Roman Literary Letters

Abstract

Like their Greek counterparts (see Oxford Bibliographies article in Classics Greek Literary Letters), Roman literary letters have elicited an increasing amount of scholarly attention in recent years. Seeking some common ground between the two cultures, we could settle for the principle in Demetrius (or pseudo-Demetrius) de Elocutione that letters propose to bridge distance between writer and recipient, but beyond this, Roman letters differ so greatly in content and circumstance as to constitute a genre of their own. In first place, the recipients have historical identities—in certain cases famous and distinguished—many with corroborating mention in historical text and in others discoverable through prosopographical research. Even more importantly, no Roman collection is without politics, overt in the letters of Cicero, Ovid, and Pliny but perceptible as subtext in Seneca and in Fronto who writes to emperors. Embedded letters are too sparse to have generated any independent scholarly discussions. Whereas there is no such category of fictional letters as the Greek Literary Letters article compiles, questions of authenticity have haunted discussions of letters; in this their very artfulness has weighed against them. Granted that the identities of correspondents are verifiable, scholars have in the past asked whether Ovid’s exile letters, Seneca’s epistolary road-map for the Stoic initiate, or Pliny’s whole collection were genuinely intended for posting or simply for publication, but the majority of scholars now tend to favor the idea of genuine letters. Self-representation has come to be a major topic of discussion, closely related to theories of persona or ethos in Latin rhetorical literature and practice, although to date with more attention to writer than recipient. Although this bibliography concludes with Fronto and the Classical period, the long reception history of these letter collections must be credited with preserving them for our currently renewed and often revised attention. Never having been lost, Pliny’s collection enjoyed the most consistent afterlife. With a brief Late Antique decline, it was valued during the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance such writers as Petrarch, Thomas More, Erasmus, and Justus Lipsius made it their model. Whereas the erotic and narrative Ovid were always popular, even the lachrymose Heroides found their fans (see Chaucer’s “The Legend of Good Women”). Cicero’s letters had the scrappiest record, surviving for years only in fragments, but in 1345 Petrarch found the lost manuscript of ad Atticum in Verona and was dismayed by his philosophical idol’s revelations of emotional instability.