Cvrsvs Pvblicvs fantasy stamps for the Roman Empire

During the Roman Empire’s glory days, the government maintained an official courier system known as the cvrsvs pvblicvs. The cvrsvs pvblicvs could be used by those who had the emperor’s special permission to transport messages and goods between locations.

Although the cvrsvs pvblicvs was not a postal system in the modern sense of the term, I thought it would be fun to imagine what the Romans’ stamps would have looked like if they had used stamps, so I created these fantasy stamps.

The stamps are inscribed “solvm officialis” to indicate that they were valid for official use only. There is a less common variant that anachronistically uses “lorem ipsvm” placeholder text—an obvious error that no doubt would have greatly displeased the emperor.

Published 2017-07-30