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CHAPTER 32
EPISTOLOGRAPHY
OWEN HODKINSON
INTRODUCTION: EPISTOLOGRAPHY IN THE SECOND SOPHISTIC
EPISTOLOGRAPHY was among the most popular genres in the imperial period:1 the vast quantity of epistolary texts transmitted to us testifies to this.2 It also numbers examples by a Philostratus (probably Flavius) and Aelian, subject of a life in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists (VS). These, and the following extract from a short treatise by Philostratus of Lemnos—namechecking some of the central figures of VS and Life of Apollonius (VA) and discussing one of the key features of its literary style in Atticism—can leave us in no doubt that letters were important business in the Second Sophistic:
Those who, next to the ancients, seem to me to have used the epistolary style of discourse best are, of the philosophers [Apollonius] of Tyana and Dio . . . of the Emperors the divine Marcus . . . 3 of the rhetoricians Herodes the Athenian was the best at writing letters although he does, through excessive Atticism and loquacity, frequently depart from the appropriate epistolary style. For the epistolary style must in appearance be more Attic than everyday speech, but more ordinary than Atticism.
Philostratus of Lemnos De Epistulis (2.257–258 Kayser)
Despite all this, imperial Greek epistolography is severely underresearched compared to many of its contemporary genres and severely undervalued relative to its contemporary importance.4 This brief chapter can barely scratch the surface of such a huge and varied genre: I aim only to survey its subgenres and their common features.
First, some general observations on Greek letters in the empire and their connections with the sophistic movement. The vast majority are written (usually by an unknown author) as if from someone else, from historical or literary figures to fictional comic and pastoral types. Thus they bear connections with the rhetorical exercises and sophistic staples prosopopoiia and ethopoiia; but though they have often been neglected as such, many are accomplished pieces of literature employing these techniques (just as orations and other genres of the period frequently did), not actual exercises themselves. Though some collections of such pseudonymous letters are just that—collections of compositions of various authors and periods—several are rather letter books composed by a single author, with discernable structure and design, including commonly a lengthier and stylistically more adventurous climactic epistle, as Holzberg observed.5 Many letter books are essentially fictionalized “autobiographical” narratives, and some contain enough coherent narrative to have been labeled “epistolary novels.”6 Letters are almost exclusively prose, and in some cases, especially when epistolarity is not so essential to the content, the letter can be seen as a useful form in which an author can compose a prose miniature,7 another staple of Second Sophistic literature. As with other contemporary prose forms, they sometimes “prosify” traditionally verse forms (elegy, epigram, pastoral, comedy). During the first few centuries CE Greek literary letters multiplied exponentially, and with the increased quantity came great generic variety and experimentation; due to the essentially “blank” template for the form (apart from opening and closing greetings) it lends itself extremely well to combining and cross-fertilizing with other genres.8 The themes, styles, and favorite intertexts of a great many Imperial Greek letters have much in common with contemporary novels and other fictional works such as Lucian’s oeuvre, as well as contemporary orations and lives. From early on, letters seem to have circulated alongside other works by the same author (where these existed), but also in collections only of letters, including perhaps anthologies by multiple authors:9 they were thus not only read for interest in their supposed authors, but also valued as examples of their genre.
GREEK AND LATIN LETTERS OF THE EMPIRE
The imperial Greek epistolary tradition surveyed in this chapter displays far more continuity and contiguity with classical and Hellenistic Greek epistolography than it does with most Latin epistolography.10 The famous Latin epistolographers either composed poetic epistles (Horace, Ovid), which thus belong as much if not more to other genres and literary conventions as to those of prose epistolography, or else published (or had published on their behalf) “real” correspondence in their own voices, which are therefore quite unlike the largely pseudonymous and fictional Greek epistolary collections.11 The conventions and tropes of the Greek literary epistolographic tradition were certainly known to and incorporated into literary Latin epistolography, but whether the inverse was true in general is impossible to say with certainty. Pliny’s and Ovid’s attention to the arrangement of collections of letters and composition within a book structure pre-date many of the Second Sophistic epistolographers who would have appreciated these features, and might have been influenced by them if they read them. Ovid’s Heroides—a book of literary letters in which the author writes in the personae of a succession of figures from myth and creates a fictional correspondence—is the most similar earlier extant text in either language to Aelian’s and Alciphron’s books, and it is tempting here to see possible connections.12 Pliny’s ten books of Epistles, “real” but at the same time “artificial” in their arrangement and no doubt edited for publication,13 bear resemblance to many of the pseudonymous Greek letter books supposed to be from real historical figures, especially those whose arrangement and intratextuality show that they were composed as books (e.g., biographical epistolary novels such as Chion and Themistocles or the letters attributed to Euripides), rather than assembled as collections from a range of spurious and possibly genuine letters of various date and provenance attributed to an author (e.g., the collection of thirteen letters attributed to Plato).14 But whether or not imperial Greek authors commonly read Latin authors writing in the same genre, they rarely refer to them explicitly or allude to them in obvious enough ways for the allusion to be indisputable, so influence in such cases cannot be asserted other than speculatively,15 especially when so little is known about most of the authors of Greek epistolography with whom we are concerned (Alciphron is just a name to us; the authors of the pseudonymous epistolary compositions are, necessarily, not even that).
AELIAN AND ALCIPHRON
We begin with letter books by Claudius Aelianus and Alciphron; these are far from the most typical epistolary compositions of the empire, but are certainly typical sophistic pieces, and also among the most accessible.16 Aelian also has an entry in Philostratus’s VS (624–625) which labels him a “sophist,” while Alciphron, about whom nothing is known, composed a very similar text. Aelian’s work consists of twenty Rustic Letters between imaginary farmers and their fellow rustics (wives, lovers, friends, and enemies); much can be learned about the sophistic nature and the game of the whole miniature book (and indeed about Alciphron’s similar text) by the self-conscious metaliterary comment concluding its final letter:
If these written words addressed to you are too clever for the country to supply, do not marvel, for we are not Libyan nor Lydian, but Athenian farmers. (Ael. Ep. 20 fin)17
Alciphron’s text comprises four books: Letters of Fishermen, Rustics, Parasites, Courtesans. It is almost certain that one imitated the other, but the chronology of Alciphron and thus the priority cannot be determined; there
are also important connections between both texts and Longus and Lucian.18 Much of what can be said of one text applies to the other (although Alciphron book 4 is rather different), thus they are treated here in common. With Aelian, of course, we have other extant works to contextualize and compare with the Epistles; two recent studies move away from a trend to dismiss the Epistles as trivial or juvenalia19 and instead note correspondences with Aelian’s moral and literary program elsewhere.20
Both epistolographers imitate fictional characters in the manner of sophistic exercises (meletai, specifically ethopoiiai).21 Thomas Schmitz’s important article shows the many ways in which Alciphron partakes of typical Second Sophistic literary traits, but also demonstrates that his letters are far more than simple exercises—rather, their extreme self-consciousness about the rhetorical techniques they employ and those same, typically sophistic, traits mean that they “explore and destabilize the status of sophistic writing, thus providing a metacommentary on sophistic declamations.”22 Alciphron and Aelian are both also highly self-conscious and metafictional in their use of the epistolary form, and experiment with the limits and particular opportunities of the genre, as several recent studies have shown.23 Their play with combining different genres and intertexts to create a novel subgenre of epistolary narrative fiction, and the metaliterary awareness of this act, are also typical of the striving for novelty of much Second Sophistic literature.24
Both texts frequently hark back to an earlier time, especially the world of classical and Hellenistic Attica, through their linguistic Atticism and through their settings and intertextual borrowings (especially from New Comedy but also from pastoral).25 Their evocation of “ordinary” character types such as those found in Greek comedy and in pastoral poetry bears similarities to the Greek novel, as does their setting in an earlier (but sometimes indeterminately so) period of Greek history.26 The adaptation of comic scenes and characters is sometimes quite extensive (Ael. Ep. 13–16 take their premise and characters from Menander’s Dyscolus—adapting it however to the epistolary medium27). Alciphron’s fourth book provides a fictional correspondence between Menander and his courtesan-mistress Glycera (4.18–19); I have argued that Menander is here an authorial figure for Alciphron, who thus self-consciously refers to one of his major hypotexts in the climactic and lengthiest letters of his work.28