INTRODUCTION Owen Hodkinson and Patricia A. Rosenmeyer I

INTRODUCTION

Owen Hodkinson and Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

I. The Study of Epistolary Narratives

Richard Bentley, in his Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themis- tocles, Socrates, Euripides, and Others (London, 1697), took great delight in challenging the origins of what we now call pseudonymous letters. His stated goal was to “pull of the disguise from those little pedants that have stalked about so long in the apparel of heroes”.1 In proving the inauthentic- ity of so many Greek epistolary texts, Bentley unwittingly all but halted our progress in understanding this genre and literary tradition, consigning them to several centuries of scholarly neglect. Yet certainty about the genuine attribution of a text was almost impossible in antiquity: hence the possi- bility of turning a pro t by making and dealing in literary forgeries. Many epistolary texts which are undoubtedly spurious were nevertheless circu- lated, transmitted, and no doubt read as genuine by countless readers and later authors throughout antiquity, and for some kinds of scholarly inquiry, this ought to have mattered far more than the fact of their spuriousness or genuineness. Some three centuries later, after large numbers of non-literary papyrus letters had been unearthed by archaeologists at Oxyrhynchus, another blow was dealt to Greek epistolary studies. The biblical scholar Adolf Deissmann, attempting to validate the authenticity of the epistolary writings of Paul in the New Testament (which he viewed as direct insights into the Realien of ancient society), invented a system that pitted letter (“Brief”) against letter (“Epistel”).2 According to his schema, the former was non-literary, private, and ephemeral, while the latter was literary, sophisticated, and of permanent cultural interest; obviously, for Deissmann’s purposes, one Pauline letter was worth ten of Cicero. While Deissmann’s views are no longer tenable today, at that time his work had a great inuence on classical

1 Bentley 1697: 79. 2 Deissmann 1927. 2 owen hodkinson and patricia a. rosenmeyer scholarship. It took another fty years before a diferent kind of classi catory scheme allowed epistolary writing the exibility it deserved, and literary letters could hold up their heads again in educated circles.3 The letter is one of the most versatile, popular, and historically signi cant forms of writing in Greek and Roman antiquity. Only in the last two decades, however, have many Greek epistolary texts received serious attention from classical scholars.4 Latin letters, especially those of particular interest to historians, have fared rather better than Greek, being widely read over a far longer period; texts such as Ovid’s Heroides have now made a signi cant impression on the scholarly map of antiquity. But the vast and varied corpus of Greek literary letters now needs to be re-examined—or, in many cases, examined properly for the rst time as literary texts. The tradition of Greek letters, from Plato, Epicurus and Hippocrates through to the Christian epistolographers they inuenced, has cumulatively contributed an incalculable amount to the shape of the modern western world. But these letters, and many other less familiar epistolary texts, are usually studied by scholars working within a speci c academic discipline such as philosophy, historiography, or religious studies, and therefore in iso- lation from the larger Greek epistolary tradition. The literary qualities of these collections are often overlooked, despite the fact that they were evi- dently written as literature: they play with intertextuality, display an aware- ness of generic conventions, and exhibit a self-consciousness of their literary nature. Other epistolary narratives, clearly spurious but purporting to be documents in the lives of famous historical characters, have been neglected largely because of their spuriousness, but are no less signi cant in the development of epistolary and ctional literature and their relation to one another.5 The aim of this volume is therefore to redress these various imbalances: to give Greek literary letters—as popular and signi cant contributors to literary history as their Latin counterparts—the attention they are due;

3 The rst to abandon Deissmann’s letter/epistle opposition was Doty 1969. For more recent classi catory schemes, still in the context of biblical studies, see Stirewalt 1993. For a general overview of these classi cations, see Rosenmeyer 2001: 5–9. 4 For monographs, anthologies, and edited collections, see Holzberg 1994; Chemello 1998; Rosenmeyer 2001, 2006 (anthology and translation); Costa 2001 (anthology and translation); Nadjo and Gavoille 2002a, 2002b, 2004; Trapp 2003 (anthology and translation); Jenkins 2006 (including Latin); Morello and Morrison 2007 (including Latin); Muir 2008; Ceccarelli forthcoming. 5 On the potentially damaging efect of focusing on questions of authenticity and the need to look beyond them in the case of the ‘Platonic’ letters, see Wohl 1998.