Julius Caesar Invented the Newspaper(?)

"Scholars commonly credit the ancient Romans with publishing the first newspaper, Acta Diurna, or daily doings, in 59 BCE. Although no copies of this paper have survived, it is widely believed to have published chronicles of events, assemblies, births, deaths, and daily gossip." - History of Newspapers, Chapter 2.1 from an Open Textbook used by Washington State University (and others)

Roman Media

From the 1st century BCE in the Roman Republic and into the empire, coins were used as instruments of social media. Moneyers would promote themselves and their families, consuls and emperors send messages to their constituents and attempt to create a narrative. Other than one coin that I will try to connect to my theme of the day, I will take a diversion and share some thoughts on finding truth in history - and the daily news.

The obverse legend confirms Octavian's role in the Second Triumvirate while simultaneously emphasizing his status as DIVI F (Son of the Deified One)  and the reverse explicitly identifies Julius Caesar as DIVO IVL (To the Divine Julius), formally linking Octavian to a god. Octavian's beard signaling his ongoing "grief" for his "father". Woytek argues that Octavian, who had recently eliminated Sextus Pompey, shifts focus to the divinity of his "father", Octavian distracts from a narrative of "civil war victor" to "pious son fulfilling a divine mandate".

Introductory textbooks on journalism, like the example above, frequently mention the same story: Julius Caesar invented the newspaper. In 59 BC, he established the Acta Diurna, a daily gazette posted on whitewashed boards in the Roman Forum, covering everything from senate debates to gladiator scores to society gossip. The gazette ran for four centuries. It was the world's first newspaper!

Almost none of this can be supported by ancient evidence.

What the ancient sources actually say

Suetonius documents that Julius Caesar created transparency in senate proceedings by requiring publication. The senate proceedings had previously been private. Suetonius, Life of Caesar 20: "Caesar's very first enactment after becoming consul was, that the proceedings both of the senate and of the people should day by day be compiled and published." (Inito honore primus omnium instituit, ut tam senatus quam populi diurna acta confierent et publicarentur.)

Caesar did not create "news" but mandated transparency and the publication of the senate's archives.

Augustus reversed this decision on senate transparency. Suetonius, Life of Augustus 36: "He introduced other innovations too, among them these: that the proceedings of the senate should not be published."

What the ancient sources do not say

A search in the Loeb Classical Library demonstrates that there is no explicit ancient reference to "Acta Diurna" as a named institution in the entirety of the collection. The Life of Caesar 20 is the only co-occurrence of the two words diurna and acta in a sentence. Suetonius is describing the action of making the acts daily, not naming a newspaper.

In all the scattered references to "acta" across Latin literature - roughly fifty passages - we cannot answer what this "acta" looked like, how it was produced, who compiled it, how frequently it was issued, or whether it was posted on a whitewashed board in the Forum. No ancient source I can identify as primary mentions a whitewashed board in the Forum for daily news.

The familiar image of whitewashed boards comes from Cicero, De Oratore 2.XII.52, and it is worth quoting carefully:

Latin: "ab initio rerum Romanarum usque ad P. Mucium pontificem maximum, res omnes singulorum annorum mandabat litteris pontifex maximus, referebatque in album, et proponebat tabulam domi, potestas ut esset populo cognoscendi" English: "from the beginning of Roman history up to the pontificate of Publius Mucius, the pontifex maximus used to commit to writing all the events of each year, and record them on a white surface [album], and post up the tablet [tabulam] at his house, so that all men might have liberty to acquaint themselves therewith.

Cicero himself, writing in 55 BC, is describing the practice of the Annales Maximi - the pontifical chronicle, posted at the pontifex's private residence. Not a newspaper. Not in the Forum. Not daily.

What did exist

Something did exist. Cicero's letters confirm that he was receiving dated compilations of public news from Rome as early as 58 BC. Tacitus confirms that under the Empire, a gazette was published regularly enough to be read in the provinces. Petronius confirms it was culturally familiar enough to be parodied. But as Barry Baldwin observed ("The Acta Diurna," 1979, Chiron 9: 189–204)in the most rigorous scholarly examination of the evidence:

"A fascinating thought, in these days of the mass media, that the Romans also had a news bulletin of sorts. And frustrating to have to admit that, save for a dubious item in the Historia Augusta, not a single fragment survives. No strong warrant, then, for those scholars who have confidently likened the Roman gazette either to the Times of London or to the modern tabloids."

Where the false narrative came from

If the ancient evidence is this thin, how did the story become so confident? In 1615, the Flemish antiquarian Stephanus Pighius published what he claimed were fragments of an ancient acta urbana - daily entries with dates, consuls' names, and civic details. They were exactly what a Roman newspaper should look like.

They were also 15th-century forgeries, debunked conclusively by Heinze in 1860, and confirmed as such by every serious scholar since - most recently by Andrew Lintott in the Papers of the British School at Rome (1986), who, after an exhaustive re-examination, concurred that they were fabrications, though "one senses a wistful longing for the fragments to be genuine".

But before the debunking, the damage was done. In 1740, Philip Yorke published an essay "On the Acta Diurna of the Old Romans" in The Gentleman's Magazine, including the first English translation of the forged fragments, and drew a direct line from the Roman gazette to the contemporary English newspaper. This essay - traceable in Walker, John, ed., A Selection of Curious Articles from the Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 2, London, 1811 - planted the seed of a narrative that journalism historians have been repeating for nearly three centuries.

Caveat Lector — or, Why AI is dangerous

A single ambiguous sentence in Suetonius, filtered through 18th-century English journalism's desire for a Roman pedigree and reinforced by 15th-century forged fragments, has produced a confident modern narrative - "Caesar invented the newspaper" - that the ancient evidence simply cannot support.

As information technology creates an almost miraculous ability to sort, organize, and synthesize information - relying on statistical frequencies of occurrence - it becomes more and more important for human consumers of information to learn how to ask "based on what evidence"?

A well told story "loosely based on the truth" makes a good movie, and "alternative facts" are often more compelling, popular, and visible than anything we can assert actually occurred.

In general, people and LLMs (Generative AI) both prioritize what is visible or probable over what is verifiable. Humans will have to prioritize critical thinking skills or we risk falling prey to every popularized narrative.

For further reading

• Baldwin, B. (1979), "The Acta Diurna," Chiron 9: 189–204.

• Lintott, A. (1986), "Acta Antiquissima: A Week in the History of the Roman Republic," Papers of the British School at Rome 54: 213–228.

• Rodriguez Mayorgas, Ana (2011), "Annales Maximi: Writing, Memory, and Religious Performance in the Roman Republic," in Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion, ed. A.P.M.H. Lardinois, J.H. Blok, and M.G.M. Van Der Poel, 235–54.

• Woytek, Bernhard. Arma et Nummi: Forschungen zur römischen Finanzgeschichte und Münzprägung der Jahre 49 bis 42 v. Chr. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003.

• Crawford, Michael H. Roman Republican Coinage. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974.