Public relations may be a modern profession, but the underlying practice is anything but new. As we explored in our earlier article, “Crafting Narratives that Stick”, storytelling remains one of the most effective ways to capture attention, create emotional connections, and make a message memorable. But the instinct to shape stories for an audience long predates press releases, social media, or even the term, “public relations.”

For centuries, leaders, communities, and institutions have used stories, symbols, ceremonies, and public spectacle to influence how people understood events and, just as importantly, how they understood the people behind them.

Altering Public Opinion

One of the clearest examples of Roman public communication began with something deeply private: death.

As World History Encyclopedia’s account of the Roman funeral explains, funerals for wealthy Romans could become elaborate public processions involving musicians, professional mourners, clients, and actors wearing imagines, or ancestral masks. The funeral was therefore more than a ceremony for the deceased. It was also a public display of family history, social connections, and status.

An audience was not simply told that a Roman family had distinguished ancestors. It was shown them. The dead were represented in the procession, their achievements could be celebrated in speeches, and the participation of clients and political allies demonstrated the family’s continuing importance.

In modern terms, the Romans understood something fundamental about reputation: identity is built through not only your own achievements, but through association as well.

Roman political life could turn that principle toward much larger consequences. The clearest example came after Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, when his funeral became a catalyst for a political crisis.

Mark Antony’s funeral oration was not simply a speech praising a dead leader. Antony incorporated Caesar’s senatorial decrees into his presentation and displayed his bloodstained toga to the crowd. The speech and spectacle together intensified public anger toward the men who had assassinated Caesar. As a result, the conspirators’ homes were attacked, Caesar’s body was cremated in the Forum, and the city remained gripped by unrest.

Antony’s speech did not single-handedly cause the civil wars that followed. But the funeral demonstrated how quickly public communication could alter the political environment.

Augustus and the Power of Many Messages

Under Rome’ first emperor Augustus, ancient techniques of persuasion and public image continued to be leveraged.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s overview of Roman art describes how Augustus disseminated his official image through portraits, coins, sculpture, and reliefs, while writers such as Virgil connected Augustus’ ancestry with a legendary and divine past.

Literature provided one particularly sophisticated way of doing this. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Rome’s present is connected to a much older story of Trojan origins. Aeneas became an ancestor of the Roman people, while his son Iulus connected that legendary past to the Julian family, the same family that Augustus was adopted into. Rome’s political present could therefore be placed within a much longer story of origins, destiny, and Roman identity.

But a Roman did not need to read Virgil to encounter an image of imperial power.

Augustus’s portrait appeared on coins that circulated throughout the Roman world. The Metropolitan Museum notes that Roman imperial coins connected the emperor with his vast empire through portraits and inscriptions, while images on the reverse side of the coins commemorated victories and other significant events.

That made the coin itself a small piece of public communication. An official portrait could tell an audience what its ruler looked like; accompanying imagery could communicate ideas about military success, tradition, religion, or authority.

Augustus’s official portrait was similarly standardized. Hundreds of versions were disseminated throughout the empire, presenting the emperor with an idealized, calm, and dignified appearance.

The significance is not that every Roman encountered exactly the same message. Rather, different media could reinforce a recognizable identity. The story changed according to the medium, while the larger identity remained recognizable.

That principle remains familiar today. For instance, you can think about these things the next time you are handed a token of some sort at a trade show. A mission statement, a photograph, an executive’s speech, a video, and a social media post may all communicate differently, but they can still contribute to the same public understanding of an organization.

The Audience Gets Bigger

For most of human history, public communication was constrained by geography. A speech reached the people who could hear it. A monument reached those who could see it. A coin could travel considerably farther, but its audience was still limited by the physical circulation of the object.

Mass media changed the equation.

The rise of newspapers and other forms of mass-circulation media allowed messages to travel far beyond the people physically present at an event. Public figures, businesses, and organizations could communicate indirectly with enormous audiences through journalists and publications.

This created a new communications challenge. It was no longer enough to stage an event or make an announcement. Organizations increasingly had to consider how an event would be interpreted and retold once it entered the media.

This is where modern public relations begins to look less like the public spectacle of antiquity and more like a recognizable communications profession.

Bernays and the Modern Art of Association

Edward Bernays emerged in this new media environment with an ambitious idea: public opinion could be shaped not simply by distributing information, but by connecting people, products, and institutions with ideas that already carried meaning.

The Museum of Public Relations’ history of Bernays provides several examples of this approach. Early in his career, Bernays worked to make ballet more appealing to American audiences by connecting it with fashion, design, personalities, and popular culture. He supplied newspapers with photographs and stories tailored to their audiences and generated publicity around the Ballets Russes’ American tour.

His later work made the technique even more explicit. In promoting Ivory soap, for example, Bernays used contests, public events, and media coverage to associate the product with creativity, cleanliness, and community participation.

The approach represented an important shift. Rather than simply asking, “How do we tell people about this product?” the question became something closer to, “What does this product mean, and how can we connect it to something people already value?”

The Romans had connected political authority to ancestry, religious tradition, military victory, and the destiny of Rome. Bernays operated in a radically different society with radically different values and means of communications, but he likewise understood that messages become more powerful when they are attached to existing cultural ideas.

The Tools Change. The Challenge Remains.

A Roman funeral procession, an Augustan coin, a newspaper story, and a modern public-relations campaign might appear to have little in common. Yet each demonstrates a version of the same fundamental challenge: people rarely encounter information in isolation. They understand it through stories, symbols, associations, and experiences.

The technology has changed enormously. What once required a procession through the streets can now reach millions of people through a screen. But the underlying task remains: to make an idea understandable, meaningful, and memorable to the people encountering it.

Modern mission-driven storytelling therefore belongs to a much longer history of public communication.

#PR #Persuasion #Rome #Roman #History