Introduction

The idea of information is not an easy one to define, partly because it is so familiar, partly because it is at the core of a wealth of scientific and sociological research unrelated to ancient history. We are living in an information age, which began, according to some historians, at the earliest with the invention of printing and the dissemination of cheaper books, or, according to others, later with the invention of the telegraph - which gave information a speed ‘‘essentially separated from the speed of human travel’’ (Brown and Duguid 2000: 17) - or even with the invention of the computer. Antiquity was not an information age, but this does not mean that information is in itself a modern idea. Information, in the sense (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) of ‘‘communication of the knowledge or ‘news’ of some fact or occurrence,’’ or of ‘‘new information about a subject of some public interest that is shared with some portion of the public’’ (Stephens 1997: 4), existed long before any age of information. The questions I raise in this chapter are concerned with how much information mattered in the Roman world and how much it changed in Late Antiquity. Although studies on information in premodern societies have interested mainly medievalists (Mostert 1999; Gauvard 2004), ancient historians have not been entirely indifferent to it. Many studies have been devoted to the history and organization of the cursus publicus, a sophisticated system of imperial post allowing official messengers to circulate at high speed and in safety throughout the empire (Naudet 1858; Pflaum 1940; Di Paola 1999; Kolb 2000); to the frumentarii and agentes in rebus, administrative agencies whose specific purpose was to circulate information (Giardina 1977; Carrie 1999); to military intelligence (Lee 1993; Austin and Rankov 1995), diplomatic relations (Gillett 2003) and archives (Demougin 1994). The proceedings of two conferences on information in the ancient world have been recently published (Andreau and Virlouvet 2002; Capdetrey and Nelis-Clement 2006). Moatti 2006 considers the same range of questions for an earlier

A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1

Period. A recent ‘‘Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity’’ meeting was focused on ‘‘Travel, Communication and Geography in Late Antiquity’’ (Ellis and Kidner 2004). But to my knowledge, there is only one book specifically devoted to the question of information in all its different aspects. Sian Lewis’s work, News and Society in the Greek Polis, when it was published in 1996, opened a new field of investigation, and it is surprising that no similar work has been done on the Roman world, for the transformation of City into Empire changed dramatically the function and the conditions of information.

This chapter is no substitute for such a study, and not just because it concerns only developments in Late Antiquity. I aim to show, rather, how interesting and fruitful it would be to undertake serious work on the subject. I am mainly concerned here with political information. In the first part, I shall investigate the possible role played by political information in the Late Roman Empire. Then I shall expound the changes in information control during the period: the increasing sophistication, the concurrence of new nonofficial systems of information, and the emergence of new, more fragmented, information patterns. In conclusion, two questions will be addressed: how are the changes in information related to the political changes of the empire, including the creation of separate kingdoms in the west? How can the history of information in the ancient world contribute to the history of information in general?