Romans loved to talk. When they gathered in the streets and marketplaces, drank at taverns, went to the barber shop for a trim, or sat in church (supposedly) listening to a sermon, they swapped news, information, rumour, and gossip about family squabbles, the price of grain, and even the emperor himself. ‘They sit in judgement on emperors and the powerful, indeed one could say that they think that they themselves rule and command armies’, wrote the fourth-century bishop Ambrose of Milan. But what precisely did Romans say about their rulers? What sort of topics interested them? And how did this change depending on one’s status or place of residence? Did Egyptian villagers care as much about the emperor’s sexual behaviour as the urban populations of Rome or Constantinople? This paper will examine the typologies of rumour and gossip about Roman leaders and their social, geographical, and chronological patterns from Julius Caesar (murdered 44 BC) to the reign of Heraclius (AD 610-641). It will discuss the payoffs and pitfalls of writing a history of oral discourse in a pre-modern society, including the benefits of engaging in comparative study of rumour and gossip in other periods and places, from Ancient China to Early Modern England.

Caillan Davenport is Associate Professor of Classics and Head of the Centre for Classical Studies in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at ANU. His research focuses on Roman history, culture, and literature from the Republic to Late Antiquity, with a special interest in emperors, elites, and the impact of the state on the empire at large. He is the author of A History of the Roman Equestrian Order (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize. He is also the co-editor and translator of Fronto: Selected Letters (Bloomsbury, 2014, with J. Manley, UQ) and co-editor of Emperors and Political Culture in Cassius Dio’s Roman History (Cambridge University Press, 2021, with C. Mallan, UWA). Caillan has received a Rome Award from the British School at Rome, an Australian Research Council DECRA, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. He is currently finishing a book on rumour and gossip about Roman emperors as well as co-editing two collections, The Roman Imperial Court in the Principate and Late Antiquity (with M. McEvoy, ANU) and Representing Rome’s Emperors: Historical and Cultural Perspectives through Time (with S. Malik, Cambridge), both under contract with Oxford University Press.

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