Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography

by Ruth Morello (Editor), A. D. Morrison (Editor)

The surviving body of ancient letters offers the reader a stunning variety of material, ranging from the everyday letters preserved among the Oxyrhynchus papyri to imperial rescripts, New Testament Epistles, fictional or pseudepigraphical letters and a wealth of missives on almost every conceivable subject. They offer us a unique insight into ancient practices in the fields of politics, literature, philosophy, medicine and many other areas. This collection presents a series of case studies in ancient letters, asking how each letter writer manipulates the epistolary tradition, why he chose the letter form over any other, and what effect the publication of volumes of collected letters might have had upon a reader's engagement with epistolary works. This volume is the first of its kind on ancient letters in any language, and it brings together both well-established and promising young scholars currently working in the fields of ancient literature, history, philosophy and medicine to
engage in a shared debate about this most adaptable and 'interdisciplinary' of genres.

Genres: Ancient History

392 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2007

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

'What is a letter?'

The question posed in Gibson and Morrison's introductory essay is one which resonates throughout this collection: what is a letter, they ask, and where does the boundary lie between letters and other forms of texts? Moving between the classical Latin letter collections of Cicero, Seneca and Pliny, this collection also explores less familiar Greek and Hellenistic texts that situate themselves against the epistolary.

Drawing on modern scholarship and touching on Derrida's remark that all literature is a letter, the essays here re-open questions of genre, of intertextuality, and give letters back a central place in ancient literature.

I would have liked to have seen at least one essay discussing the relationships between 'real' letters and poetic missives (most obviously Ovid's Heroides, but also the 'cover-letter' reading of Catullus 50, for example) but while the relationship between poetry and letters is implicitly touched on in a number of pieces this aspect is absent.

Nevertheless, this is a stimulating collection that problematises the genre of the letter in provocative ways.

[Hoyden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incidentally cute. Fundamentally flawed. Also, John Henderson is clearly the craziest person working in classics today. Who quotes Rod Stewart to begin a scholarly article? Amazing.