Letters are attested in Greco-Roman literature as early as Homer, when Bellerophon unwittingly delivered the lygra semata that ordered his own murder (Il. 6. 167-70; Rosenmeyer 2001: 39-44). Both Herodotus and Thucydides include letters in their historical narratives (Rosenmeyer 2001: 45-60); and letters have a role in several Euripidean plays (for instance, Hippolytus and Iphigenia in Tauris) as well as in Middle and New Comedy (Rosenmeyer 2001: 61-97). Collections of letters by Demosthenes, Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Epicurus were known in antiquity. Though many (if not all) of the extant letters attributed to these authors are probably spurious, they testify to the pervasiveness of the letter-writing habit among Greeks living in the fifth and fourth century bc. The survival of numerous letters on papyrus from the Hellenistic period confirms that letter-writing played an essential role in the management of both private and more official matters. Indeed, by the third century BC, letters appear to have been used regularly by both Greeks and Romans to convey information or facilitate pleasant conversation in absentia (Cic. Fam. 2. 4. 1; Ambrose, Ep. 66. 1).
Authors could inscribe their letters on a variety of materials, including metal, lead, wax-coated wooden tablets, pottery fragments, animal skin, and papyrus. Acontius famously used an apple as the medium for his letter to Cydippe (Ovid, Her. 20; Kenney 1996: 15-18). A literate author with time on his hands might write his own letters. More typically, though, letters were dictated to an amanuensis (Ubrarius, servus ab epistulis). If the author enjoyed a special relationship with the correspondent, he might personalize his letter with the addition of a postscript in his own hand. Because there was no centralized postal system for the delivery of private mail (the cursus publicus founded by Augustus was restricted to government business), most letter-writers relied on servants and traveling friends to act as messengers for their private correspondence (Nicholson 1994: 33-8). Letters were frequently lost or delayed. Postal problems were the rule, not the exception, in ancient letter exchanges. Common among extant collections are letters in which one correspondent reproaches
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
The other for some delay in responding, for not writing at sufficient length, or for entrusting the letter to an unreliable carrier, that is, for failing to fulfill the obligations of his epistolary officium. It was the author’s responsibility to find a reasonably efficient carrier who would deliver his letter in a timely manner (a period which could range anywhere from a few days to several months to a year, depending on the distance and terrain separating the correspondents). This was particularly true for letters with sensitive content. Nevertheless, correspondents could have little expectation of privacy and sometimes took steps to guard against interception (Nicholson 1994: 38-63).
In both classical and Late Antiquity, the messenger served as a stand-in for the letter’s absent author and might even be expected to provide supplementary information or answer questions raised by the letter. Similarly, he might bring additional, extra-epistolary gifts (for example, consecrated bread, wine, produce, or books). His arrival at the addressee’s locale might be greeted with great excitement, as the community anticipated the public reading of a letter from someone like Jerome or Augustine. The letter exchange, then, could be understood as a ‘‘historical event’’ that included the messenger’s supplements to the written letter text (Conybeare 2000: 19-40). Messengers were not always mere bearers of a written message; they could and, in Late Antiquity, often did become, as Conybeare observes, participants in the performance of letter exchange.
Despite the documented prevalence of letter-writing and exchange from as early as the fifth century BC, the self-conscious composition, collection, and public circulation of one’s letters is, so far as we can tell, unattested before Caesar’s and Cicero’s generation. This is not to say that that generation invented the letter collection. The letters of Demosthenes, Plato, and Isocrates, for instance, seem to have been compiled (and perhaps even composed) by later admirers. Similarly, certain pseudonymous, obviously fictional collections of letters may date to the Hellenistic period or earlier (Rosenmeyer 2001: 193-233).
But there is no indication that letters were composed with an eye toward collection and public circulation before the first century bc. Caesar, whose letters do not survive, may have prepared parts of his correspondence for public circulation (Ebbeler 2003: 12). Cicero’s plans to publish a selection of his letters were cut short by his untimely death, but his letters were known in the years after his death and survive in abundance for modern readers (Att. 16. 5; Nicholson 1998: 63-105). Horace published a collection of hexameter letter poems, the Epistulae. Ovid and the Greek sophists Aelian, Alciphron, and Philostratus likewise experimented with the novel literary genre of the letter collection. The younger Seneca and the younger Pliny published collections of their prose letters as part of their literary wuvre; and a collection of letters from the correspondence of Fronto and Marcus Aurelius was known in antiquity and survives in fragmentary form.
Still, our most substantial evidence for Greek and Latin letter-writing and collection practices is late antique. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to characterize the period between ad 200 and 600 as the golden age of Greek and Latin letter-writing (Vessey 2005a: 74-5). A significant number of letters survive from various late antique writers, including Basil, Julian, Athanasius, Gregory of
Nyssa, Synesius, John Chrysostom, and the prolific Libanius; and in Latin, Ambrose, Ausonius, Symmachus, Paulinus, Jerome, and Augustine. The letters of Gregory the Great, Sidonius, Ruricius, Avitus, Cassiodorus, and Ennodius, as well as scattered letters from assorted bishops, scholars, emperors, and government bureaucrats remind us that the letter continued to be a popular literary form throughout Late Antiquity. In some cases, authors (for example, Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome, and Sidonius) published a selection of their own letters; in others (for example, Symmachus and Augustine), they preserved copies of their letters in an archive, intending to publish some portion as a collection but leaving the laborious editorial work to others. In most cases, we cannot be sure of the process by which a collection of an author’s letters was produced, though it is unlikely that this would have happened without some serious preservation efforts on the part of the author.
Until quite recently, the practice of late antique (and classical) prose letter-writing has not been an object of serious scholarly inquiry. This is not to say that the letters themselves were ignored. To the contrary, individual letters have proven to be a valuable historical source for biographers and prosopographers as well as social and cultural historians. Similarly, they have attracted the attention of New Testament scholars eager to explicate literary influences on the Pauline letters (J. L. White 1984; Stowers 1986: 17-26; Klauck 1998). These early studies, which focused on questions of typology as well as on the distinctions between ‘‘real’’ (private) and ‘‘literary’’ (public) letters, emphasized an atomistic rather than functional approach to ancient letters (Stowers 1986: 23). Little, if any, attention was paid to the literary and cultural practices that produced individual letters and governed their exchange, collection, and circulation. All letters, regardless of their transmission history, were treated as transparent windows into the world and personality of their author. Ancient rhetorical theorists like Demetrius, who insisted that letters reveal their author’s soul, contributed to this misleading conception of the letter (Eloc. 227). In truth, most of our extant late antique letters, which survive because they were collected and frequently copied, are sophisticated textual performances intended to advertise their authors’ literary skill to their contemporaries and posterity.
This is not to say that individual letters cannot be mined for important details about, for instance, the circulation of rural laborers in the late Roman west (Grey 2004) or late antique attitudes toward travel (Salzman 2004). Certainly, letters can be a valuable source of historical, biographical, and prosopographical information. They allow us revelatory glimpses into the lives of authors and their contemporaries. Still, as Raymond Van Dam reminds us, historians of all stripes must take into account the rhetoric of the epistolary genre, since ‘‘authors were concerned more about protocol than candor, more about form than substance and emotion’’ (Van Dam 2003a: 132). All social transactions, including letter exchange, are governed by a prescribed set of rules to which all participants are expected to adhere. In the case of elite letter exchange, this code of conduct included the expectations that a correspondent would write back, use reliable messengers, and employ conventional rhetoric. The scholarly interpretation of these letters demands that we go beyond literal reading to take into account these rules and their sophisticated manipulation by individual authors. Surviving ancient letters are not so much transparent windows as a reflective lens designed to distort as much as reveal.
The primary task for twenty-first-century scholars of Greek and Latin letter-writing of all periods is the identification and analysis of the letter’s highly conventional idiom - the ‘‘rhetoric of epistolography,’’ as we might call it - followed by a discussion of the creative manipulation of this idiom in specific instances. Andrew Cain’s (2006) study of Jerome’s manipulation of the reproach topos in his early correspondence exemplifies this rhetorically minded approach. Klaus Thraede’s outstanding discussion of select epistolary topoi (Thraede 1970) is an essential starting place, but his observations could be substantially extended. The following discussion of epistolary censure illustrates the potential of this ‘‘rhetorical’’ approach for the interpretation of Augustine’s famously difficult correspondence with Jerome.
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