Tiberius’s internet …

Today saw a partial eclipse of the Sun over Britain. In honour of this event (though it was somewhat unimpressive) the Crow went looking on the Internet for links to do with the Sun (no – not the paper with the naked girls in it, but I’ll pencil that in for later). On my search I found this interesting article from Wikipedia on the heliograph …

A heliograph uses a mirror to reflect sunlight to a distant observer. By moving the mirror the distant observer sees flashes of light that can be used to send a prearranged signalling code.
The unpopular Roman emperor Tiberius used a heliograph to rule the Empire from a villa on the island of Capri - sending orders each day to the mainland, eight miles away.

If true, this probably makes Tiberius the first example of the kind of home worker we get all the time in the days of the Internet, and probably the first boss who tried to control their global interests from a place of relative luxury a good distance from where actual events were happening.

The Crow has worked for a number of multi-national companies, where the CEOs in an attempt to boost moral and “get down with the common worker" would send weekly messages to the whole corporation - telling them about how the company was doing better than ever, beating the competition, just don’t expect a pay rise soon. In fact it was once suggested in such an email that our companies strict dress code of black suits which looked straight out of an undertakers was because we were going to “bury our competition”.

Alas none of these messages from Emperor Tiberius survive, however taking the messages received from our modern day Caesers of capitalism and applying some reverse engineering …

"As I sit here in my island villa overlooking you all across 8 miles of water ….. I want you to know how unconcerned I am about the rumours of Hannibal and his Carthaginian army marching towards Rome …..

"I know many say the Roman Empire is in decline, that it has had it's day ….

"But I say we’re seeing growth in our Empire for the first time this years, our rollout across the Empire of slave labour markets have reduced employment costs by as much as 35%, and that our army is the finest ….. Anyone who is caught saying otherwise will be crucified.

"Love and hugs, Emperor T."

[The more history conscious of you might want to point out Hannibal was several hundred years before Tiberius - but hush!!!]


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