggage to Antonoe and wait there til I can find a boat and sail. Please give the bearers of this letter 2 talents and 300 drachmas...to pay for transportation...If you you don't have it at hand borrow it...and pay them, since they can't wait around even an hour."
There were no addresses and only the main streets had names. People dropping off letters had to be given careful instructions on where to deliver it. One set of instruction read, "From Moon gate walks as if toward the granaries...and at the first street in back of the baths turn left...Then go west. Then go to the steps and up the other steps and turn right. After the temple precinct there is a seven story house with a basket-weaving establishment. Inquire there from the concierge...Then give a shout."
The only postal system was for government couriers, who were often slaves. The words diplomacy and diploma come from the Greek word diploma , which means "doubled" or "folded." This was a reference to how special messages were folded and sealed to be kept secret. The Romans placed important documents on a bronze diptych and were folded shut and sealed. Bronze seals with names of homeowners and administrators have been found.
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Websites on Ancient Rome: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; Lacus Curtius penelope.uchicago.edu; British Museum ancientgreece.co.uk; Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org; The Internet Classics Archive classics.mit.edu ; Bryn Mawr Classical Review bmcr.brynmawr.edu; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org; Ancient Rome resources for students from the Courtenay Middle School Library web.archive.org ; History of ancient Rome OpenCourseWare from the University of Notre Dame web.archive.org ; United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV) History unrv.com
Codes and Signals in the Roman Empire

Roman signal station
Adam Hart-Davis wrote for the BBC: “The Romans had clever signalling systems. On Hadrian's Wall an alphabetic system was used based on two groups of five flags, which allowed them to send messages letter by letter, and was similar to the system developed in England at the end of the eighteenth century. [Source: Adam Hart-Davis, BBC, February 17, 2011 |::|]
“The Romans also had a coded system, with which they could send only one of a dozen fixed messages, depending on the time for which they showed a flag. The sender and receiver would have the same code book and identical water clocks, marked perhaps with numbers. |::|
“To send message VI in the book, raise your flag (or flaming torch at night), wait until the receiver raises a flag to acknowledge, then lower your flag, and raise it again, starting your clock as you raise the flag. When your flag points to VI, lower your flag again. The receiver should have started the clock when the flag went up for the second time, and stopped it when the flag went down; the number VI will reveal the message. The idea of using codes like this was taken up by the French, also at the end of the eighteenth century.” |::|
Letters in the Roman Era
Harold Whetstone Johnston wrote in “The Private Life of the Romans”: “Sending Letters. For long distances, especially over seas, sending letters by special messengers was very expensive, and, except for the most urgent matters, recourse was had to traders and travelers going in the desired direction. Persons sending messengers or intending to travel themselves made it a point of honor to notify their friends in time for letters to be prepared; they also carried letters for entire strangers, if requested to do so. There was great danger, of course, that letters sent in this way might fall into the wrong hands or be lost. It was customary, therefore, to send a copy of an important letter (litterae eodem exemplo, uno exemplo), or at least an abstract of its contents, by another person and, if possible, by a different route. It was also possible to disguise the meaning by the use of fictitious names known to the correspondents only or by the employment of regular cipher codes. Suetonius tells us that Caesar simply substituted for each letter the one that stood three places lower in the alphabet (D for A, E for B, etc.), but elaborate and intricate systems were also in use. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]

letter on a writing tablet from the British military outpost of Vindolanda
“Writing the Letter. The extensive correspondence carried on by every Roman of position made it impossible for him to write with his own hand any but the most important of his letters or those to his dearest friends. The place of the stenographer and writing machine of today was taken by slaves or freedmen, often highly educated, who wrote at his dictation. Such slaves were called in general terms librarii, more accurately servi ab epistulis, servi a manu, or amanuenses. Notes and short letters were written on tablets of firwood or ivory of various sizes, often fastened together in sets of two or more by wire hinges (codicilli, pugillare). The inner faces were slightly hollowed out, and the depression was nearly filled with wax, so as to leave a raised rim about the edges, much like the frame of an old-fashioned slate. Upon the wax the letters were traced with an ivory, bone, or metal tool (stilus, graphium) which had one end pointed like a pencil, for writing, and the other broad and flat, like a paper cutter, for smoothing the wax. With the flat end mistakes could be corrected or the whole letter erased and the tablets used again, often for the reply to the letter itself. Such tablets were used not only for letters, but also for the schoolboy’s exercises and for business documents. For longer communications the Romans used a coarse “paper” (papyrus). Upon it they wrote with pens made of split reeds and with a thick ink made of soot (lampblack) mixed with resinous gums. Paper, pens, and ink were poor, and papyrus expensive, and the bulky tablets, which could be used again, were preferred for all but the longest letters. Parchment did not come into general use until the fourth or fifth century of our era. |+|
“Sealing and Opening of Letters. For sealing the letter, thread (linum), wax (cera), and a seal (signum) were necessary. The seal not only secured the letter against improper inspection, but also attested the genuineness of those written by the librarii; autograph signatures seem not to have been thought of. The tablets were put together face to face with the writing on the inside, and the thread was passed around them and through small holes bored through them, and was then securely tied. Upon the knot softened wax was dropped and to this the seal was applied. Letters written on sheets of papyrus (schedae) were rolled longitudinally and then secured in the same way. On the outside was written the name of the person addressed, with, perhaps, the place where he was to be found, if the letter was not sent by a special messenger. When the letter was opened, care was taken not to break the seal; the cutting of the thread gave access to the contents. If the letter was preserved, the seal was kept attached to it in order to attest its authenticity. In the fifth chapter of the Third Oration against Catiline Cicero describes the opening of a letter.” |+|
Roman Social Media
Tom Standage wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “The exchange of media along social networks of friends and acquaintances is in fact much older than Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. Consider the situation in the late Roman republic, in the 1st century B.C. At the time there were no printing presses and no paper. Instead, information circulated among the intermarried families of the Roman elite through the exchange of papyrus rolls. The correspondence of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, the best preserved collection of letters from the period, shows that he and his friends wrote to one another constantly, recounting the latest political machinations, passing on items of interest from others and providing commentary and opinion. [Source: Tom Standage, Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2013. Standage is the digital editor at the Economist and author of “A History of the World in 6 Glasses and Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years” (Bloomsbury USA, 2013), ***]

Cicero
““I sent you on March 24th a copy of Balbus’ letter to me and of Caesar’s letter to him,” Cicero wrote to a friend in one typical example. Letters were commonly copied, shared and quoted in other letters. Some missives were addressed to several people and were intended to be read aloud or posted in public. When Cicero or another politician made a noteworthy speech, he would distribute it by making copies available to his associates, who would read it and pass it on to others. Many more people might then read the speech than had heard it being delivered in person. “Books circulated in a similar way, as sets of papyrus rolls passed from one reader to the next. Anyone who wished to retain a copy of a speech or book would have it copied by scribes before passing it on. People in Rome also sent their friends excerpts from the state gazette, a bulletin posted in the Forum each day containing official announcements and summaries of political debates. ***
“With information flitting from one person to another, this informal system enabled information to reach the farthest corners of the Roman world within a few weeks. News from Rome took about five weeks to reach Britain in the west and seven weeks to reach Syria in the east. Merchants, soldiers and officials in distant parts would circulate information from the heart of the republic within their own social circles, sharing extracts from letters, speeches or the state gazette with their friends and passing news and rumors from the frontier back to their contacts in Rome. This was a world in which people gathered, filtered and distributed information for their friends. It was, in short, a social media system. ***
“In many respects, the emergence of Internet-based social media in recent years is therefore a return to the way things used to be. These similarities can be instructive because it turns out that ancient forms of social media prompted many of the same questions that Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the rest have raised today. Do new forms of social media lead to a trivialisation and coarsening of public discourse, for example? How should those in authority respond when they face criticism in social media? To what extent can social media help bring about political change? Is it all just a distracting waste of time? The deepest lesson is that when you send a tweet or share a link on Facebook, you are continuing a deep and rich tradition of person-to-person sharing that goes back to Roman times, more than 2,000 years ago. Social media does not simply link us to each other today - it also links us to the past.” ***
As Cicero said: “Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.”
Spread of Information in the Roman Era
Tom Standage wrote in his book “Writing on the Wall”: “In July 51 B.C. the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero arrived in Cilicia, in what is now southeast Turkey, to take up the post of proconsul, or regional governor. Cicero had been deeply reluctant to leave the bustle of Rome, where he was a central figure in the plotting and counterplotting of Roman politics, and he intended to return as soon as was decently possible. The burning question of the day was whether Julius Caesar, commander of Rome’s armies in the west, would make a grab for power by marching on the city. Cicero had spent his career trying to defend the political system of the Roman republic, with its careful division of powers and strict limits on the authority of any individual, from Caesar and others who wished to centralize power and seize it for themselves. But a new anticorruption law required Cicero and other trustworthy elder statesmen to take up posts as provincial governors. Fortunately, even in distant Cilicia, Cicero had the means to stay in touch with the goings- on in Rome— because the Roman elite had developed an elaborate system to distribute information.

“At the time there were no printing presses and no paper. Instead, information circulated through the exchange of letters and other documents which were copied, commented on, and shared with others in the form of papyrus rolls. Cicero’s own correspondence, one of the best- preserved collections of letters from the period, shows that he exchanged letters constantly with his friends elsewhere, keeping them up to date with the latest political machinations, passing on items of interest from others, and providing his own commentary and opinions. Letters were often copied, shared, and quoted in other letters. Some letters were addressed to several people and were written to be read aloud, or to be posted in public for general consumption.
“When Cicero or another politician made a noteworthy speech, he could distribute it by making copies available to his close associates, who would read it and pass it on to others. Many more people might then read the speech than had heard it being delivered. Books circulated in a similar way, as sets of papyrus rolls passed from person to person. Anyone who wished to retain a copy of a speech or book would have it transcribed by scribes before passing it on. Copies also circulated of the acta diurna (the “daily acts,” or state gazette), the original of which was posted on a board in the Forum in Rome each day and contained summaries of political debates, proposals for new laws, announcements of births and deaths, the dates of public holidays, and other official information. As he departed for Cilicia, Cicero asked his friend and protégé Marcus Caelius Rufus to send him copies of each day’s gazette along with his letters. But this would be just part of Cicero’s information supply. “Others will write, many will bring me news, much too will reach me even in the way of rumor,” Cicero wrote.
“With information flitting from one correspondent to another, this informal system enabled information to penetrate to the farthest provinces within a few weeks at most. News from Rome took around five weeks to reach Britain in the west and seven weeks to reach Syria in the east. Merchants, soldiers, and officials in distant parts would circulate information from the heart of the republic within their own social circles, sharing extracts from letters, speeches, or the state gazette with their friends and passing news and rumors from the frontier back to their contacts in Rome. There was no formal postal service, so letters had to be carried by messengers or given to friends, traders, or travelers heading in the right direction. The result was that Cicero, along with other members of the Roman elite, was kept informed by a web of contacts— the members of his social circle— all of whom gathered, filtered, and distributed information for each other. To modern eyes this all seems strangely familiar. Cicero was, to use today’s Internet jargon, participating in a “social media” system: that is, an environment in which information was passed from one person to another along social connections, to create a distributed discussion or community. The Romans did it with papyrus rolls and messengers; today hundreds of millions of people do the same things rather more quickly and easily using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other Internet tools. The technologies involved are very different, but these two forms of social media, separated by two millennia, share many of the same underlying structures and dynamics: they are two- way, conversational environments in which information passes horizontally from one person to another along social networks, rather than being delivered vertically from an impersonal central source.”
Pompeii’s Graffiti as a Form of Social Media
Adrienne LaFrance wrote in The Atlantic: “All of which is somewhat sophomoric, but certainly isn’t outdated per se. The social nature of ancient graffiti, including walls where there were clusters of inscriptions featuring people writing back and forth to one another, evokes social communication of the modern era: Facebook and Twitter, for instance. “I will say that the graffiti at Pompeii are nicer than the types of things we write today, though,” Benefiel told me. [Source: Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic, Mar 29, 2016 |^|]
“That may be because many of the tropes associated with writing in public are by now so familiar that simply declaring “Claudius was here,” isn’t enough—in the digital space, anyway—to achieve what many people are aiming for. “Overall, people want to write on things to be known,” Roger Gastman, the author of The History of American Graffiti, told me in an email. “To be everywhere at once yet nowhere at all.” |^|
“But the wall-politicking that takes place on Facebook may be inherently different from graffiti in the physical world—even if it stems from the same basic human inclinations. “Writing your name on a [physical] wall is both a way of getting noticed but it’s also somewhat transgressive,” said Judith Donath, the author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. But in order to get noticed online, where everyone can and is supposed to write on walls, you have to do more than mark down your own name and the date. The pressure, then, is to be more provocative, Donath told me. And an arms race for provocation in a world where there are more than 7,000 tweets published every second tends to debase civility pretty quickly. |^|
““Especially Twitter,” Donath said. “If you’re not saying something, it’s like you’re not there at all; you don’t exist. You have to maintain your presence there. It’s more of a temporal issue, whereas in a city it’s more spatial.” |^|
“The ancient graffiti of Pompeii brings together these two domains, the spatial and the temporal, anchoring the ideas of a group of people in time to the physical space they occupy. Few artifacts are able to do this. Books and stone tablets, for example, aren’t typically preserved in situ. Which means the preservation of the convergence in Pompeii is remarkably rare, and made all the more astonishing for the fact that much of the graffiti there dates to sometime in the twilight decades of the city’s existence. |^|
““You can walk through the entire town. You can peek into each house. You can get a sense that, wow, this is a space where people lived surrounded by color and imagery and decoration,” Benefiel said. “But I think what all of those elements give you is the space of the town. Then we have many inscriptions that are people’s names. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of inscriptions that are friends writing greetings to each other. The graffiti immediately brings you to the people of the town.The graffiti really evoke the people who lived there.” |^|
Message But Not Media Changes When Rome Embraces Christianity
Dr Neil Faulkner wrote for the BBC: “When Constantine the Great ordered his men to fight as Christians in 312 AD, he began an ideological revolution.By the end of the century, paganism was effectively outlawed, and Christianity was the dominant religion of the state, the army, the elite and the towns. Donations of land and wealth flowed to the church. [Source: Dr Neil Faulkner, BBC, February 17, 2011 |::|]
“When we examine the archaeology of Late Roman cities, we find many of the old monuments ruined and their walls cannibalised to build new cathedrals and churches. We find the mosaicist employed making Christian tombstones, the silversmith engraving Christian motifs, the fresco-painter decorating Christian chapels. Roman emperors were represented as the agents of God on Earth, charged with crushing paganism and heresy. |::|
“The bishops reciprocated the favour shown the Church by preaching loyalty to the secular power. An alliance was forged between church and state, and henceforward Roman emperors were represented as the agents of God on Earth, charged with crushing paganism and heresy, with defending Christendom against its enemies. We see them depicted - on coins, jewellery, silverware, frescos and mosaics - alongside the symbols of the Christian church - the Cross or the Chi-Rho monogram (the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek). |Here was a new motif in the propaganda of power, one destined to have a long and bloody history: the ruler as crusader.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.
Last updated November 2024