From the Editor

This special issue on Letters in Late Antiquity grew out of the panel that the Society for Late Antiquity organized at the annual meeting of the American Philological Society (recently renamed the Society for Classical Studies), on January 4, 2013 in Seattle. That gathering generated a tremendous response on every front: some twenty abstracts were submitted for six paper slots; the lecture hall was full to bursting; the papers were of outstanding quality; and they received a warm and enthusiastic response from the audience. This happy coincidence decided the editor then and there to strive to assemble these studies for a special issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity.

We are fortunate to have more letters and letter collections from Late Antiquity than from the rest of Greco-Roman antiquity combined. These offer a wealth of information on personal relations, political alliances, and religious concerns. They also open a window onto the literary ambitions of their authors, reflecting as they do the power this genre exerted over the formation of literary personae and their performance on the cultural stage. The importance of epistolography in the period has been highlighted by a number of outstanding recent monographs and translations, including Sogno, Roberts and Salzman on Symmachus; Cain on Jerome; Bradbury and Cribiore on Libanius; Shanzer on Avitus; Mathisen on Ruricius; Schor on Theodoret; and Ebbeler on Augustine—to name but a few.

Three of the papers published herewith were originally presented at the APA panel—Schor, McLaughlin, and Yuzwa. The remaining four arose from expressions of interest in the subject and solicitations from the editor. All submissions were peer reviewed according to the customary standards for the journal. The final results are presented here in roughly chronological order. The volume leads off with Cristiana Sogno’s paper, which explores the way in which the anxiety of influence created by Cicero’s letters—particularly for Pliny—set the stage for a new sort of epistolography in Late Antiquity which was at once aware of earlier precedents but also willing to explore new territory free of concerns over high politics. David DeVore explores the letters preserved in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius and shows how carefully Eusebius selected, excerpted, and arranged his epistolary source material in order to invent a church that could seem a model of unity. Jonathan McLaughlin uses a statistical exploration of Libanius’ correspondence with barbarian generals in order to elucidate a particularly revealing letter of Libanius to Ellebichus—a figure who to all the world might just as well have been a fellow Greek. Paula Moretti questions recent skeptics of Jerome’s reports that his female correspondents read Greek and even Hebrew with fluency. She shows that these claims represent anything but literary inventions and are instead likely to reflect real linguistic mastery. Adam Schor applies the methodologies of network analysis to two letter collections—Basil’s and Synesius’s—in order to demonstrate the way in which tone, language, and themes shift depending on the identity of these bishops’ correspondents and the point in their career when they were writing. Zachary Yuzwa shows that the three letters preserved for Sulpicius Severus are highly crafted literary productions aimed less at representing the historical reality of Martin’s life than at offering Sulpicius’s readers a master reading of the final days of Martin. Finally Joe Williams grounds the volume in material and practical concerns by exploring the way many letters in Late Antiquity were as important for their artifactuality as for the messages they conveyed.

JLA continues to welcome thematic volumes, both as a way to publish the best material from successful conferences and panels, and as a means to group together interrelated studies in order to serve fellow scholars and to shed light on important and timely themes. In this vein, readers are encouraged to submit to the editor ideas for special issues of their own. In the future, all submissions should be sent to my new email address, noel.lenski@yale.edu.