"The Revolutionary Evolution of the Media" -- Chapter 2

Chapter 2 -- Why the Romans Really Built All Those Roads

OK, that’s a bit facetious. But the Roman roads had a big hand in creating newspapers … sort of. Like the Interstate highways President Eisenhower started in order to make certain military equipment could move freely, the Roman road system “was built to move large bodies of troops around a militarized domain that stretched from (what’s now) Spain to Germany and from Britain to Asia Minor” as Andrew Pettegree wrote in The Invention of News: How the World Came To Know About Itself. Not long after the roads were built, the Emperor Augustus created a courier service to keep in touch across the Empire.

The courier service was the first formal step beyond the intimate “connectivity” of the family, tribe and city-state. Think of it as the first pony express.

As Rome’s first autocratic ruler, Augustus annexed (nice word) “Egypt,Dalmatia, Pannonia,Noricum, and Raetia, expanded possessions in Africa, expanded into Germania, and completed the conquest of Hispania.” He also ruled through client states such as Judea.

The Roman postal service ceased when the empire crumbled. But in 1973, at archaeological excavations dubbed Vindolanda along Hadrian’s wall in the United Kingdom, a trove of thousands of writing tablets made of wood was found that contained mundane news along with notes from the local governor and his wife as well as orders for legionnaires and local conscripts.

Of course, some connectivity had always existed in the realm of commerce and the military going back to the Mesopotamian Sumerians as they created one of the first organized kingdoms (circa 2350-2150) as well as one of the first written languages (Akkadian). After all, someone had to keep track of what was being sent along the Silk and other roads and in the seas sailed by the Phoenicians and others. And someone had to make sure soldiers and sailors sometimes returned.

The eras of Xenophon, Alexander the Great, Hannibal and Julius Caesar spanning the years from about 500 BC to the time of Christ accelerated the forming of multi-ethnic empires encompassing greater geographical footprints.

Much, much later after the Dark Ages began to lighten, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor between 1493 and 1519, combined the power of printing and the still extant network of roads in his domain by charging Francesco and Janetto de Tassis with creating a regular postal service that crisscrossed Europe from Innsbruck to Brussels via Rome. The de Tassis brothers were sons of Alessandro Tassis who had recently organized the papal courier service Maestri dei Corrieri.

Thus the resurrection of the Roman pony express occurred. Sort of. The service required riders to travel at 7.5 kilometers/hour via permanently manned stages swapping horses to continue. In 1505, Granada and Toledo were added in Spain where Maximilian’s son Philip co-ruled. The reality of the printing press and moveable type (Johannes Gutenberg married the carved wooden block screw press with moveable type and oil-based ink in 1493) was economically driving printing toward mass possibilities adding a conduit form taking literacy from the elite to the masses.

But it took another hundred years before either the postal service or the serial news format was really functional.

The renewed ability to shrink – though not so much yet – time and space plus growing populations and rulers with diversifying ethnic and/or religious subjects drove a need for better communications. Printing allowed for mass access to information as literacy grew (and, as, Steven Johnson wrote in How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, printing drove not only communications but also optics as people strained to read and much more).

The building of a systematic way to distribute printed matter via horseback or carriage created a distribution conduit to go along with the newly economical content.