Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography (review)

This collection of papers is equally rich in its range of subject matter and variety of approaches. Based on a conference held at Manchester, UK in 2004, it has made excellent use of the recent flowering of texts and discussions of Greek and Latin letters. It specifically acknowledges our common debt to M. B. Trapp's fine anthology, Greek and Latin Letters (Cambridge 2003), with its substantial analytical introduction and eighty texts (documentary and literary, independent or embedded) drawn from all periods, each with translation and commentary, to which we can add Patricia Rosenmeyer's monograph, Ancient Epistolary Fictions (Cambridge 2001), C. D. N. Costa's collection of translated Greek Fictional Letters (Oxford 2001), and now Bagnall and Cribiore's collection, Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt (Ann Arbor 2006).

The editors have modified the usual practice by dividing their general considerations between a preface ("Why Letters?"), which covers the utility and accessibility of letters, power dynamics and role playing, special epistolary topics, letters as a didactic mode, the effect of collections of letters, and the readers' expectations, and an introduction ("What is a Letter?") by Morello and Roy Gibson, which briefly reviews alternative versions of rules of genre before testing their simple set of requirements for a letter on two extreme categories: Greek verse epistles like Theocritus 11 and Cicero's three-volume treatise De Officiis addressed to his son. Their criteria stress the physical separation of the two persons involved and the form and scale of the text but miss what most require in a good letter, namely, "engagement with the addressee" (111, from Morrison's chapter; cf. 113–14), and, we might add, with his interests and recent activities. It is this relative indifference to the addressee which leaves me dissatisfied with the letters of Pliny and makes it so difficult to remember the addressee of any given letter.

Rightly, many of the fourteen chapters focus not on single ancient authors but on topics: Hutchinson's delightfully shrewd analysis of a papyrus letter from an unnamed student to his family and two letters from Paphnuthis to his parents and brother, providing social context and penetrating literary pretext to reconstruct events and motives (chap. 1); Henderson on Cicero's extended Ad Q. Fr. 3.1 (chap. 2) and Hoffer on Cicero's adoption of the metaphor stomachus, stomachari to label and limit passages of complaint, along with other typical allusive expressions (chap. 3); Morrison on "didacticism and epistolarity in Horace Epistles 1" (the best treatment since McGann's Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles [Bruxelles 1969]) (chap. 4); an important chapter by Inwood arguing for Seneca's deliberate emulation of the letters of Epicurus and explaining Seneca's choice of continuous letter form (including some quasi-dialogue) over his previous use of "Dialogues" (chap. 5). Next, Roger Rees on litterae commendaticiae from Cicero through Pliny to Fronto (chap. 6). Plus, two chapters on Pliny: Morello on Pliny's preoccupation with protecting his circle of literary friends from invidia, putting tact and courtesy before critical standards (chap. 7) and Fitzgerald illustrating from Pliny's seventh book his obsession with literary productivity and oblique methods of commemorating his own moral and literary integrity (chap. 8).

Langslow (chap. 9) offers a dazzling demonstration of the sheer complexity with which the medical tradition accumulates and incorporates earlier dedicatory works, reattributing both author and addressee to attract readers. Freisenbruch in "Back to Fronto" (chap. 10) combines two recurring themes: the daily details of ill-health lavished with equal zeal by the imperial pupil and his master and their use of this topic to pay court to each other. In chapters 11 and 12, on Second Sophistic letter collections, Konig illustrates Alciphron's use of the fictional epistle while Hodkinson uses Alciphron and Aelian to show how letters could serve their writer "better than speech" (cf. the title of the preface to the volume, "Why Letters?"). The last two papers consider Christian...