insist on our newspaper serving us up daily some sensational piece of news, and when we fail to find the dainty, we pettishly shut it with the remark, 'Nothing in the paper to-day.'
And yet of this journalistic recreation, which we have made a necessity to us, it is certain that the ancients had scarce any idea. We do not know whether the Athenians ever knew anything like it. Among the Romans something still more surprising prevailed. They had newspapers, or at least what resembled our newspapers, and they were in a position to appreciate the services to be obtained from them; yet they did not divine the part they might assume, the place they would fill in politics, in literature, in the life of every one everywhere; they let them vegetate in obscurity for centuries, deriving from them hardly any profit. How shall we explain their failure to grasp what was to be one of the great forces—one of the tyrannies of our time, without appearing even to catch a glimpse of it?
We have here an historical problem of which we must seek the solution.
I
What took the place of newspapers among the Romans. The placard. The importance of inscriptions.
It is evident from the outset that if the ancients did not feel like ourselves the need of newspapers, it was because they had something else which took their place.
Among the means of publicity at their disposal there were none of which they made more use than placards; we use them still, but much less than they. When we traverse the ruins of a Roman town, we encounter them at every step. There are those made to last, and, with this intention, graven on brass, on marble, on stone. These are the enactments of authority, the laws of the Emperors, the decrees of the Senate and the decurions, or, even in private life, the contracts guaranteeing the right of possession, and the minutes of religious corporations desirous of recording the
