Morning at the Forum: Reading Rome's Daily News

Marcus Valerius

Stay close to me. The light is only just touching the Capitoline, and the Forum is already loud. I've poured my drop of wine for the household gods, I've swallowed a heel of bread on my feet, and now I'm walking down toward the Rostra with half of Rome. Do you see where the crowd thickens? Near the temple steps, where it stops being a crowd and becomes a wall of shoulders? That is where the news is.

Marcus Valerius

We call it the Acta. The Daily Acts. Some say Acta Populi, some say Acta Publica, and some just say the Diurna and leave it at that. It's a board, a wooden board painted white, which we call an album, and the scribes write on it fresh, in dark ink, sometimes red for the things they want your eye to catch. Julius Caesar ordered it in his first consulship, some hundred and seventy years ago, when he decreed that the doings of the Senate and the people be written down and made public. Augustus later kept the Senate's quarrels off the board, but the Acta itself never stopped. Emperors come and go, and still the scribes whiten the wood every morning.

Marcus Valerius

Now, what do I want today? I want the games. If the Emperor is announcing a day at the Circus or the Amphitheatre, I sell wine to a thirsty city. If the aediles have made a new rule about stalls, I need to know it before an inspector knocks over my amphorae. And I want the grain news, because when ships are late at Ostia, tempers rise, and when tempers rise, men drink. A wine seller reads the sky, and the sea, and the board.

Marcus Valerius

I am literate, I'll tell you that with some pride. But literate is no use when you can't get within ten paces of the wood. Look at this crush. Here's a baker's boy with flour to his elbows. Here's a slave sent by his mistress, wax tablet in hand, scratching down everything for her breakfast table. There's a Syrian trader asking anyone who'll answer about corn prices. And here, always, are the idlers, who have no business at all except the hope that somebody's wife has done something shameful.

Marcus Valerius

So I do what any sensible Roman does. I stop pushing. I stand on my toes at the back and I listen, because somebody is always reading aloud.

Marcus Valerius

Hear him? That's a freedman clerk, thin as a reed, standing on a step with his chin up. He chants the lines the way a priest chants a prayer, a little too proud of the sound of his own voice. And the crowd answers him. That's what you must understand about the Acta. Nobody reads it alone. It is read to us, and we talk back.

Marcus Valerius

First comes the Emperor. The clerk gives the formal words, something about Trajan's new forum and the great works still rising behind us on the cut hillside, and the people nod, because we can see the dust from here. Then senatorial business, dry as old bread. Then the aediles, and now the crowd wakes up, because the clerk reads a rule about market stalls and cleanliness, and a fishmonger at my elbow curses it with real imagination. Someone behind him laughs. The clerk raises his voice and goes on.

Marcus Valerius

Then the grain. Shipments reported at Ostia, the price steady. Good. A little breath goes out of the whole Forum, as if we were one body. And listen to what follows, because this is the strange and wonderful part. Right after the grain, the clerk reads a notice of a court judgment. And right after that, a divorce.

Marcus Valerius

A great house, naturally. Names I know from gossip. The idlers lean in like cats at a fish stall. The man beside me, an old neighbor of mine, a cobbler with a voice like a gate hinge, announces to nobody that he saw this coming when the lady was seen at the baths without her husband. Old Seneca, the philosopher, grumbled that there's hardly a day without a divorce on the board, and that some Roman women count their years by their husbands instead of by the consuls. I've never found him wrong about that.

Marcus Valerius

And that is the thing. It's all on the same board, in the same ink. The Emperor's decree. The price of grain. A man condemned. A baby born. A fire in a tavern, a portent in the sky, a notice of games. Nobody here thinks it strange. The old annals, the grand records of the year, keep only the weighty matters, and the Acta keeps whatever happened. A historian might look down his nose at that. I think it's why we love it.

Marcus Valerius

They tell an old story that was posted on this very board, long before my day. A man was executed and his body lay on the Gemonian Stairs, and his dog would not leave him. The people threw food, and the dog carried it to his dead master's mouth. Then, when the body was thrown into the Tiber, the dog swam out and tried to hold him above the water. Pliny wrote it down in his books. But the board had it first, and the whole city wept over it before any scholar picked up a pen.

Marcus Valerius

The clerk reaches the last of it. Games, three days from now, with beast hunts promised. I've got my answer. I'll hire two extra porters and order more jars. And then comes the closing line, the one that ends all the notices: publicare et propagare. Make it public, and spread it. And we do. The slave with the wax tablet is already pushing away. The Syrian is running toward the river. The cobbler is telling the fishmonger, who is telling a woman with a basket, and by midday the whole of Rome will know a thing a scribe wrote this morning.

Marcus Valerius

Copyists will write it out on papyrus too, for governors and legions and rich men on their country estates, far from this noise. But I wouldn't trade places with them. They only get the words. I get the crowd, the chalk dust on my sleeve, the old cobbler's cackle, and the feeling that I am a small man standing at the heart of the world, and the world has just told me exactly what it needs. Come along. We have wine to buy.