Sur les lèvres de la foule

Rumours and gossip were an important part of social life in ancient societies, prior to the major transformations brought about by the printing press and contemporary media. Combining literary and historical approaches (which the Ancients did not view as contradictory), this study intends to take seriously the winged words which, in the Roman world, were constantly on the lips of the crowd.

The first aim is to understand what social practices the ancient authors are thinking of when they mention “rumours” (rumor, fama, sermones, etc.) in their texts. In spite of the obvious biases of this mainly literary and aristocratic documentation, we mobilize the tools of political sociology to give an interactionist reading of gossip in ancient Rome, both in urban settings and in military camps. Thus, we analyse rumours as a social practice in which people engage in specific times and places, through social networks which we aim at reconstructing. Rumours were, we argue, one facet of a popular political culture that the Roman elites were wary of and never neglected, particularly when these informal discussions concerned public a fairs or when alternative information challenged the official news, of which the magistrates, the senators, the emperor or the military staff were the custodians.

Rumours were also a highly literary object, from which ancient authors knew how to derive all kinds of dramatic effects. The second part of the book focuses on the work of Tacitus, whose historiographical work stands out with respect to rumours in sheer density and in variety of depiction. Without ever considering Tacitean rumours as mere rhetorical artefacts, we first look at how they play a part in the construction of the text by using a narratological approach. Then, we investigate how, in the background of the main narrative, rumours sketch out a form of choral counter-history, made up of impressions and emotions, independent of the strict analysis of historical causation conducted by Tacitus, and never reducible to the historian’s own voice.