Material Aspects of Letter Writing in the Graeco-Roman World

Antonia Sarri

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110423488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Letter writing was widespread in the Graeco-Roman world, as indicated by the large number of surviving letters and their extensive coverage of all social categories. Despite a large amount of work that has been done on the topic of ancient epistolography, material and formatting conventions have remained underexplored, mainly due to the difficulty of accessing images of letters in the past. Thanks to the increasing availability of digital images and the appearance of more detailed and sophisticated editions, we are now in a position to study such aspects.

This book examines the development of letter writing conventions from the archaic to Roman times, and is based on a wide corpus of letters that survive on their original material substrates. The bulk of the material is from Egypt, but the study takes account of comparative evidence from other regions of the Graeco-Roman world. Through analysis of developments in the use of letters, variations in formatting conventions, layout and authentication patterns according to the sociocultural background and communicational needs of writers, this book sheds light on changing trends in epistolary practice in Graeco-Roman society over a period of roughly eight hundred years.

This book will appeal to scholars of Epistolography, Papyrology, Palaeography, Classics, Cultural History of the Graeco-Roman World.

1The Development of the Ancient Letter

A general definition of the ancient letter would be a message written on a transferable medium to be carried by a third person to the addressee for the purpose of communication between sender(s) and addressee(s), who are separated by distance.4 Essential elements of a letter are the sender, the addressee, the message, the medium, and the carrier. However, if one looks at the surviving corpus of letters from Graeco-Roman times, one realises that this general definition covers only partly the scope of letter writing. Besides ordinary letters that functioned as messages for the communication between two parties, letters were also used in official life for administrative purposes or as an outer format for many other types of texts, such as contracts or literary treatises.5

The list of types of letters that existed according to their content and function can become long, depending on the degree of detail with which one wishes to analyse the categories. Since Hellenistic and Roman times there have been several treatises on epistolary theory that have tried to distinguish types of letters. Each theorist, according to his perspective and cultural backround, has presented a different number and classification of the types of letters.6 For example Cicero distinguished between two types of letters, public and private, and different styles of letters, of which he mentioned two, the serious and the intimate or humorous.7 Ps.-Demetrius categorised letters according to their style into twenty-one types,8 while a treatise attributed to the rhetor Libanius or Proclus mentions forty-one types according to their style.9 Ps.-Demetrius and ps.-Libanius coincide in some types but differ in others.10 Julius Victor, on the other hand, categorised the letters simply as official or personal.11

In modern times, Sykutris made a typological categorisation of ancient letters according to their content, distinguishing them as private, as literary (recognising that the borders between literary and private letters can be blurred), as forms of public speech, as moral teachings or literature, as pseudepigrapha letters, as official letters.12 In the papyrological database of HGV, which contains records for almost all published letters surviving on their original materials, mainly from Egypt but also from other places in the Graeco-Roman world, letters have been divided into three types: official, business and private (some, especially fragmentary ones, are uncategorised), although as explained below, it may be preferable to divide them into two types, official and private.13

It is clear from the above that the definition of ancient letters is complicated, not only due to the great differentiation between the types of letters, the blurred borders between and the mixing of some categories, but also because of the broad applicability of the epistolary form for other types of texts. The boundaries that distinguish letters from other types of texts are not always clear, a difficulty that was already recognised by ancient epistolary theorists.14 Furthermore, neither the use nor the format of ancient letters was stable, but it developed over time, according to the socio-political context and the communicational needs of each period, parallel to development in the meaning of the Greek term “ἐπιστολή” (epistle, letter) and the gradual establishment of letter writing in the Graeco-Roman world. It has therefore seemed preferable to define ancient letters by giving a brief description of the evolution of the function and applicability of letters, as well as of the sense of the term ἐπιστολή from the earliest surviving evidence in archaic times to the end of the Roman period, by which time the definition of the term “letter” had clearly stabilised.

1.1The Use of Letters in Official Life

Letter writing was used in the ancient Near East long before the earliest attestations of Greek letters.15 In the Greek world the earliest references to letters begin in archaic literature with the letter mentioned in the story of Bellerophontes, which contained a malign message instructing the addressee to kill the letter carrier (Homer, Iliad VI 118). In classical times, and especially in the last half of the fifth century, references to letters in literature multiply in a way that shows that people were familiar with letter writing in their private life. For example, letters were presented in drama to advance the plot, such as the letter of Iphigenia in Euripides’ Iphigenia Taurica, which propels the plot to the recognition between Iphigenia and Orestes. It has been stated that in many cases the letters that appear in archaic and classical literature were used to convey secretive, suspicious, deceptive messages, as in the letter of Phaedra in Euripides Hippolytus, which leads to the death of Hippolytus, and in the letter of Agamemnon in Iphigenia in Aulis, which leads to the death of Iphigenia, suggesting that letter writing may have had negative connotations in classical times.16 A relevant statement of Aeschylus in the Supplices that oral speech guarantees the truth of the words seems to reflect this view.17 Along the same lines is a joke in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae, ταῦτ’ἐγὼ φανερῶς λέγω· τὰ δ’ἄλλα μετὰ τῆς γραμματέως συγγράψομαι (“That is what I announce publicly; as to certain other points I will record them in the secretary’s minutes”).18

It has been suggested that the negative connotations that letters appear to have in sixth and fifth century literature and the respective trust in the oral word may be related to the political conditions that applied in the societies where the literature was created.19 In democratic Athens, where all public matters used to be discussed openly in the assembly, letters with private messages could have been regarded as suspicious. For this reason, in democratic cities like Athens, communication between the city and its delegates, ambassadors or generals, used to be carried out by heralds. Since anything related to public matters did not need to be kept secret from the citizens, messages did not have to be kept secret from the heralds. For official dealings with other states, ambassadors (πρέσβεις) were usually sent, who represented the city as its delegates. Official messages between cities used to be delivered orally by messengers (ἄγγελοι) or heralds (κήρυκες).20 For longer distances or at war campaigns fast-runners were preferred as messengers; these were called day-runners (ἡμεροδρόμοι) or runner-heralds (δρομοκήρυκες).21 The advantage of oral messages was that messages had better chances to survive, if heralds encountered hard conditions or even enemies.22 This is the reason given by Euripides in Iphigenia Taurica when Iphigenia disclosed the content of her letter in order to enhance the chances of its secure delivery.23 Although messengers carried mostly oral messages, they also carried letters if required. The carrier of a letter usually knew the information written in the message and could give additional information and clarification if necessary.

Contrary to Athens, in monarchic and oligarchic regimes letters were common for official communications, because private dealings were part of the way of ruling, and messages needed to be carried for that reason in secrecy.24 There are several examples of letters in the Histories of Herodotus that were delivered secretly; these mostly relate to Persian kings or Greek tyrants and elites.25 Both Herodotus and Xenophon describe the efficiency of the Persian postal system, which enabled the speediest possible delivery of messages in antiquity and enabled the control and administration of the vast Persian Empire.26 The postal system consisted of a network of roads, with post stations on the way, placed at a distance equal to one-day journey-by-horse from each other. The letter carriers (called ἄγγαροι) carried the messages in relay, each carrier being responsible to carry the message for a fixed distance and deliver it to the post station, from where the next letter carrier would carry it further. The relay post system required a trustworthy way to guarantee the authenticity of the messages, and it has been suggested that this was perhaps managed by equipping the royal messengers and envoys with a royal seal.27 In oligarchic Sparta, letters were used in official communications for the transfer of messages between the ephors and generals who had been sent to war campaigns, and they were written with the cryptographic method of the scytale.28

The above views about the use of letters in official life, however, need not imply that letters were not common in the private life of Athens and other cities of the classical Greek world.29 As the evidence of lead letters shows, letter writing must have been common for communications related to private life in the whole archaic and classical Greek world. Although lead is not mentioned as a writing material in any of the classical literary sources, thanks to their durable material, letters on lead sheets have survived from various places of the ancient world, including Athens.30 These letters are representative of the private correspondence that circulated in archaic and classical times, while those written on perishable materials (e.g. wood) have been much more poorly preserved. The content of the surviving letters on lead shows that they were used for private communications, such as sending information, instructions, requests or other messages to relatives, friends or business associates. They were exchanged among ordinary people, including traders, women, slaves.

The linguistic style of the surviving letters on lead sheets and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Development of the Ancient Letter
• 2 Evidence
• 3 Format and Layout
• 4 Authentication
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index