To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  Where did the ‘greetings’ element come from? One explanation suggests it became popular in Athens after 425 BC, when the statesman Cleon used the word at the start of his account of an unexpected victory against the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. The report was an official council document, but its celebratory tone was soon deemed suitable for the common letter, initially perhaps as a reminder of the victory. Before this – and this is the case of the earliest Greek letter that survives, an indistinct fifth-century inscription on lead from the Black Sea – there was no greeting at all, as if a piece of papyrus that had been delivered by fleet-footed messenger after a journey of many days was somehow part of an ongoing and open conversation, like an email.* But once it was established, the hello-goodbye template would barely alter in style through the centuries (though it wouldn’t be until the sixteenth century that the spacious layout of a modern letter took shape; certainly papyrus was far too precious to experiment with attractive blank space).

  The contents of the letters, composed in black carbon ink with reed pen, are also familiar. There are enquiries about the recipient’s health, usually optimistic, followed with news of the sender’s health, which is almost always buoyant. The ancient history scholar John Muir observes that when this practice was later adopted by letter-writers in Latin it was so commonplace that it was sometimes abbreviated as SVBEEQV: si vales bene est, ego quidem valeo.* The receipt of previous letters was then acknowledged, or perhaps a rebuke for the lack of them. Good wishes were sent to all members of the family, each by name, and often including pets.

  The practice of letter-writing was itself the subject of study as early as the fourth century BC, or at least the subject of criticism. Theophrastus, categorising the character traits of the ‘arrogant man’, observes that ‘when sending instructions by letter, he does not write “you would oblige me” but “I want this to happen” . . . and “make sure it is exactly as I said”.’ In the third century, the philosopher Ariston found another definition: ‘When he has bought a slave, he does not bother to ask his name but just addresses him as “slave” . . . and writing a letter, he neither writes “Greetings” nor “Farewell” at the end.’

  The Greek letters that survive – some 2,000 examples scattered around the world’s great museums – have value beyond their immediate content. They shed some light on the prominent role played by educated women, and certainly refute the notion that all were invisible in public debate. (The literacy rate in Greek cities is believed to have been less than 50 per cent, and the figure was lower for women, but the illiterate often hired scribes to communicate for them.) The letters have also enabled scholars to track developments in Greek language and grammar.

  Predictably, the letters we find most intriguing are not the commonplace (the majority) but the quirky, the ones that make us gasp at their audacity or absurdity. In the first century BC a letter from a man working away from his wife (whom he calls sister, a common convention), is both caring and nonchalantly heartless.

  Hilarion to his sister Alis, very many greetings – and to my respected Berous and Appolonarion. Know that we are still at this moment in Alexandria . . . I ask you and urge you, look after the child, and as soon as I receive my pay I will send it up to you. If by any chance you give birth and it is male, let it live; if it is female, get rid of it. You said to Aphrodisias, ‘Don’t forget me’. How can I forget you? I ask you therefore not to be anxious.

  A letter from older to younger sisters carries a hectoring air:

  Apollonia and Eupous to their sisters Rasion and Demarion, greetings. If you are in good health, that is well. We ourselves are in good health too. You would do us a favour by lighting the lamp in the shrine and shaking out the cushions. Keep studying and do not worry about mother. For she is already enjoying good health. Expect our arrival. Farewell. And don’t play in the courtyard but behave yourselves inside. Take care of Titoas and Shairos.

  A testy letter from the third century AD, from an eager son at school to an unresponsive father, smothers its frustrations as best it can:

  To my respected father Arion, Thonis sends greetings. Most of all I say a prayer every day, praying to the ancestral gods of this land in which I am staying that I find you and all our family flourishing. Look, this is the fifth letter I have written and, except for one, you have not written to me, even about your being well, nor have you come to see me. Having promised me, ‘I am coming’, you didn’t come so that you could find out whether the teacher was attending me or not . . . So make the effort to come to me quickly so he can teach me – as he is keen to do . . . Come quickly to me before he leaves for the upper territories. I send many greetings to all our family by name and to my friends. Goodbye my respected father, and I pray that you may fare well for many years along with my brothers (safe from the evil eye).

  Remember my pigeons.

  But for all their attractions, and for all their familiar templates, most Greek letters fall short of the key attribute we expect from letters in the modern world: they do not greatly enrich the personal experience. They may be fascinating, but the personal letters are rarely of consequence. Public letters – many purposely artificial, using the letter form as a new way of performing elaborate flights of philosophy and reaching a wider audience – are often just unperformed speeches, the equivalent of the ‘open letter’ in our modern media; many New Testament epistles would clearly model themselves on this practice.

  The Greeks loved the idea of the letter and its high ambitions; they loved its epistolarity. But what of its private role as a conveyance of intimacy? Almost all letters were written to be read aloud; even private letters were primarily dictated to a scribe, and read in a low voice when received. There are rare snippets of private idiosyncrasy in Socrates and Plato, but the majority of correspondences are free of private emotion, and their oratorical heritage lends them a showy formality.

  So what is lacking that we might expect to find? The historian John Muir notes that of the 2,000 or so papyrus letters we have, there are very few – he counts twelve or thirteen – that concern themselves with bereavement. Of these only six have sympathy as their main purpose, and a disproportionate three were written by women. Thus one of the few reliable mainstays of letter-writing in an age of email – the condolence letter – is almost entirely absent, and there is no logical explanation. And why were there no love letters? One possibility is that almost all were destroyed by the parties involved. Another, more plausible, is that letters were not yet regarded as the proper medium for such things. Because so many Greek letters were those of effect (or carried violent or dramatic instruction, such as that brought by Bellerophon), they may not have been considered appropriate for authentic outpourings from the heart. Muir also sounds a word of caution – their world was not as much like ours as we might imagine. The greetings and farewells were one thing, but ‘there may be a salutary warning against assuming that the many undoubtedly recognisable feelings and situations in the letters imply that we are meeting people . . . who had notions of individuality very like our own. The “otherness” of the ancient world is sometimes easy to forget.’

  Individuality and authenticity – a letter that was both personal and informative – begins properly with the Romans, the first true letter-writers, and the first to establish the tradition of letters both as biographical source material and a literature to be gathered and enjoyed in its own right. The classical scholar Betty Radice has compared the ancient history of letters to a trip round a marble-floored museum, ‘the Greek statue stands aloof with his stylized enigmatic smile, while the Roman portrait bust is recognisably someone like ourselves, and its regular features speak for a single individual at a point of time’. To the modern reader, Latin letters tend to have another beneficial attribute over their Greek counterparts – their straightforwardness. They are intelligent without being flashy, direct rather than imaginative, unpretentious rather than conceited. If Greek letters are
rooted in the theatre, Roman ones are rooted in the tavern.

  The trail begins in the second half of the first century BC with more than 900 letters from Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero was the consummate statesman on a world stage at a time when the Roman Republic was in significant decline. His oratory – as a lawyer in court and in the senate – was allegedly stupendous, but it is his surviving letters that confirm his talents. His lifelong correspondence with his friend Atticus is boastful, playful and varied like no other correspondence before it, and its prolific and sequential nature enables us to build an unusually intimate biographical picture of a politician. In other letters he is compelling particularly because he is spontaneous, vulnerable and prone to hyperbolic excitement, and because his political success is fuelled by ambition, vanity and weakness. Cicero does not emerge as a particularly likeable character, but his letters have made him a valuable one: there were few figures with whom he did not communicate as Rome suffered paroxysms of decline in the decades before 45 BC, and no other collection of writing so illuminates this world. But Cicero performs another trick too, a grand epistolary deflection. His is the oldest substantive collection to show how the consummate politician flatters to deceive; his apparent confidences invariably advance his own ends and enhance his reputation.

  The survival and popularity of Cicero’s correspondence is due largely to the discovery of a long-lost collection by Petrarch in the cathedral in Verona in 1345, while a second haul almost 50 years later at Vercelli boosted the supply. Together, the letters made an immeasurable literary contribution to the formative years of the Renaissance; Cicero had laid bare the values of classical antiquity with enough detail to inspire its artistic and cultural reconstruction.

  We empathise with his domestic travails (two divorces, the untimely death of his daughter Tullia), almost enough to forgive his pomposity. Virginia Woolf once noted that ‘there is a bareness about an age that has neither letter-writers nor biographers’, and it is Cicero who proves the point first. There is no doubt that Cicero knew the value of his correspondence: it was carefully edited before being copied, with an aim to present a man in firm control of grand public events; Tiro, his secretary, played at least some role in this. The worth of his letters to subsequent centuries has changed over time, but as a late-Victorian translator of Cicero’s writing claims in an introduction to his letters, ‘In every one of them he will doubtless rouse different feelings in different minds. But though he will still, as he did in his lifetime, excite vehement disapproval as well as strong admiration, he will never, I think, appear to anyone dull or uninteresting.’

  In 2011, the Princeton classics professor Denis Feeney noted that while Cicero has always been popular, the last decade and a half has seen an even greater scholarly interest in his letters, ‘as if our own scurrying e-communications have created a nostalgia for a time when busy people could write pages of well-turned prose as part of their regular intercourse’.*

  Two examples provide vivid snapshots of his times and a glimpse of his mischievous style (Cicero claimed he was no more able to keep a witticism in his mouth than a hot coal). The first, to his friend M. Marius at Cumae, a city near Naples, was written in 55 BC from Rome. His friend had missed the opening of the new theatre named after the leader Pompey, and with it a nice display of animal-baiting and other revelry.

  If some bodily pain or weakness of health has prevented your coming to the games, I put it down to fortune rather than your own wisdom: but if you have made up your mind that these things which the rest of the world admires are only worthy of contempt, and, though your health would have allowed of it, you yet were unwilling to come, then I rejoice at both facts – that you were free from bodily pain, and that you had the sound sense to disdain what others causelessly admire.

  . . . On the whole, if you care to know, the games were most splendid, but not to your taste. I judge from my own . . . For what is the pleasure of a train of six hundred mules in the ‘Clytemnestra’, or three thousand bowls in the ‘Trojan Horse’, or gay-coloured armour of infantry and cavalry in some battle? These things roused the admiration of the vulgar; to you they would have brought no delight . . . Why, again, should I suppose you to care about missing the athletes, since you disdained the gladiators? in which even Pompey himself confesses that he lost his trouble and his pains. There remain the two wild-beast hunts, lasting five days, magnificent – nobody denies it – and yet, what pleasure can it be to a man of refinement, when either a weak man is torn by an extremely powerful animal, or a splendid animal is transfixed by a hunting spear? . . . The last day was that of the elephants, on which there was a great deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it, and a kind of belief created that that animal has something in common with mankind.

  At the same theatre, just over a decade later, in 44 BC, the murder of Julius Caesar would take place by its entrance. But shortly before that, Caesar came to dinner at Cicero’s house in the Bay of Naples, and Cicero wrote of the experience to Atticus in Rome in much the same way we might refer to overpowering visitors today.

  Well, I have no reason after all to repent my formidable guest! For he made himself exceedingly pleasant . . . He stayed with Philippus on the third day of the Saturnalia till one o’clock, without admitting anyone. He was engaged on his accounts, I think, with Balbus. Then he took a walk on the beach. After two he went to the bath . . . He was anointed: took his place at the table. He was under a course of emetics, and so ate and drank without scruple and as suited his taste. It was a very good dinner, and well served, and not only so, but ‘Well-cooked, well-seasoned food, with rare discourse: A banquet in a word to cheer the heart.’

  Besides this, the staff were entertained in three rooms in a very liberal style. The freedmen of lower rank and the slaves had everything they could want. But the upper sort had a really recherché dinner. In fact, I showed that I was somebody. However, he is not a guest to whom one would say, ‘Pray look me up again on your way back.’ Once is enough.

  Cicero at work: pompous perhaps, but never dull.

  A century later the Stoic philosopher, poet and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger) offered a different take on the Latin letter. Where Cicero was personal and scheming, Seneca was instructional and disarming, composing 124 letters telling us how to conduct our lives.* All written towards the end of his life to his writer friend Lucilius, they are a combination of philosophical treatise and spiritual guide, with the letter judged a suitable vehicle for the provision of robust and serious advice delivered in a digestible way.

  The letters may be seen as the world’s first correspondence course in self-improvement, or indeed – considered as a collection – the first self-help book. As would be expected, the complexity of his arguments increases as the course progresses. But the letters are also conversational, and it is largely assumed that the dialogue went both ways, though the contribution from Lucilius does not survive. They contain much modern thinking, and their range is vast: from musings on the respective merits of brawn and brains to old age and senility; from the value of travel to the despairs of drunkenness; from the futility of half-done deeds to the virtues of self-control; from specific ethical issues to broad matters of physics. They are never less than absorbing. Scholars have argued that Seneca is often playing the role of the philosopher, as concerned with the structure of his argument as he is with the treatise itself. But there is no doubt that he adores the challenges of the letter form, and his accessible, bite-sized approach has contributed to the continued popularity and influence of his work.

  On travel, for example, Seneca advises against the hope of returning from a journey in a better frame of mind than the one we had on departure. He is evidently replying directly to a complaint of Lucilius:

  Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it
were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate . . .

  What pleasure is there in seeing new lands? Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

  It was one of the cornerstones of the Stoic tradition that an individual’s well-being could be improved by clarity of being as well as clarity of thought, a distant forerunner of the unclutter movement. In ‘Some Arguments in Favour of the Simple Life’, Seneca considers ‘how much we possess that is superfluous; and how easily we can make up our minds to do away with things whose loss, whenever it is necessary to part with them, we do not feel.’