t the news, and was in no
way connected with the essential nature of the newspaper.

The regular collection and despatch of news presupposes a widespread
interest in public affairs, or an extensive area of trade exhibiting
numerous commercial connections and combinations of interest, or both at
once. Such interest is not realized until people are united by some more
or less extensive political organization into a certain community of
life-interest. The city republics of ancient times required no
newspaper; all their needs of publication could be met by the herald and
by inscriptions, as occasion demanded. Only when Roman supremacy had
embraced or subjected to its influence all the countries of the
Mediterranean was there need of some means by which those members of the
ruling class who had gone to the provinces as officials, tax-farmers,
and in other occupations, might receive the current news of the capital.
It is significant that Caesar, the creator of the military monarchy and
of the administrative centralization of Rome, is regarded as the founder
of the first contrivance resembling a newspaper.

Indeed, long before Caesar's consulate it had become customary for
Romans in the provinces to keep one or more correspondents at the
capital to send them written reports on the course of political movement
and on other events of the day. Such a correspondent was generally an
intelligent slave or freedman intimately acquainted with affairs at the
capital, who, moreover, often made a business of reporting for several.
He was thus a species of primitive reporter, differing from those of
today only in writing, not for a newspaper, but directly for readers. On
recommendation of their employers, these reporters enjoyed at times
admission even to the senate discussions. Antony kept such a man, whose
duty it was to report to him not merely on the senate's resolutions but
also on the speeches and votes of the senators. Cicero, when proconsul,
received through his friend, M. Caelius, the reports of a certain
Chrestus, but seems not to have been particularly well satisfied with
the latter's accounts of gladiatorial sports, law-court proceedings, and
the various pieces of city gossip. As in this case, such correspondence
never extended beyond a rude relation of facts that required
supplementing through letters from party friends of the absent person.
These friends, as we know from Cicero, supplied the real report on
political feeling.