Introduction: Fictions of Genre

Claire Rachel Jackson would like to acknowledge the funding of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 819459 - NovelEchoes) in her contribution to this introduction.

The place of fiction in ancient epistolography is something of a paradox. Depictions of letters litter classical literary culture and play a key role in the plots of works commonly classified as fictitious, from drama to elegy to the ancient novel. The paradigmatic examples of Bellerophon’s tablet in the Iliad and Phaedra’s suicide note in Euripides’ Hippolytus testify to an awareness even in some of the earliest literature extant from classical antiquity of the potential of letters to construct false, even deceptive stories.1 By the imperial period, the variety of letter-collections ascribed to ancient celebrities including Pythagoras, Hippocrates, and Themistocles, but likely written long after their deaths, testify to a widespread interest in letters as a vehicle to embellish and rewrite traditional biographical narratives about famous figures.2 Early Christian pseudepigraphic letters have, by contrast, been argued to be fiction as a counterweight to accusations of forgery.3 The label of fictional letters, therefore, covers a multitude of forms, genres, and contexts, ranging from letters within fictional narratives to invented collections neutralised within a generic label and those intended to deceive. And yet the extent to which ancient audiences, both contemporary readers and later compilers, conceptualised fiction as a distinct category is far from clear. While analogies with the early modern epistolary novel are relatively commonplace, this risks implying a generic clarity and fixity for which there is little evidence in antiquity.4 What, then, exactly do we mean when we talk of fictional letters, and what is at stake in this terminology?

Concerns about how to distinguish invented from genuine letters are not new, nor have they ever been uncontroversial. Richard Bentley’s late seventeenth-century Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris is just one intervention in a much wider debate,5 but the sharpness and starkness of its argument that the eponymous letters were inauthentic established it as the primary model for later approaches to such pseudepigraphic letter collections.6 Throughout the treatise Bentley argues pedantically for the Epistles’ inauthenticity based on anachronistic details such as mistakes made regarding types of currency or drinking cups easily established by citing standard scholarly reference works of the time. As such, in Haugen’s words, ‘Bentley’s Dissertation was thus a spectacular application of compiled collective learning rather than an original piece of research in itself.’7 While this kind of pedantic Echtheitskritik perhaps reflects more on Bentley than on the Epistles themselves,8 throughout the course of this debate and others Bentley’s central premise, namely that such collections should be understood through the binary lens of authenticity and forgery, remained unchallenged.9 The late nineteenth-century rediscovery of the papyri at Oxyrhynchus, including a variety of documentary letters, added to the urgency of this argument.10 Particularly influential at this time was Gustav Adolf Deißmann’s distinction between letters, written for private purposes only, and epistles, written with publication in mind.11 His study of the Pauline letters acknowledged that letters (Briefe) and, respectively, epistles (Episteln) vary in their degree of authenticity and established a firm opposition between real and fictive letters. Despite various attempts to nuance this distinction in subsequent scholarship,12 ancient epistolography remained primarily viewed through a binary lens of truth and falsehood, where references to fiction would only signify mendacity or deceit.

These kinds of interventions set the tone for scholarship on epistolary fiction for much of the twentieth century, and it is only recently that analysis has attempted to move beyond these binary oppositions.13 The volume edited by Niklas Holzberg, Der griechische Briefroman: Gattungstypologie und Textanalyse, argues for the category of the epistolary novel and outlines conventions of the genre, subsuming different pseudonymous Greek collections into this category.14 On this reading, the potentially problematic pseudonymity of collections attributed to Plato, Socrates, Chion, and Euripides can be neutralised within a generic framework through the familiar modern paradigm of the epistolary novel. This approach is developed even further by Patricia Rosenmeyer’s Ancient Epistolary Fictions. In this work, Rosenmeyer looks both at the depictions of letters in canonical Greek texts and later pseudepigraphic collections not as a derivative imitation of documentary letters, but as a field of study in its own right. Although Rosenmeyer’s stated focus is on rehabilitating neglected letter-collections by collating them as a unified although not unitary genre,15 this nonetheless implicitly reinscribes an opposition between fictional and seemingly genuine letters. The key difference is that the rhetoric of forgery has been sublimated into the more impartial terminology of fiction, which downplays any deceptive intentions and outlines a distinct generic opposition between letters which are what they claim to be and those which are not. This shift in approach has been highly influential for later studies of epistolography, not least because it rightly showcases the value of epistolographic fiction within classical literary culture, but also for its clear focus on letters as a literary form rather than historical documents.16 As a result, subsequent scholarship has positioned pseudepigraphic letters not as forgeries, but as a category of creative expression which develops from the educational precepts of the imperial era,17 or the rise of prose fiction in the form of the ancient novel,18 or the increasing interest in biography in the postclassical world.19

And yet, even as such approaches embed pseudonymous letters in the literary, rhetorical, and educational contexts of the ancient world, this essential distinction between authentic and inauthentic letters has not been challenged. The extent to which letters interrogate the boundaries between fiction and historicity has long been recognised and scholars have repeatedly decried an over-reliance upon rigid typologies,20 but in practice these binary categories have remained stubbornly fixed despite this change of terminology. While the label of fiction inoculates pseudonymous collections against accusations of deception by aligning them within a less charged generic framework familiar to contemporary readers from early modern traditions of the epistolary novel, it nonetheless reinscribes an opposition between documentary and invented letters, even as the criteria for determining this distinction shift. Seen through this lens, it is perhaps not surprising that a key focus of Holzberg’s definition of ancient epistolary novels is anachronism.21 By emphasising the ways in which scholarly Echtheitskritik can distinguish pseudonymous letters from genuine ones, the historical value of authentic letters can be protected from any hint of deception and confidently distinguished from their invented counterparts. On such a reading, therefore, fictional letters remain a circumscribed category distinct from historical letters, which are defined by their lack of authenticity, and this generic approach naturalises epistolary fiction as a teleological precursor to the early modern epistolary novel.

One striking consequence of this approach is visible in the bifurcated understanding of fiction across scholarship on Latin and Greek letters respectively. Michael Trapp’s epistolary anthology has often been cited as a turning point in contemporary studies,22 in large part due to its expansive approach and diverse range of letters cited. In contrast to other translations and editions, Trapp’s anthology juxtaposes Greek and Latin letters from a variety of periods within functional rather than generic categories.23 Trapp rejects the idea that all letters are fictional or that there are unique markers of epistolary fiction in favour of a broader definition of letters which focuses on the similarities between different epistolary texts rather than their differences.24 As such, the anthologised letters are divided not by questions of authentication or fictitiousness, but rather by function and theme, with Cicero alongside Ovid and letters from Oxyrhynchus.25 This wide-ranging approach has repeatedly been reaffirmed in scholarship, often with insight and incisiveness, but the perennial return to such issues testifies to the difficulties of defining letters as a genre.26 In practice, despite this commitment to...