Morello Ruth, Morrison A.D. (Editors). Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography

Oxford University Press. 2007. — 373 p. — ISBN: 0199203954The surviving body of ancient letters offers the reader a stunning variety of material, ranging from the everyday letters preserved among the Oxyrhynchus papyri to imperial rescripts, New Testament Epistles, fictional or pseudepigraphical letters and a wealth of missives on almost every conceivable subject. They offer us a unique insight into ancient practices in the fields of politics, literature, philosophy, medicine and many other areas. This collection presents a series of case studies in ancient letters, asking how each letter writer manipulates the epistolary tradition, why he chose the letter form over any other, and what effect the publication of volumes of collected letters might have had upon a reader's engagement with epistolary works. This volume is the first of its kind on ancient letters in any language, and it brings together both well-established and promising young scholars currently working in the fields of ancient literature, history, philosophy and medicine to engage in a shared debate about this most adaptable and 'interdisciplinary' of genres.Introduction: What is a Letter?
Down among the Documents: Criticism and Papyrus Letters
‘. when who should walk into the room but .’: Epistoliterarity in Cicero, Ad Qfr.
Cicero’s ‘Stomach’: Political Indignation and the Use of Repeated Allusive Expressions in Cicero’s
Correspondence
Didacticism and Epistolarity in Horace’s Epistles
The Importance of Form in Seneca’s Philosophical Letters
Letters of Recommendation and the Rhetoric of Praise
Confidence, Inuidia, and Pliny’s Epistolary Curriculum
The Letter’s the Thing (in Pliny, Book 7)
The Epistula in Ancient Scientific and Technical Literature, with Special Reference to Medicine
Back to Fronto: Doctor and Patient in his Correspondence with an Emperor
Alciphron’s Epistolarity
Better than Speech: Some Advantages of the Letter in the Second Sophistic
Mixed Messages: The Play of Epistolary Codes in Two Late Antique Latin Correspondences
St Patrick and the Art of Allusion
Epistola ad Milites Corotici, translated by David Howlett