Clout Is Not a Modern Invention: How Ancient Rome Perfected the Influencer Economy Two Thousand Years Before Instagram

Every few months, someone publishes a hot take arguing that social media has fundamentally rewired human behavior, created new pathologies of status-seeking, and produced a class of professional attention-merchants with no historical precedent. It is a compelling argument. It is also, to anyone who has spent time with the historical record, extremely funny.

The Romans did all of this. They did it in togas, at considerably lower bandwidth, but they did it with an enthusiasm and a structural sophistication that would be recognizable to anyone who has ever watched a brand deal play out on YouTube or witnessed a public figure's reputation collapse in real time on Twitter. Human beings have been in the clout business for as long as there have been other human beings to impress, and the architecture of that business has remained remarkably stable across the intervening centuries.

Let us meet some of the talent.

Cicero: The Original Thought Leader (Complete With Parasocial Fanbase)

Marcus Tullius Cicero was, by any reasonable assessment, the most followed account in the late Roman Republic. His speeches were transcribed and circulated — physically copied by slaves and distributed through networks of literate Romans — with the same velocity that a viral thread moves through a modern timeline. He understood, with the precision of a contemporary content strategist, that the medium was not just the message but the monetization vehicle.

Cicero did not charge for his legal advocacy. Roman law prohibited direct payment for oratorical services. What he received instead was something more valuable: gratia — social credit, political obligation, and the accumulated goodwill of everyone who had ever watched him perform. His client list was, functionally, his follower count, and he managed it with the obsessive attention of someone who understood that reach was the asset.

He also understood personal branding in terms that would not embarrass a modern media consultant. His letters — of which hundreds survive — show a man carefully managing his public image across multiple audiences simultaneously, adjusting tone and emphasis depending on who was reading, and maintaining a studied consistency of persona that masked considerable private anxiety. Sound familiar? The main difference between Cicero's newsletter and a Substack is the delivery mechanism and the absence of a paid tier.

He was also, it should be noted, eventually cancelled. His proscription by Mark Antony in 43 BCE — which resulted in his execution and the posting of his severed hands on the Rostra where he had so often spoken — was the ancient world's version of a permanent ban. Antony reportedly had Cicero's tongue cut out and repeatedly stabbed with a hairpin. This was extreme even by ancient standards, but it illustrates a point about cancellation that the modern version occasionally obscures: the underlying impulse is the neutralization of a rival's platform, and it has always been personal.

The Chariot Racing Factions: Sports Content Creators With Actual Armies

If Cicero represents the thought-leader pipeline, the chariot racing factions of Constantinople represent sports entertainment content at a scale that modern leagues are still trying to replicate.

By the time of the Byzantine Empire, the Hippodrome's four racing factions — the Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites, though the Reds and Whites had largely been absorbed — had evolved from sporting organizations into something closer to vertically integrated media companies with paramilitary wings. The Blues and Greens each had celebrity drivers who functioned as influencers in the most literal sense: their public appearances generated crowd responses, their endorsements (of positions, of emperors, of theological controversies) moved public opinion, and their personal lives were followed with an intensity that would not embarrass a modern tabloid.

The charioteer Porphyrius, who raced in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, was famous enough to have multiple honorific statues erected in the Hippodrome during his own lifetime — the ancient equivalent of a verified checkmark times ten. His faction affiliations were complicated, switching between Blues and Greens in ways that contemporary chroniclers found as fascinating and contentious as modern fans find a star athlete's team transfer.

The Nika Riots of 532 CE, in which Blues and Greens temporarily united against Emperor Justinian and nearly burned Constantinople to the ground, demonstrate what happens when a sports content community achieves genuine political mobilization. Justinian survived only because his general Belisarius and his wife Theodora (who delivered what is arguably the most consequential locker-room speech in recorded history) held firm. The death toll was somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 people. For context, this was a sporting event that escalated.

The influencer-to-insurrection pipeline is, the historical record suggests, not a new concern.

Sponsored Content, Roman Style: The Patron-Client System as Native Advertising

The Roman patronus-cliens relationship is typically described in political science terms, as a system of hierarchical social obligation that structured Roman society from top to bottom. This is accurate but undersells how precisely it maps to the modern influencer-brand relationship.

A wealthy Roman patron provided his clients with financial support, legal protection, social access, and career advancement. In return, clients provided their patron with visible public loyalty — attending his morning reception (salutatio), accompanying him through the Forum, applauding his speeches, and generally functioning as a walking demonstration of his social reach. The patron's reputation was, in part, a function of how many clients he could mobilize and display.

This is, structurally, a brand deal. The patron is the brand. The client is the creator. The morning salutatio is the sponsored post. The Forum walk is the activation. The only thing missing is a discount code.

The satirist Juvenal, writing in the early second century CE, complained about this system with an energy that maps almost perfectly onto contemporary critiques of influencer culture: the inauthenticity, the performative loyalty, the degrading spectacle of talented people debasing themselves for access and gifts. His Satires read, in places, like a very angry Substack post about the hollowness of the creator economy. He was writing approximately 1,900 years ago.

What This Actually Means

The standard response to historical parallels like these is to note the differences — the scale, the speed, the global reach of modern platforms — and argue that those differences are significant enough to make the comparison misleading. This response is not wrong about the differences. It is wrong about their significance.

Human status-seeking behavior is not a product of technology. Technology is a product of human status-seeking behavior. We build tools that allow us to do more efficiently what we were already trying to do. The Romans wanted to broadcast their reputations, accumulate social credit, perform authenticity while managing image, and destroy their rivals' platforms. They built the tools available to them to accomplish those goals.

We have better tools. Our goals are identical.

The experimental psychology literature on status competition, social comparison, and reputation management consistently shows these drives to be deeply embedded, cross-cultural, and remarkably stable across demographic groups. The historical record shows the same drives producing structurally similar behaviors across centuries and civilizations that had no contact with each other.

When two independent lines of evidence — controlled experiments and five thousand years of documented human behavior — point to the same conclusion, that conclusion is probably not a product of the current moment. It is probably a feature of the species.

Cicero would have had an enormous following. He also would have been insufferable about it. Some things do not change.