Introduction: Epistolary Fiction versus Spurious Letters

Note: My warmest thanks to Prof. Karen ní Mheallaigh for her patient and careful review of my English, and to Diego Morelli for the correction of the abstracts. Any remaining errors are mine.

Ancient epistolography is a huge field of research. Even if we limit ourselves to the classical world, the large number of letters of all sorts that have been handed down to us from this period attest to their popularity. There are, throughout antiquity, all kinds of letters, on all kinds of materials, coming from all over the Mediterranean and beyond. Moreover, the study of ancient letters is covered by different disciplines of research (papyrology, epigraphy, palaeography, as well as ancient history and classical philology), resulting in a great variety of approaches.

There are, indeed, many differences between the so-called ‘Berezan letter’ scratched by Achillodoros to his son on a thin sheet of lead, on the north shores of the Black Sea (SEG 26.845.3, 6th century B.C.),1 the invitation to her birthday party sent by Claudia Severa to her sister Sulpicia Lepidina on a wooden tablet, found at the site of Vindolanda, a Roman fort in north England (T.Vindol. II 291, 97–105),2 the official letter sent by the king Attalos III of Pergamum to the Council and people of Cyzicus on the 8th October 135 B.C. which survives in an inscribed copy whose remains are now in Berlin (Inschr. Perg. 248),3 and the letter collections of the Roman orators and politicians Cicero and Pliny, assembled in many books, or the large epistolary corpora of the Church Fathers Basil and Augustine, which all had a tremendous influence on posterity, both for their literary qualities and their historical value. These, in turn, may seem to have little in common with Alciphron’s Letters, a literary work4 divided in four books according to the social status of the addressees (fishermen, farmers, parasites and courtesans) and imaginatively located in 4th century Athens, or with the Letters of Phalaris, pseudepigraphic letters attributed to the semi-legendary tyrant of Acragas in Sicily, who was known for the brazen bull in which he roasted his enemies alive. The amount and variety of the material as well as its heterogeneity makes a totalizing survey of ancient epistolography difficult. While scholarship on ancient letters and letter writing has continued to increase in the last decades, therefore, classicists have moved away from holistic attempts at categorization or definition, choosing to engage in more specific approaches instead.

One of these approaches is the study of ‘literary’ letters: that is, of letters that have been handed down to us in manuscripts as literary works (mostly as collections). They have been touched on and collected in several anthologies. While the anthologies edited by Michael Trapp5 and (to a lesser extent) Noelle Zeiner-Carmichael6 intentionally mix different types of letter writers and letters, emphasising their common features, those of Charles Costa7 as well as Patricia Rosenmeyer8 primarily focus on literary letters. The international conferences ‘L’épistolaire antique et ses prolongements européens’, held regularly in Tours (France) since 1998, are concerned with literary letters; they deal with Greek, Roman and Christian epistolography and give a comparative point of view with letters from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early modern period. The papers have been collected in various volumes under the name Epistulae Antiquae:9 from volume 6 onwards, they have a specific theme. At the same time, ancient letters have been examined through the prisms of their literariness (see for instance the volume La lettre gréco-latine, un genre littéraire? edited by Jean Schneider)10 and of their epistolarity,11 as in Ruth Morello and Andrew Morrison’s volume Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography12 which contains essays on literary letters that, by and large, are all trying to answer the question, ‘Why letters?’.

In the area of literary letters, Mary Beard’s book chapter of 2002 “Ciceronian Correspondences: Making a Book out of Letters”13 and Roy Gibson’s essay “On the Nature of Ancient Letter Collections” (2012)14 have been fundamental. They initiated a shift in the study of ancient letters which has led both to a better mapping of ancient epistolary collections (see, for example, the ongoing project ‘Ancient Letters Collections’15 led by Roy Gibson and Andrew Morrison in Manchester or the volume on late antique collections by Cristiana Sogno, Bradley K. Storin and Edward J. Watts)16 and to fruitful research on their internal arrangement. In a further development, new light has been shed on the process of collecting letters and on the editors and editions of such collections, as in the two books of Pauline Allen and Neil Bronwen on Christian letter collections.17

Approaching ancient epistolography through the concepts of ‘literary letters’ or ‘letter collections’ offers a great advantage: it makes it possible to study a unified object of research, while (partially) avoiding or at least circumventing the thorny question of the letters’ authenticity. Indeed, authenticity is one of the main issues concerning letters in antiquity – it drained most of the studies on epistolography until recently. Many letters and letter collections are considered to be ‘fakes’ or at least ‘pseudepigraphs’, id est they are either intentionally transmitted under a false name or wrongly attributed, due to an error, a confusion of names, or the hazards of transmission. This doubt affects entire letter collections, and even in collections that are otherwise recognised as genuine, the authenticity of some letters can be denied. And when a text is labelled as inauthentic, it is usually neglected by scholars. Thus, whole letter collections have, for this reason, sunk into obscurity. This is the case, in particular, for the letter collections examined and rejected as inauthentic by Richard Bentley in his magistral Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides and the Fables of Aesop (1697).18 The corollary to the accusation of inauthenticity, which also contributes to the disregard that these letters have to face, is the implicit judgment that is hidden behind the term ‘fake’: deception, forgery, and falsification. All these terms have very negative connotations and evoke a criminal act.19 They imply a moral judgment. Thus, the terminology fomented the development of moral interrogations concerning pseudepigraphic texts: what sort of legitimacy and value should we grant to a ‘fake’? This tendency was even stronger in studies concerning Christian pseudepigraphy. And in the field of New Testament studies, these questions lead to theological problems related to the biblical canon.

However, for some time now, there has been a renewed interest in the fakes.20 Neglected and despised works of classical, late antique and early Christian literature have aroused the curiosity of academics. They have undergone a reappraisal both for their literary quality and for their historical values (for the information they give about the political, social, cultural and ideological contexts in which they were produced). Such approaches consider forgery as a ‘creative act’ and aim at rethinking the phenomenon of fakes and the question of authenticity in the ancient world.21 This holds true for ancient epistolography as well. It is possible to re-examine the letter collections labelled as ‘fakes’ by Richard Bentley with a fresh eye and from a different angle, as ‘inventions of the mind’.22 Let us go one more step farther: these letters may be considered as successful works of fiction. This makes it possible to link them to other epistolary texts, which were immediately recognised as fictive and appreciated as such because they were transmitted under the name of an author with undisputed celebrity – one may think in particular of the works of the Second Sophistic and its descendants.

This is what this book is about. It is dedicated to epistolary fiction in ancient Greek literature, a grey area at the intersection of studies on ancient epistolography and on ancient fiction that is still largely under-explored23. More precisely, it approaches these literary ‘fakes’ from the angle of fiction: viewing them as imaginative works written in the form of one or more letters. Dealing with the creativity of the epistolary form itself, it investigates what this form brings to the writing of fiction. As such, the present volume has a descriptive intention and a ‘topographical’ value. It ventures into the various landscapes of fictional letter writing, its unsteady grounds and its hazy fringes. It sketches out a broad (but not exhaustive) panorama of fiction in letters and helps draw a carte du Tendre of a new kind. Focusing on the specific features of epistolary fiction,...