The Ghost of Cicero’s Letters: Epistolography and Historiography in Senatorial Letter-Writing

This paper investigates the privileged but fraught relationship between historiography and epistolography in the tradition of senatorial letter writing and explores the role that the ghost of Cicero’s letters plays in shaping that tradition. Even though Cicero is often invoked as the unachievable example, his letters became the model against which later letter-writers redefined the boundaries of the genre and of their own epistolary project. In so doing, they were able to offer new epistolary models to future generations of letter-writers.