would perhaps have judged it to be Cicero 's, in spirit, for he considers that "Cicero was a journalist in the worst sense of the term, over-rich in words as he himself confesses, and beyond all imagination poor in thought."
Caesar had already found on the Roman frontier that a characteristic of the Gauls was "their habit of stopping travellers on the road, and, in spite of protest, of closely questioning them on any facts or rumours concerning any event of passing interest each may have gathered on the way. The same thing is done to traders on reaching a town; the crowd surrounding them and compelling them to give a clear and full account, both of the district they have come from and of the news they found current in it."[1]
The Gaul of a later day ran true to type and traveller and trader developed into the nouvellistes whose occupation it was to know every day the most recent news. The wars of Louis XIV gave them their great opportunity, for all hung on their lightest word and they were then in their element. They grew in numbers and importance until "every body became a newsmonger" and "even women shared in the general desire to collect and dis seminate news,"—so comments one of their historians who anticipated the speedy arrival of the time when the common greeting on the street would be, not "how do you do," but "what's the news." The nouvellistes specialized not only on military information, but on political news, travels, literature, art, the theater, music, the ballet, and jokes, even carrying with
- ↑ Commentaries, IV, 5. Translation of F. P. Long.
The lady, who while her slaves were being whipped, read over "transversa diurna"(Juvenal, IX, 84), may have read the Acta Diurna, but Escott thinks it improbable and interprets it as "household accounts "which were written across the page as well as down . The phrase Quis dabit historico, quantum daret acta legenti, (VII, 104) Klein says refers to Acta Diurna; Escott says "Petronius mentions that the actuarius, who copied out the acta, read them aloud at table to amuse the company." But in Petronius it was the household accounts that were read. Other passages are omitted altogether by some editors. In the multitude of interpreters there is confusion. The statement that "Juvenal speaks of a Roman lady passing her morning in reading the paper, so that it appears private copies [of Acta Diurna] were ir vogue" (H . Chisholm, "Newspapers," Encyclopaedia Britannica, XIX, 544) seems a somewhat free translation of disputed passages, while the concluding inference can only be regarded as a pleasantry of speech.
