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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Epistolography
Cristiana Sogno and Edward J. Watts
Until relatively recently letters and letter collections have represented some of the least appreciated late antique literary innovations. Given the extensive use that many historians have made of individual late antique letters over the past century, it is perhaps surprising to call them underappreciated. Letters have indeed been mined for information, but scholars have tended to think of late antique letters as discrete documents that capture a genuine conversation between figures. Consequently, scholars have read letters in isolation, as relatively uncomplicated sources that lack the digressions and literary artifice of classical historiography. In recent years, however, the literary complexity of late antique epistolography has become far better appreciated. Not only have we come to see how the individual letters can serve as literary monuments to the skill and creativity of their authors, but the collections to which they belong often represent creative literary works in which characters develop and themes unfold in specifically designed ways. The late antique letter collection, then, does not represent simply the stack of papers found on someone’s desk when he or she died. It is instead a complicated and very deliberately organized literary document often designed to use the author’s literary interactions with others to define and develop a specific literary persona (e.g. Beard 2002; Gibson 2012). At the same time, as we shall argue below, the macrotextual dimension of the letter collection does not always necessarily depend on the intentionality of its author.
Although some of the pioneering work on the literary aspects of letter collections has focused on earlier assemblages of the letters of Cicero and Pliny, there can be little doubt that late antiquity represents the golden age of ancient letter collections. There are more surviving Greek and Latin letters and letter collections from the period between 355 and 415 than there are from the previous thousand years. These include massive collections of figures like Isidore of Pelusium (the author of over 2000 surviving letters), Libanius (over 1500 extant letters), and Symmachus (over 900 letters), as well as far smaller collections from figures like Aeneas of Gaza or Ausonius. In all, however, more than 30 substantial collections of literary letters survive from late antiquity (Sogno, Storin, and Watts 2016). This cannot be attributed simply to an accident of transmission. Moreover, after the publication of letter collections slows in the early seventh century, nothing like the rate of production and preservation of letter collections found in late antiquity occurs again until the later medieval period.
This essay explains why late antiquity became a golden age for the production and preservation of literary letter collections. It has three parts. First, it considers the nature of a literary letter collection and the particular characteristics of later Roman society that incentivized the production and dissemination of these texts. Second, it examines the literary creativity involved in producing letter collections that developed a particular identity for their author. Late antique authors had some earlier, classical models of collected letters from which they could take inspiration, but their projects pushed far beyond the limits set by these earlier exemplars in ways that demonstrated remarkable literary creativity. The final section of the chapter then looks at how late antique authors brought similar innovative genius to the individual letters that they composed. This will show the degree to which letter collections as well as the individual letters within them embody the late antique authorial tendency to push against and experiment with classical literary templates in exciting and creative ways.
24.1 Letter Collections in theLater Roman World
The idea of the letter collection as a deliberately organized text remains somewhat controversial in some circles. This is on some level understandable because not all late antique letter collections fit the same mold. Some, like the collection of Paulinus, are early modern creations (Trout 2016), whil
e others, like the seemingly ever‐expanding corpus of letters of Augustine, are modern assemblages (Ebbeler 2016). Many late antique collections also do not now appear in their original order. From the Renaissance forward, editors have tended to reorganize, anthologize, or simply disassemble collections that ancient authors took care to put together in specific ways (Gibson 2012), that mostly disregarded and tended to obscure the chronology of the letters. There is little doubt that this kind of early modern and modern editorial violence was inspired by a specific historiographical bias that tended to regard letters as raw and unmediated sources for history rather than as literary artifacts in their own right. Even though the view of epistolography as a lesser form of historiography is a demonstrably ancient idea, the chronological bias of Renaissance authors seems to have been inspired by Cicero’s letters, which are exceptionally rich in historical information but were never prepared by their author for publication. The main cause for the editorial approach described above has been an almost exclusive focus on the microlevel of the individual letter and the historical information that could be gleaned from it. Only recently has the macrolevel of the collection attracted scholarly attention. The concept of “macrotext,” which was developed by Italian semioticians in the 1970s and used by Maria Corti to study Italo Calvino’s collections of short stories (Corti 1975; Viti 2014), seems to be an especially powerful hermeneutical tool for studying letter collections. Even when, or especially when, the identity of the editor is uncertain, and the history of the collection remains unknowable, the tension between the macrotextual dimension of the collection and the microtextual reality of the single letter opens up new perspectives for the study of letter collections as a novel and specifically late antique literary form/genre. As Marco Formisano has recently argued (Formisano 2016a, 2016b), the macrotext represents a textual formation that bears a different and potentially opposite meaning from that conveyed by the microtext read in isolation.
Some collections have managed to preserve their original order in modern editions. Seven of the nine books of Symmachus’s letters were organized by addressee, and later editors seem to have been mostly respectful of the original order, not only because it was easily understood to be deliberate, but also because the lack of historical information made it especially challenging to reorganize the collection chronologically (Sogno 2016). Similarly, in the later fifth century, Sidonius Apollinaris made explicit at the outset of his collection that he was following Symmachus and, ultimately, Pliny in creating a coherent collection made up of units designed to fit together in a certain way (Gibson 2013; Harries 1994). Later copyists and editors understood this project, too, and tended to respect Sidonius’s work by preserving the integrity of the collection as he had designed it (Mratschek 2016). Many collections were not so fortunate, however. One must work hard to reconstruct the original manuscript order of the letters of Gregory Nazianzus because their modern edition has reorganized them chronologically (Storin 2012). There are problems even when the critical edition follows the manuscript order, because some of the best‐known translations of letter collections frequently do not. Although the modern critical edition of Libanius’s 1546 letters preserves the organization found in the best manuscripts, recent translations have preferred to read the letters in chronological order, with each translator choosing selections of letters based on their thematic or historical importance (Van Hoof 2016).
Something important is lost when we do this. In the case of Libanius, his collection of letters contains three chronologically distinctive tranches. Although all three batches of letters illustrate the prominence, influence, and wit of Libanius, each of them features a different cast of characters and a slightly different set of themes. The largest group, which contains letters 19–839 and covers the years between 355 and 363, begins with a letter from the winter of 358/359 that Libanius sent to the prefect Anatolius in the midst of a dispute about whether Libanius praised people disingenuously (Van Hoof 2016). This letter falls in the middle of the collection chronologically, but Libanius has clearly chosen it to introduce his readers to Anatolius not as the firm friend Libanius believed him to be in 355 but as the shady character he had become by 358. This was a deliberate act of literary foreshadowing made possible only because the letters to Anatolius appear in the collection out of chronological order.
This introductory letter did more than establish Anatolius’s character. It also allowed Libanius to sketch out the literary character that he would himself project across the collection. The charge that Libanius disingenuously praised people was potentially a biting one, but Libanius’s response to it is powerful and compelling. It had to be. The rest of this batch of letters is full of praises of friends and, in Letter 19, Libanius catalogs many of the types of praises he offers throughout the larger collection along with explanations of why they are justified. Letter 19, then, not only foreshadows the development of Libanius’s relationship with Anatolius; it provides a set of literary guidelines that readers can use to appreciate Libanius’s fuller literary achievements across 821 letters – and to do it on the terms that Libanius himself set.
One sees a similar process unfold in the other two tranches of Libanian letters. Letters 840–1112, a group written between 388 and 393 and presumably published after Libanius’s death by a literary executor, begin with a letter to the praetorian prefect and consul Flavius Eutolmius Tatianus. In this letter Libanius demonstrates his strong friendship with Tatianus, a figure who had been left in de facto charge of the East while Theodosius marched west to fight a civil war, and also proclaims the exoneration of Libanius from charges that he had supported Magnus Maximus in his recent revolt. Libanius then casts himself as a loyal and influential elder statesman, a persona he will inhabit across the mini‐collection. Something similar happens in Letter 1113, the introduction to the batch of 429 letters that document Libanius’s activities between the death of Julian in 363 and the revolt of Procopius in 365. The letter is addressed to Caesarius, the vicar of Asia, and mentions that it, too, was composed in the presence of Celsus, the governor of Syria. Not only does it show Libanius’s continued importance after the death of Julian, but it also presents Libanius’s effective and compelling defense against a charge that he has been a negligent correspondent. Like the letter to Anatolius from 358/359, Letter 1113 displays Libanius’s distinctive ability to turn charges of epistolary misconduct against his accusers and, in so doing, use a letter to seize control of the social dynamics of a relationship. This again sets the tone for the larger collection by introducing the prominent cast of characters it will feature and the sorts of displays of literary authority that Libanius will make through these letters.
Libanius was not the only author to strategically arrange the letters in his collection in order to define a specific literary identity. Many other authors in late antiquity used collections of letters to showcase a certain literary persona they wished to claim. Jerome, for example, seems to have used small collections of letters to advertise his unique combination of biblical expertise and ascetic training to potential literary patrons in Rome (Cain 2009). The Cyrenean philosopher Synesius used his letter collection to present himself as a political and intellectual go‐between whose writings and social activities joined the cosmopolitan worlds of Constantinople and Alexandria to the backward and isolated Libyan hinterland (Petkas forthcoming). It is then no surprise that letters seeking the literary blessings of the Constantinopolitan sophist Nicander and the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia on two of Synesius’s most famous texts bookend his collection (Watts 2017).
Certain aspects of late Roman society made late antiquity a particularly fertile period for the sort of literary self‐definition engaged in by authors like Libanius, Jerome, and Synesius. The authors of the famous letter collections of the late republic and early empire had been prominent men of affairs like Cicero and Pliny, men whose actions and authority resonated across the Mediterranean. They lived, however, in an empire where only a small group of Ital
ian elites could claim this sort of ecumenical influence. By the turn of the fourth century, the nature of the empire had changed. The dramatic expansion of citizenship in the third century and the tremendous growth of the imperial bureaucracy in the decades spanning the turn of the fourth century meant that more Romans than ever before could aspire to a level of influence like that of Pliny. Late antiquity saw provincial elites like Libanius, men of middling curial rank like Augustine, and even failed bureaucrats like Jerome aspire to a level of Mediterranean‐wide influence that their ancestors could never imagine. The Mediterranean world of late antiquity offered everyone from pagan Italian aristocrats like Symmachus to Christian landholders in isolated provinces like Synesius an opportunity to grab fame and fortune on an imperial stage.
The letter collection represented a perfect vehicle for displaying the unique sets of attributes that defined the influence of such figures. The trappings of tradition on which it drew gave a timeless, old‐Roman quality to the authority that these new elites claimed, but the collection also afforded them plenty of scope to reimagine and reinvent the ways in which they defined themselves. Only in a collection of letters could Synesius make the case that he was an uncompromising devotee of philosophy who served as a civic and ecclesiastical leader in Cyrenaica and had strong connections with leading intellectuals in Alexandria and Constantinople. Similarly, only a letter collection could preserve, demonstrate, and disseminate the breadth of the teachings given by the abbots Barsanuphius and John, two monks who communicated with the ascetics under their charge and the laity under their influence exclusively by letter (Hevelone Harper 2016). And, as the anti‐Chalcedonian hierarchies of Egypt and Syria struggled to survive persecutions under Justinian, the collected letters of Severus of Antioch defined for the community an exemplar of principled episcopal resistance at a moment of deep communal crisis.
