The rumor mill was the Romans’ social media, and they were ever anxious to make it clear that by one criterion or another—wealth, ancestry, education, legal status, physique, ethnicity, or character—their honor could be established, in comparison with others’. As Cicero put it, “By nature we yearn and hunger for honor, and once we have glimpsed, as it were, some part of its radiance, there is nothing we are not prepared to bear and to suffer in order to secure it” (Tusculan Disputations 2.24.58).
Ancient social media
