Papyrological Perspectives on Letter-collections in the Roman Mediterranean
The letter is a fascinatingly polyvalent literary form, which covers a spectrum from an occasional medium of personal or administrative correspondence to richly textured corpus of romantic, religious, or philosophical literature. Consequently, the ancient letter has attracted the attention of classicists, theologians, literary theorists, and others, for centuries. But in 2002, Mary Beard challenged the status quo of epistolary scholarship, when she observed that (early) modern editors of the Ciceronian epistles had altered the order of his letters as they were found in the manuscript tradition, re-arranging them according to a reconstructed chronology of their composition. Beard’s observation helped to initiate a surge of interest in letter-collections with new kinds of questions. Scholars are now devoting attention to Greek and Latin letter collections as an ancient literary genre in its own right, uncovering ancient logics of epistolary arrangement, analyzing the poetics of the collection genre, and investigating their reception in other ancient literature such as novels and polemical writings, among many new modes of inquiry. However, this exciting research has been hindered by the state of the manuscript evidence for ancient letter collections, which are principally attested in medieval manuscripts. The character of the evidence raises questions, not unlike that posed by Beard two decades ago: to what extent can we assume that the medieval parchments attest to epistolary corpora as they were collected and circulated in antiquity?
This paper presents new research that is seeking to address that question head on, through a comprehensive study of the papyrological evidence for ancient letter collections and their reception in antiquity. Drawing on theoretical insights from the field of Book History, this research is asking fundamental questions about how the entanglement of structural and material form of the letter collection as expressed in ancient manuscripts themselves created affordances for their engagement and re-use by ancient readers. This paper begins by enumerating some of the challenges in assembling a corpus of papyri that attest to this literary form, but focuses on the most substantial and interesting examples: P.Oxy. LXXVI 5077 (letters of Epicurus), P.Haun. II 13 (letters of Pythagorean women), and PSI 1285v (Alexander Romance). By documenting the formal features of these papyri and explaining their significance in conversation with recent scholarship on the material genre of documentary letters, on one hand, and literary book rolls, on the other, this paper shows how attention to the material dimensions of ancient manuscripts offers new ways of understanding one of antiquity’s most tantalizing literary genres.
Dr. Gregory Fewster is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Antiquity and Early Christianity at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society in Oslo.