When the art of writing was invented, the means of extending the knowledge which had heretofore been simply cried, was greatly extended, and advertising gradually became an art to be cultivated.
Very soon after the invention of writing in its rudest form, it was turned to account in the way of giving publicity to events in the way of advertisement; for rewards for and descriptions of runaway slaves, written on papyri more than three thousand years ago, have been exhumed from the ruins of Thebes. An early but mythical instance of a reward being offered in an advertisement is related by Pausanias,1 who, speaking of the art of working metals, says that the people of Phineum, in Arcadia, pretended that Ulysses dedicated a statue of bronze to Neptune, in the hope that by that deity’s intervention he might recover the horses he had lost; and, he adds, “they showed me an inscription on the pedestal of the statue offering a reward to any person who should find and take care of the animals.”
The Greeks used another mode of giving publicity which is worthy of remark here. They used to affix to the statues of the infernal deities, in the temenos of their temples, curses inscribed on sheets of lead, by which they devoted to the vengeance of those gods the persons who had found or stolen certain things, or injured the advertisers in any other way. As the names of the offenders were given in full in these singular inscriptions, they had the effect of making the grievances known to mortals as well as immortals, and thus the advertisement was attained. The only difference between these and ordinary public notices was that the threat of punishment was held out instead of the offer of reward. A compromise was endeavoured generally at the same time, the evil invoked being deprecated in case of restitution of the property. A most interesting collection of such imprecations (diræ defixiones, or κατάδεσμοι) was found in 1858 in the temenos of the infernal deities attached to the temple of Demeter at Cnidus. It is at present deposited in the British Museum, where the curious reader may inspect it in the second vase-room.