A Roman Postal Service under the Republic

Extract

Modern writers have remarked with surprise upon the absence of a postal service under the Roman Republic. The fact that Latin literature makes no mention of any such service would not, taken alone, be sufficient to prove that it did not exist; but Suetonius in his account of the institution of the Imperial post by Augustus speaks as if it were a new departure in the history of Roman administration, and it is clear from many incidental references in Cicero's correspondence that in his time there was no government postal service which an official could make use of. A provincial governor sent his despatches by one of his own lictors or orderlies (statores) or by the tabellarii of the tax-farming companies, there being no other means of transmission available. “Your orderly has brought me two letters from you,” writes Cicero, then governor of Cilicia, to Sallustius, proquaestor of Syria. “I have thought it advisable to send my orderlies and lictors to you with despatches,” he writes about the same time to his own quaestor.