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Lewis, Sian. News and Society in the Creek Polis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 206 PP. $16.95.
The story of Phidippides racing from Marathon to Athens with news of victory over Persia, collapsing as he reaches the council chamber and uttering "rejoice, we conquer" as he dies, represents the classic myth about the dissemination of news in ancient Greece. Yes, the story is true, but Sian Lewis argues in an intriguing book, News and Society in the Greek Polis, that it is a myth that the Marathon story represented standard practices of newsgathering or dissemination in and among Greek city-states in the period between 600 B.C. and 300 B.C. According to Lewis, the Greek poleis had no permanent system for gathering news. Moreover, there are no documented cases in which...