In Pompeii, the Wall Is Yours: If There Had Been Social Media in Antiquity
Status updates were scratched into walls and the annual recap was carved into a monument: the stone and marble mirror of social media in the ancient world.
Translated from the Turkish original: Türkçesini oku
IN SHORT
There was no social media in the ancient world, but there was a habit of sharing: Rome's daily notice boards, the wall writings of Pompeii, the Res Gestae of Augustus and lead curse tablets. What changed was the material that carried the message, and its speed.
Social media was not invented; it was discovered. The urge to share came before us, and all it asked of the medium was a durable surface. If we carried today’s platforms back to the ancient world, the picture would look like this:
The official feed: Acta Diurna
How was daily news announced in Rome?
In 59 BC, on Caesar’s orders, Rome began writing daily events on whitewashed wooden boards and posting them in public places1: decisions of the Senate, lawsuits, births, marriages. This was the state’s verified account, and its followers were everyone who passed through the forum. No algorithm, just a ladder. No notifications; the town crier shouts. And the feed refreshes once a day; no pulling down with your finger to refresh.
The comment section: the walls of Pompeii
What was written in the graffiti of Pompeii?
The wall writings of Pompeii contain the entire cast of a comment section without the internet: love announcements (“so-and-so kissed his sweetheart here”), skilfully crafted insults, check-ins in the style of “stayed here, the wine wasn’t bad” (there really are names scratched in saying “Gaius was here”2), gladiator fight posters painted on walls (sponsored content, in other words) and endorsements of candidates at election time. No like counts; but if a second hand added to the scratched message, it had gone viral.
The art of forwarding: epic
How were the Homeric epics passed on?
Think of Homer: every bard tells the story again, embellishes it a little, changes it a little. With each hand-over the text degrades like a screenshot of a screenshot. Three thousand years later, philologists argue about which version is the original. Source criticism is history’s oldest reverse image search.
The annual recap: Res Gestae
What is the Res Gestae of Augustus?
Before he died, Augustus wrote a thirty-five-point text of “things I did”: how many wars I ended, how many temples I built, how much I gave to the people. After his death the text was inscribed on bronze tablets in Rome, and in stone on buildings in Anatolia such as the Temple of Augustus in Ankara. It is the Stone Age version of Spotify Wrapped plus a LinkedIn year in review plus the classic humble brag. The difference: nobody reads yours a year later, while Augustus’s is still read two thousand years on.
The subtweet: lead curses
What were curse tablets used for in antiquity?
For someone you were angry with, you scratched a curse into a lead tablet and threw it into a well, a grave or a spring: the defixio. No “without naming names” here (most people wrote the name, and sometimes the mother’s name too). The post looks deleted, but two thousand years later an archaeologist digs it up. Like the internet, lead forgets nothing; the server is just a well.
The reply guy: Socrates
What did Socrates do in the agora?
The man in the agora who jumps into every topic, turns every sentence into a question and keeps asking “what exactly do you mean?” No moderation system, no report button either. That is why history’s most famous reply guy was silenced with poison instead of a block: the worst decision in the history of platform management.
In a nutshell
What do we learn from the sharing habits of antiquity?
The picture never changed; it only sped up: from stone tablet to screen, from agora to timeline. The material got cheaper and durability declined. The lead curse tablet lasted two thousand years; a post lasts as long as the server rent. Antiquity already had its social media; the only thing missing is the chance that we leave behind an archive tomorrow’s historian cannot read. We wrote about that too: marble erases nothing; we do.
Notes
References
- Cooley, A. E. (2009). Res gestae divi Augusti: Text, translation, and commentary. Cambridge University Press.
- Gager, J. G. (Ed.). (1992). Curse tablets and binding spells from the ancient world. Oxford University Press.
- Milnor, K. (2014). Graffiti and the literary landscape in Roman Pompeii. Oxford University Press.
- Suetonius. (1914). Lives of the Caesars, Volume I (J. C. Rolfe, Trans.; Loeb Classical Library 31). Harvard University Press. (Julius, 20)
