Lettersand Communities
StudiesintheSocio-PoliticalDimensions ofAncientEpistolography
Editedby
PAOLACECCARELLI,LUTZDOERING, THORSTENFÖGEN,ANDINGOGILDENHARD
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Contents
ListofContributors ix
Introduction1 PaolaCeccarelli,LutzDoering,ThorstenFögen,and IngoGildenhard
PARTA:THEORYANDPRACTICEOFEPISTOLARY COMMUNICATION
1.AncientApproachestoLetter-WritingandtheConfiguration ofCommunitiesthroughEpistles43 ThorstenFögen
2.CouriersandConventionsinCicero’sEpistolaryNetwork81 Bianca-JeanetteSchröder
PARTB:CONFIGURATIONSOFPOWERANDEPISTOLARY COMMUNICATION:FROMGREECETOROME
3.Tyrants,Letters,andLegitimacy103 SianLewis
4.PowersinDialogue:TheLettersand diagrammata of MacedonianKingstoLocalCommunities121 ManuelaMari
5.LettersandDecrees:DiplomaticProtocolsintheHellenistic Period147 PaolaCeccarelli
6.Letters,Diplomacy,andtheRomanConquestofGreece185 RobinOsborne
7.ARepublicinLetters:EpistolaryCommunitiesinCicero’ s Correspondence,49–44 BCE 205 IngoGildenhard
PARTC:LETTERSANDCOMMUNITIESINANCIENT JUDAISMANDEARLYCHRISTIANITY
8.TheLiteraryandIdeologicalCharacteroftheLettersinEzra4–7239 SebastianGrätz
9. ‘FromMe,Jerusalem,theHolyCity,toYouAlexandriainEgypt, mySister. ’ (BavliSanhedrin107b):TheRoleofLettersin PowerRelationsbetween ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ inJudaism intheHellenistic,Roman,andEarlyIslamicPeriods253 PhilipAlexander
10.ConfiguringAddresseeCommunitiesinAncientJewish Letters:TheCaseoftheEpistleofBaruch(2Baruch 78–86)271 LutzDoering
11.TheLettersofPaulandtheConstructionofEarlyChristian Networks289 JohnM.G.Barclay
12.TheCommunitiesConfiguredintheLetterofJames303 Karl-WilhelmNiebuhr
PARTD:ENVOI
13.ConversingwiththeAbsent,CorrespondingwiththeDead: FriendshipandPhilosophicalCommunityinSeneca’sLetters325 CatharineEdwards
Letters and Communities: Studies in the SocioPolitical Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography
Paola Ceccarelli, Lutz Doering, Thorsten Fögen, and Ingo Gildenhard
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198804208
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198804208.001.0001
(p.v) Acknowledgements
Paola Ceccarelli, Lutz Doering, Thorsten Fögen, Ingo Gildenhard
The core of the volume has its origins in the conference ‘Configuring Communities: The Socio-Political Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography’ organized by the editors, in the summer of 2011, under the auspices of the Durham Centre for the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East. The editors would like to thank the Department of Classics and Ancient History and the Department of Theology and Religion of Durham University for their support, financial and otherwise. For Paola Ceccarelli, this venture constitutes part of a programme of research on the Seleukid Royal Correspondence, which she has been conducting with the help of the mid-career fellowship scheme of the British Academy (BARDA), whose support she gratefully acknowledges.
For various reasons, it took longer than initially anticipated for this book to materialize. We are all the more grateful for the seemingly limitless patience extended to us along the way by our contributors as well as Oxford University Press, in particular Georgina Leighton and Charlotte Loveridge. We were fortunate in having Timothy Beck as our copy-editor for the press, who worked through a difficult manuscript with exemplary care, and Lisa Eaton as our project manager, who shepherded our volume through the production process with great efficiency. Finally, we would like to express our thanks to Yannick Golchert and Andreas Knöll for their help with the indices.
The Editors (p.vi)
Letters and Communities: Studies in the SocioPolitical Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography
Paola Ceccarelli, Lutz Doering, Thorsten Fögen, and Ingo Gildenhard
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198804208
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198804208.001.0001
(p.ix) List of Contributors
Paola Ceccarelli, Lutz Doering, Thorsten Fögen, Ingo Gildenhard
Philip Alexander FBA, Emeritus Professor of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature, University of Manchester.
John M. G. Barclay, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity, Durham University.
Paola Ceccarelli, Lecturer in Classical Greek History, University College London.
Lutz Doering, Professor of New Testament and Ancient Judaism, Director of the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, Westfälische WilhelmsUniversität Münster.
Catharine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient History, Birkbeck, University of London.
Thorsten Fögen, Associate Professor (Reader) in Classics, Durham University.
Ingo Gildenhard, Reader in Classics and the Classical Tradition, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.
Sebastian Grätz, Professor of Old Testament, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.
Sian Lewis, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, University of St Andrews.
Manuela Mari, Associate Professor of Greek History, Università di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale.
Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr,
(p.x)
Professor of New Testament, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Robin Osborne FBA, Professor of Ancient History, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.
Bianca-Jeanette Schröder, Senior Lecturer in Latin Literature, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.
Letters and Communities: Studies in the SocioPolitical Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography
Paola Ceccarelli, Lutz Doering, Thorsten Fögen, and Ingo Gildenhard
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198804208
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198804208.001.0001
Introduction
Paola Ceccarelli
Lutz Doering
Thorsten Fögen
Ingo Gildenhard
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198804208.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
The Introduction surveys scholarly work on letter-writing in the ancient world. While generally of a high standard and often interdisciplinary in nature, bridging such fields as Near Eastern and Jewish Studies, Biblical Studies, Patristics, and Classics, research on ancient epistolography often marginalizes the role of letters in constituting and sustaining communities of various stripes (political, social, ethnic, religious, philosophical). The introduction explores various reasons for this oversight (the overriding importance given to face-to-face communication in public settings, the apparently ‘private’ nature of corresponding via letters, its low rank in the hierarchy of genres, and the marginal status this aspect of letter-writing has in ancient epistolary theory) before outlining why letters played such a vital role in ancient communitybuilding, with an emphasis on long-distance communication, permanence, and the genre’s ideological flexibility and strong pro-social outlook. The second half offers a narrative of the volume, with summaries of its thirteen case studies.
Keywords: ancient letters,epistolography,communal aspects,communities,history of research
1.Letter-Writing and Communities: General Considerations
Ancient letter-writing has seen a welcome increase in scholarly attention in recent years. A range of editions, edited collections, and individual case studies have done much to enhance our understanding of the formal characteristics, literary qualities, and ideological protocols of the genre.1 A noteworthy feature
of this upsurge in interest is its cross-disciplinary contour, which is very much in line with the multifarious nature of our primary data. In terms of diversity of evidence, arguably no other literary form practised in antiquity rivals epistolography. Letters from the ancient Mediterranean have survived in a wide variety of media across an extraordinarily broad chronological and geographical span. Virtually any material suited to the preservation of writing—such as clay (either soft or hard-burnt), hide, lead, wood tablets, papyrus, stone, or parchment—has been employed as a surface on which to transmit a missive. Epistolary (p.2) endeavours to which we still have access come in all shapes and sizes, from the tablets of third millennium Ebla in Syria to the letters of the Roman garrison at Vindolanda in the North of England (dating to the Roman imperial period), from the lead letters found across the Mediterranean world (and beyond), the earliest of which date to the late sixth century BCE, to Jewish and Greek, Christian and Roman letters and letter collections preserved down the ages by scribes and scholars in charge of manuscript traditions, from Near Eastern archives of missives written on clay to letters preserved through their inscription on stone or the epistolary papyri that have surfaced from the sands of Egypt.2
Given the scope of this material, it is hardly surprising that scholars of diverse disciplinary stripes have been invested in exploring ancient epistolary writing and, equally important, its practitioners. In fact, if dialogue between the disciplines of Theology (broadly speaking) and Classics has had its undeniable ups and downs over the centuries, ‘the letter’ has always constituted a shared common ground of investigation—unsurprisingly (again), given its prominent status not least in the Christian Bible. New Testament scholars, for instance, have routinely employed information about epistolary practices gathered from classical sources, in particular Cicero’s correspondence, to advance arguments about the factors involved in the emergence of the significant parts of Christian Scripture comprised of letters.3 And Patristic scholars share an interest with Classicists in studying Christian letters in the context of late antique epistolography—a period that has bequeathed a particularly rich set of epistolary dossiers.4
(p.3) The strong interest by biblical scholars in Graeco-Roman epistolary practice in part accounts for the fact that letter-writing has been one of the fields where the flow of information between the disciplines (at least in one direction) has been most intense in the past, and the present volume wishes to continue and advance this tradition. It offers a range of case studies on letterwriting in biblical and classical settings, covering Judaism and Christianity, ancient Greece and Rome—though the approach we advocate here is of course equally valid for other cultural configurations of the Near Eastern and ancient Mediterranean worlds. Aiming to build on the available body of crossdisciplinary work, and joining in with other recent developments in the area, it foregrounds an aspect of epistolary communication that arguably has yet to
receive the sustained and systematic attention it deserves, in particular within Classics: the fact that correspondence via letters frequently presupposes—and is designed to reinforce or reshape—the outlook and identity of a specific group or community. There are various reasons why the ‘socio-political dimensions of ancient epistolography’ have not registered more powerfully on the scholarly radar screen so far.
To begin with, scholarship on the political cultures of pre-modern societies likes to insist, emphatically, on the overriding importance of face-to-face communication in public settings.5 This is understandable. Modes of interaction facilitated by the joint presence of participants in a shared topography appeal through a high degree of immediacy, urgency, and vividness—and not just from our point of view. In Republican Rome, it would have been considered rude to rely on letters for important matters unless absolutely necessary: ‘when two powerful men were in the same city, there remained a strong expectation that they would conduct their business face-to-face.’6 Encounters, more or less fraught, between members of ruling elites and the larger populace, the wide range of public rituals and ceremonies practised by pre-modern (p.4) communities to rehearse their collective identities, complemented by unpredictable, but equally important clashes and bust-ups, or the different types of performances bringing together—or opposing—different cultural groups (and outsiders) in a joint experience fascinate not just as sites of community-building (or destruction) but also as vibrant feasts for the senses. Public oratory, for instance, involves sweaty, shoving crowds, speakers holding forth at the top of their lungs in eye contact with their (packed) audience, and a wide range of visual stimuli that support the aural soundtrack—gestures, facial expressions, or body language more generally.7 Against the synaesthetic intensity of touch, smell, sound, and sight, as well as the various forms of verbal and non-verbal interactions that unfold in the crammed civic spaces of an ancient city-state, the writing and perusal of letters for those who are unable to be present cannot help, it seems, but pale in significance and appeal. From this point of view, the exchange of written missives might well look like an anaemic mode of discourse, a deracinated surrogate to the sensory thrills that constitute the drama of life.8 It is, at any rate, a deferred and deferring medium of communication that struggles to compensate for the benefits of modes of interaction in which all participants are co-present.9
Secondly, precisely because epistolary communication tends to unfold outside the public limelight, already in antiquity it acquired, in certain quarters, a shady reputation as an anti-popular mode of discourse. Its seemingly secretive nature makes it the perfect medium for crooked power brokers such as tyrants, keen to wield influence by backstage operations, inaccessible to prying eyes and the wider public. If some formats, like the city-decree, can be said to embody a communal will and, in their collective authorship, to enact democratic values and procedures, the letter is either issued by a single author or, if corporate, by
a group of people whose precise power relations often remain obscure. Similarly, the modes of transmission of a letter enable—even though they by no means require—exchanges that bypass the scrutiny of the citizen body or other forms of community from which it claims to have arisen. Unsurprisingly, letters, early on in their history, attracted disagreeable connotations as ‘the tyrant’s writ’.10
Thirdly, compared with other forms of literary expression, letters seem a rather unpromising medium for the constitution and celebration of communal identities —in comparison and contrast to epic or tragedy in verse or various forms of historiography in prose (including, in the case of Christianity, (p.5) biography, or, in the case of Rome’s Republican aristocracy, autobiography), which have long been recognized as important media for the ways in which civic or religious communities (or distinct individuals within them) defined themselves, negotiated their place in the world, and moulded or manufactured memories of their past.11 In addition to the social dynamics that inform canon formation or, more generally, transmission, the commemorative power and longevity of these forms of historical writing resided not just in their (imaginary) documentary value but also to a significant degree in the artistic quality of the verbal artefacts, including the prestige of the genre and the talent of the authors. Within the hierarchies of discursive forms, letters, in their quotidian preoccupations and apparent occasionality, tend to rank rather low in terms of aesthetic value and factual import, even when they aspire to literary distinction and treat matters of public significance: witness, for instance, Pliny the Younger’s self-derogatory—if notoriously disingenuous—advertisement of his edited epistolary output as seemingly requiring less diligence and effort than the composition of historiography.12
And finally, ‘community-building’ is a function of letters that barely registers in ancient epistolary theory. Ancient definitions of letter-writing tend to conceive of the activity as a dialogue between a (single) author and a (single) addressee, who are often imagined as sharing in the exchange of intimate sentiments across distances of space and time.13 Letters are perceived to be for individuals corresponding with one another, for pairs rather than groups, even if a wider audience is of course often part of the picture. This model underwrites iconic notions evoked in discussions of epistolography, such as the letter representing an ‘image of the soul of the author’ in intimate long-distance conversation with a close friend or acquaintance and as such constituting ‘one half of a dialogue’. Many of the ‘contextual and formal characteristics’ that make ‘the letter’ a recognizable genre thus also ensure that, from certain perspectives, its cultural rank and standing tends to be relatively modest—both among ancient practitioners and modern scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds.14
(p.6) Yet however justified such views on letter-writing may be in particular instances, they tend to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world. Letters frequently presuppose or
were explicitly designed to reinforce communal identities—or, indeed, to constitute them in the first place. Three characteristics in particular made it possible for the genre to make distinctive contributions to the mechanisms that held specific groups or entire cultures together. Most obviously, letters benefit from the inbuilt permanence of written discourse (in contrast to the ephemeral nature of the spoken word). This permanence in turn enabled letters to help facilitate the extension of communities beyond those who are present—both in terms of space, via long-distance communication, and time, by rendering the community constituted in a historical moment accessible to future generations— or, indeed, enabling retrospective ‘dialogue’ with the dead.15 A third, perhaps less obvious, factor is the letter’s flexible ‘generic ideology’. All three of these features are worth a more detailed look.
(i)Permanence
To begin with, compared with written communication, face-to-face encounters tend to be ephemeral. Shrewd operators knew how to tap into the potential of the written word for greater permanence, which also ensured continuous resonance—even in a genre often concerned with matters of merely quotidian significance such as letters.16 Late Republican Rome (as well as the current state of debate over the nature of its political system) illustrates the point at issue very well. In line with the preference for the immediate and the oral outlined above, recent scholarship has tended to privilege interactive scenarios and institutions in discussing the degree of popular participation in Republican politics, such as the constitutional place and function of different types of citizen-assemblies, public oratory as a medium of communication between the (ruling) elite and the (sovereign) people, voting rights, and election platforms.17
But the ‘written word’ seems poised for a comeback, even where the contio is concerned—a type of non-voting assembly during which speakers canvassed the opinion of the populace on matters of concern to the wider community, which Cicero hailed as the (p.7) maxima scaena (‘the greatest stage’) of the orator, and hence the quintessential form of face-to-face politics.18 As Henrik Mouritsen has now suggested, the dissemination of speeches delivered at contiones in written form after the actual performance made a significant contribution to the backstage operations of power—over and above the occasion of the actual speech, albeit of course to a smaller circle of recipients.19 A similar case can be made for letters, especially if one considers the semi-public status of what are prima facie ‘private’ pieces of correspondence. While the letter of course often is ‘a personal medium that might become an accidentally public one’, it is frequently advisable to invert the emphasis—treating the letters as a personal medium that could be knowingly used as a public one.20 Cicero, for instance, blasts Marc Antony for broadcasting a sensitive piece of correspondence meant for private consumption (such nefarious disrespect for civilized values, he argues, cannot help but destroy long-distance conversation among friends and thereby entail a lapse back into barbarism); but he would presumably have been
rather aggrieved if his lengthy apologia for his political conduct after his return from exile, when he got his arm twisted into supporting Caesar and various of his (more loathsome) creatures, sent in the form of a letter to Lentulus, had reached no one else beside the explicit addressee.21 The letter advocates Cicero’s past, present, and future vision of Rome’s civic community, holding not least those to account who self-identify as ‘the good’ (boni), many of whom (he feels) shamelessly betrayed him in the wake of his consulship over his ill-advised execution of the Catilinarian conspirators—and thus providing a commentary, in equal measures auto-apologetic and accusatory, on his pro-Caesarian oratory during this period. In this particular case, the benefits of outlining his position in a letter turned out to be twofold. We may assume wider dissemination of copies close to the time of writing; and the archived version then also found its ways into the post mortem publication of Cicero’s correspondence, where the smart choices of the (unknown) editor enhance its impact within the first volume of the Ad familiares (or indeed the collection as a whole).22 (p.8) Likewise, the practice of monumentalizing official letters in stone endowed specific instances of long-distance communication relevant for communal life with a special permanence: they became public sites of memory, for the purpose of symbolic display and future reference. A ready example from the Hellenistic period is the epigraphical recording and publication of royal pieces of correspondence that granted special privileges to a given city-state, broadcasting the dynamics of civic life and international diplomacy to both members of the community and visitors from abroad.23
In all this, it is furthermore important to stress the fluidity between ‘spoken’ and ‘written’. Just as speeches intended initially for oral delivery could end up circulating in written form, so a letter could easily form the basis for an oral performance by means of a public reading—with the letter-writer almost ‘speaking’ vicariously to a specific group or community across distances of time and space. Ancient authors record many telling instances of public readings of letters as communal events. Thucydides, for instance, speculates that the general Nicias, off on his ill-fated campaign in Sicily that helped doom the Athenians in their war against Sparta, hoped to be able to speak directly to his fellow-citizens via a letter, to be read out in a public assembly.24 The political culture of Republican Rome (with pro-magistrates sending detailed accounts of their provincial administration to the capital in the form of official letters to be read out in the senate) offers further examples of this phenomenon—as does ancient Judaism and especially early Christianity, where letters initially dispatched to communities for communal reading and sharing with other communities eventually turned into major parts of Christian Scripture. Indeed, one of the reasons for the success of the Christian (and perhaps already Jewish) letter was that it was read in front of the community gathered, which allowed for some of the sensory aspects mentioned above, a predominantly ‘aural’ mode of reception, and interaction among members of the community.25 The holy kiss,
for instance, seems to have been extended during such meetings, and the letters of Paul and others encourage the recipients to perform it.26 Generally speaking, the public rendition of a letter, especially, but not only, if it was addressed not to a specific individual but a wider community, could provide the focal point of a collective experience. All this is not to diminish in any way the importance of non-literary (and hence non-epistolary) modes of interaction or the power of conversation, gossip, (p.9) hearsay, and rumour for communal experiences and the formation of group identities.27 Rather, we would like to suggest that it is attention to the symbiotic relation of spoken—whether formal (oratory) or informal (conversation)—and written modes of communication (such as letters) and their inbuilt potential for both oral activation (including the possibility that those writing letters may well have composed them with their eventual performance in mind) and longevity that best captures the rhetorical dynamics underwriting socio-political or communal life in the ancient world.
(ii)Long-Distance Communication
Secondly, the apparent primacy of the ‘face-to-face’ should not obfuscate the crucial role played by long-distance communication in the far-flung cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, quite irrespective of what kind of regime was in charge. The writing of letters was not just the preserve of autocrats; aristocracies and democracies, too, had to avail themselves of missives in the exercise of power. More generally, in any scenario in which a group or community relied on the flow of information between a centre and a periphery the genre takes on a special importance. Ancient Rome again offers a case in point. Once the Roman res publica started to assert itself as an imperial presence in Italy and beyond, (pro-)magistrates entertained a busy dialogue with the capital by means of official and personal correspondence, addressed to the magistrates and the senate as well as networks of friends and acquaintances. Dispatches from the margins constituted a crucial (if frequently neglected) dimension of the political culture of Republican Rome, helping absent power brokers to retain a foothold—or, as was the case with Caesar, a stranglehold—on political proceedings in the capital. As John Henderson and Josiah Osgood have shown, the exercise of power in the capital during the 50s BCE happened to a significant degree through the exchange of letters that travelled between Gaul and Rome.28 As we have just had occasion to note, scholars debating the nature of the political system of the Roman Republic focus primarily (at times even exclusively) on public oratory in live performance, in particular the contio. Yet during the years of the first triumvirate, Caesar’s penmanship, and the (utilitarian) alliances and (coercive) loyalties it helped to sustain, arguably held as much importance for the future of the commonwealth as the figures delivering public speeches from Cicero’s maxima scaena. Letters (p.10) were an important part and indispensable medium for the flow of goods, services, and oral and written speech-acts (instructions and orders, promises, and threats) that enabled Caesar to dominate political proceedings from afar. Mutatis
mutandis, the letter retained its vital importance in imperial times. Fergus Millar portrayed the emperor in the Roman world as a keen correspondent, who supplemented the holding of audience in the capital with strategic travel and the busy exchange of letters that helped to ensure that all parts of the empire were able to acquire a sense of participation in the whole.29
What is the case in large-scale territorial configurations of power is equally true of communities that lived, moved, and proliferated within the ancient empires. Jews from Jerusalem reached out to various areas of the Jewish Diaspora by means of letters.30 And the explosion of geopolitical horizons in the wake of Alexander the Great opened up much-increased opportunities for communitybuilding beyond the confines of the individual city-state—just as much as the ecumenical reach of Roman power in the imperial period and its complex infrastructure aided in the cultivation of supra-regional networks held together by long-distance communication. Two communities, one philosophical, the other religious, that thrived in these conditions not least by relying on the letter as a privileged mode of communication, were Epicurus (and his school) and Christianity.
While earlier philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, wrote letters, Epicurus’ (surviving?) letters ‘are more numerous than the letters of any other ancient philosopher save Seneca’.31 Indeed, the Epicureans can be thought of as being, in a special sense, ‘epistolary’.32 In part, of course, the prominence of letters in Epicureanism owes itself to accidents of transmission. While Epicurus’ large number of treatises have all but vanished, three of his doctrinal letters, addressed to, respectively, Herodotus (covering physics), Pythocles (dealing with astronomy and meteorology), and Menoeceus (discussing ethics), have come down to us as part of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 33 But, as Klauck notes, we are here only dealing with the (p.11) tip of the iceberg: ‘The three main doctrinal letters of Epicurus preserved by Diogenes Laertius are part of a larger correspondence with individuals and groups…. After the death of their master, Epicurus’s pupils continued this practice of lively correspondence.’34 Indeed, further passages in Diogenes and other sources, such as the inscription set up by Diogenes’ namesake in Oenoanda, portray an Epicurus merrily corresponding with all and sundry, including the odd (particularly obedient) child, about matters ranging from the personal and autobiographical to the philosophical.35 Other members of his school followed suit.36 In antiquity, reactions to Epicurus’ correspondence took on different forms: some, like Diogenes of Oenoanda, immortalized bits and pieces thereof in stone; others cited supposedly incriminating passages as evidence for Epicurus’ depraved character.37 The significant amount of correspondence, both mundane and philosophical, that underwrote the daily operations of Epicurean communities across the Mediterranean resembles the role of letters in early Christianity: the apostle Paul in particular initiated a network with and between communities, in which long-distance communication between Asia, Greece, and
finally Rome helped to foster a shared identity, and which subsequent generations of Christian writers extended and made use of for their purposes.38 The epistolary aspects of Epicurus’ philosophy and his fellowship constitute an intriguing precedent and parallel from the classical world for the status and function of letter-writing in early Christian communities, and scholars have increasingly started to explore the ‘medial’ aspects of Epicureanism as part of the religious context of early Christianity.39
(p.12) Generally speaking, then, religious, philosophical, and other communities that flourished across the ancient Mediterranean relied on epistolary writing as a medium of communication in addition to the ‘simultaneous interactions’ among co-present individuals and groups. There is of course no need to play off written missives against face-to-face encounters: the two modes of interactions clearly complemented one another, not least in the fashioning and cultivation of shared identities. The challenge rather consists in calibrating their relative (and varying) importance, giving each its due.
(iii)Generic Ideology
A third—and related—point is the extraordinary ideological flexibility of the genre, which derives at least in part from its rather undemanding formal requirements. In the most basic sense, a letter is a written message from an author (singular or collective) to an addressee (again singular or collective), marked by opening and closing greeting formulae. Indeed, whether the letter constitutes a genre in the narrow sense of (German) ‘Gattung’ or ‘Textsorte’ is a matter of debate. In German textual linguistics, for instance, an influential position holds that it should be thought of as something further up the classificatory scale: not a ‘Gattung’ but a ‘form of communication’ (Kommunikationsform) or a ‘basic text type’ (Grundtextsorte), akin, for example, to the (face-to-face) dialogue or the (oral or written) monologue.40 Conversely, according to Jacques Derrida, the letter ‘is not a genre but all genres, literature itself’.41 For our purposes, it makes sense to continue to think of the letter as a ‘genre’ in the suitably wide sense this term has in English, with due recognition of ambiguous cases or a ‘spectrum’ with grey zones.42 Arguably, it is precisely the absence of demanding formal requirements, combined with a potentially attractive set of ideological connotations, that has turned the genre into such (p.13) an appealing matrix for literary experimentation and community-building: the absence of strong formal prerequisites makes it easy to package pretty much anything in the form of a letter through the simple convenience of adding formulaic greetings and signoffs, enabling imaginative authors to claim epistolary affiliations for works that otherwise do not look like epistles at all. The Apocalypse of John, for instance, which styles itself as a ‘revelation of Jesus Christ’ and as containing ‘words of prophecy’ (Rev 1:1–3), nevertheless presents itself as a letter due to its epistolary frame at Rev 1:4–5; 22:21.43 The same is true of a number of early martyrdom texts, such as the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the Martyrium
Lugdunense, which are cast in the form of letters.44 Indeed, one could argue that there is more generally a close connection between epistolary writing and narrative, whether fictional or historical.45 And Cicero’s De officiis is, in generic terms, a massive ‘philosophical-treatise-turned-letter-to-his-son’ on account of the epistolary formulae at the beginning and the end. Instead of rejecting such works from the epistolary fold, it rather behoves us to enquire into the benefits that the respective authors thought would accrue from opting for these particular generic affiliations.46 In the case of Cicero’s De officiis, the epistolary format helps to endow the treatise with a venerable pedigree, invoking Cato the Elder’s practice of instructing his senatorial peers in matters of public morality in the guise of letters addressed to his son and thereby producing a fitting generic matrix for Cicero’s rhetorical agenda in the work, namely to induct the next generation of Rome’s political elite into his unorthodox approach to civic ethics.47 The inherently pro-social nature of epistolary discourse expects author and addressee to find common ground and hence arguably softens the didactic strictures that make other genres employed in pedagogic settings, such as straightforward lecturing or probing cross-examination, less socially palatable; letters thus form an ideal medium for teaching and preaching, while reaching out to a wider community.
Other features further enhance the letter’s remarkable ideological fluidity. As a substitute for oral discourse, it tends towards the informal and ephemeral; but as written discourse, it benefits from the archival potential inherent in all writing, offering one form of what Niklas Luhmann has called ‘compact communication’: unlike an oral statement, a visual or verbal artefact can (p.14) undergo repeated (in principle countless) instances of engagement.48 This tension (or coincidence) between the accidental and the permanent, or, put slightly differently, the informal and the formal, opens up a spectrum of possibilities that authors could exploit for their rhetorical and wider sociopolitical agendas. Epistolary postures range from studied casualness to a tactical investment in the (seemingly accidental) permanence of the ephemeral to the deliberate monumentalization of letters as literature—and many more besides, including diverse variants of strategic disingenuity, such as emphasizing the reputation of epistolary discourse as easy-going and uninhibited to articulate issues of monumental import. The conceit that a letter offers a (more or less authentic) record of the sender’s thoughts and actions also generates significant affinities with other genres focused on (historical) lives, such as biography and autobiography.49 And, as Robin Osborne argues in this volume (Chapter6), letters tend to contain discursive explanations of, or background to, the requests or decisions that they convey and, in doing so, make an effort to persuade— rather than simply state what is the case or issue a command to be obeyed and not to be questioned. They are therefore, in Philip Alexander’s formulation, a ‘soft medium’ when compared to a ‘blunt decree’ or a ‘curt order’. Any instructions, requests, or pieces of advice sent through a letter thus tend to be
embedded within a rhetorical-persuasive matrix, which renders the letter a mode of discourse well suited for exercising influence in a winning way, either because the sender does not have any coercive force or because he wishes to project civic or diplomatic virtues. Given the emphasis on interactivity, the letter also proves to be an ideal medium for engaging pedagogy, even—or especially— in those contexts where the contents of the instruction consisted of dogma, not to be questioned.
The status of epistolary writing in Epicureanism is again a case in point of how the features that distinguish epistolary communication more generally can be employed to advance a specific agenda, in this case sectarian communitybuilding. Beyond the utilitarian value of the letter as a means of keeping in touch with fellow practitioners and proselytizing among the non-initiate, there are a number of suggestive affinities between the doctrinal content of Epicureanism and epistolary ideology that make the letter a genre seemingly tailor-made for Epicurus’ philosophy, such as the emphasis on the social interaction between the like-minded, the cultivation of friendship grounded in shared intellectual commitments (both through communal (p.15) living and philosophical dialogue by means of conversation and the exchange of letters), and membership in a wider community of ‘initiates’, also across spatial and temporal distances.50 The ability to combine exclusivity (the letter as a privileged mode of correspondence between select individuals) with demotic appeal (in terms of stylistic registers both epistolary and Epicurean discourse show frequent affinities with everyday speech) and intimacy with doctrinal rigour made letters an ideal tool for teaching, long before the Open University perfected flexible distance learning: ‘En effet, parmi les types d’écrits les mieux adaptés aux besoins philosophiques d’Épicure, la lettre apparaît comme un lieu privilégié, sans doute en vertu de ses extraordinaires pouvoirs de communiquer à distance, tant parce qu’elle favorise l’intimité des échanges que parce qu’elle permet de rappeler les exigences doctrinales rigoureuses propres à l’enseignement d’Épicure.’51 These features (again) render the comparison between Epicurean and early Christian epistolary practices an illuminating exercise, both because of telling differences and striking similarities—not least the fact that pieces of seemingly quotidian correspondence over time acquired the status of ‘scripture’.52
Another complex and arresting illustration of how a gifted correspondent could employ epistolography and its various ideological registers to define and immortalize both himself and the political community of which he was a part comes in the form of the letters of Pliny the Younger. No one today succumbs anymore to the ‘temptation to treat the Letters as the more or less artless reportage of a plain man, an ordinary senator’s lightly polished testimony to the social and moral, literary and political preoccupations of his age’.53 His high degree of literary sophistication is nowadays a given—from intratextual architectures to allusive dialogue not just with epistolary predecessors (Cicero, Horace, Seneca) but a wide range of other authors as (p.16) well (Catullus,
Quintilian, Tacitus), from thematic patterns that criss-cross the collection and endow it with unity and coherence to ‘the whole apparatus of self-commentary that impels’ the letters.54 But Pliny put his literary artistry also at the service of a socio-political agenda tailor-made for the Rome of Nerva and Trajan.55 Appearances to the contrary, he turned the letter into a rival of such grand public genres as epic, oratory, and historiography.56 The choice of epistolography as his preferred medium of literary (and socio-political) selfpromotion has everything to do with the wider socio-political context. In Roy Gibson’s words:
Pliny, in his own eyes above all, is operating in an ethical world ‘in which the most legitimate measure of his worth is whether he fills an appropriate place in the order of the community’. Unlike some of his forerunners and contemporaries, Pliny displays a decided preference for cultivating his standing over the cultivation of his inner self. Rather than ‘turning inwards’ to interrogate and improve his character, Pliny adheres to a more old-fashioned community-based system of ethics, where all actions, even ‘private’ ones, are given value by their public reception.57
More specifically, his epistolary habit allowed him to refashion the senatorial elite (and his own place within it) under changed political circumstances. As Johannes Geisthardt has shown, Pliny uses the informality of the genre and its setting in the sphere of otium (frequently conceived by writers of the Trajanic age as a site for the articulation of honest feelings and (literary) truth-telling, removed as it was from the exigencies of ritual occasions such as public thanksgiving) to chronicle his revisions of the Panegyricus delivered in praise of Trajan —thereby endowing the edited, written version of the speech with an epistolary commentary that enhances the oration’s authenticity as well as the author’s personal integrity, an effect not unlike the one Cicero was trying to achieve with his letter to Lentulus (Fam. 1.9), which we discussed above.58 In turn, the deceptive contingency of epistolary conversation facilitates moments (p.17) of striking self-promotion. In one reading of the opening letter of Book 2, which is devoted to an appreciation of the recently deceased Verginius Rufus, Pliny broadcasts his support for the current regime of Nerva and Trajan, grounded as it is in the meritocratic succession principle of ‘adoption of the best’—while subtly implying that, in such a world, he too would qualify for the top job. He does so very subtly, by self-identifying as the quasi-adoptive son of Verginius Rufus, whose greatest distinctions included refusal to pursue the emperorship back in 68 (he remained loyal to Galba after putting down the insurrection of Vindex).59 This kind of counterfactual megalomania (if Rufus had accepted the emperorship, his ‘adoptive’ son Pliny would now be on the throne…) seems to require epistolary modesty for its oblique articulation. Pliny also dedicates many letters in his collection to commentary on recent political events, including trials that targeted senators supportive of Domitian’s regime, thereby using his medium for the ethical vetting of the aristocratic elite after a regime change that
required painful shifts and reconfigurations in senatorial loyalties and alliances.60 The example of Pliny shows a correspondent playing with the—often contrapuntal—ideological registers of the genre, using its potential as a privileged site of personal truths to authenticate sentiments designed for consumption by a wider public seemingly invited to ‘eavesdrop’ on privileged or exclusive information and thereby intervening into and helping to shape the moral discourse of Rome’s ruling elite that we need to imagine as part of the wider audience.61
The inbuilt permanence, the ability to bridge spatial and temporal distance, and the pro-social outlook of its generic ideology ensured that epistolary discourse thrived within the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. To unlock the ‘communal’ dimension of letter-writing in antiquity, the following heuristic angles call out for investigation (and will receive discussion in one or more of our case studies):
The identity-politics of ethopoeia and prosopopoeia: how does the authorial selffashioning of letter-writers interact with their communities of readers, which may be real or imagined, and situated in the past, present, or future? This question flags up the complex socio-political dimensions that are implied by such categories as ‘real’, ‘explicit’, or ‘implied’ author and (especially) (p.18) addressee—in other words, the ways in which the formal aspects of the genre interlock with processes of group formation and identity construction, to which the letter contributes by imagining and connecting communities, above and beyond its function as a medium of communication between alter and ego
Corporate authorship and collective addressees: as a rule of thumb, in classical and Hellenistic Greece, individuals (such as kings or tyrants) write letters, whereas communities opt for a different type of genre to articulate their collective view (such as the decree), even when responding to a letter. But there are notable exceptions, especially in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Likewise, letters often have one explicit addressee, but he or she is often just singled out for strategic reasons against the background of a larger community of (frequently more important) implied recipients. And the paradox of the ‘offene Brief’, a letter addressed to all and sundry, is a phenomenon with a history from antiquity to the present.62
Letters as means of connecting members of a community that are geographically dispersed or separated in time: how are (circular) letters used to exercise territorial control by imperial powers? What is their role in sustaining lines of communication between a centre and a periphery (such as the land of Israel and Jews in the Diaspora)? How do philosophical treatises in epistolary form engage future generations as part of a trans-historical community of (like-minded) readers?
Letters and other modes of (long-distance) communication: do letters construct communities differently (and different kinds of communities) from other genres (such as the city-decree)? And what kind of difference in terms of communityconstruction does it make if one sends a messenger with an oral message and one who (also) carries a letter? What is the relative importance of letters in building and sustaining a given community—vis-à-vis other (oral) modes of communication?
Community and confidentiality: how do ‘communal’ letters position themselves vis-à-vis epistolary communication that emphasizes the exclusive and confidential nature of letter-writing? How do authors deal with the fact of different audiences, some intended, others clearly undesirable, as is the case if a letter gets intercepted and receives wider circulation than planned? How do issues of confidentiality (and the possibility of a breach thereof) affect the sociopolitical dimension of the text?
The presence of a ‘community-focus’ in ancient epistolary theory: how do handbooks, and reflections in letters, address the ‘communal’ aspects of epistolary communication, i.e. to what extent do the handbooks cover letterwriting beyond the private letter?
(p.19) In the following chapters, the communities that come into view are varied: political, of course, but also more broadly cultural or religious, as well as philosophical. As this variety suggests, the notion (or notions) of ‘community’ presupposed in this volume is rather broad—and thus very much in line with the definitions that the term has attracted over the years: they are legion, and impossible to survey here. At its core, a community refers to a unit of people who have something in common, and the volume explores the widest possible range, from tight-knit groups tied together by shared commitments to a set of beliefs or cultural practices to large political communities and ‘virtual communities’, a concept that has risen to prominence in recent years in the context of the internet, but is equally applicable to the trans-historical communities arguably formed by readers or students of the same texts or philosophical masters. Some may object to the deracination of a term that could be taken to imply a high degree of cohesion and shared values;63 but the ability of the noun to attract attributes of significant abstraction—yielding such entities as civic community, national community, digital communities, or a wide range of other notional or ‘imagined’ communities—encourages an un- or under-theorized use of the term in the present volume.64
In line with the ecumenical outlook of the letter as a genre, the volume contains case studies from four key cultural configurations in the ancient world: Judaism, Christianity, Greece, and Rome. For the sake of coherence (and other reasons), it proved impracticable to extend the range of the volume geographically and chronologically beyond Judaea into the Near East and beyond the Roman
imperial period into late antiquity. But as goes without saying, our self-imposed remits are to some extent arbitrary, and we note interesting affinities between our project and current research on older, further-away, and later texts and cultural configurations, including those of ancient Mesopotamia, late antiquity, Byzantium, and the early Middle Ages.65
(p.20) 2.The Narrative of the Volume
The two chapters of our opening Section A, ‘Theory and Practice of Epistolary Communication’, set the stage by exploring some of the wider parameters that defined the exchange of letters in antiquity, with particular attention to how ideological protocols and contextual exigencies impacted on the ability of the genre to establish and sustain interpersonal relationships and group identities.
While it would be unwise to suppose that ancient theorizing on any phenomenon captures ancient practice (or, indeed, ought to delimit modern research), the reflective engagement with letters as a medium of communication or literary genre that have come down to us from antiquity yield important insights into the body of shared cultural knowledge that senders and recipients of letters intuitively relied upon in epistolary dialogue.66 As Thorsten Fögen points out in Chapter1, ‘Ancient Approaches to Letter-Writing and the Configuration of Communities through Epistles’, ancient reflections on epistolography include both treatments of the genre in instructional handbooks and the meta-generic statements that letter-writers routinely embed in their correspondence. Despite certain differences of emphasis and comprehensiveness, there is a significant degree of overlap between the characteristics of their chosen medium that practitioners of the genre such as Seneca or Pliny the Younger enact or single out and the theoretical reflections on letter-writing that we find in rhetorical treatises and letter-writing manuals. In both types of sources, what one might call the social dimension of style tends to register as a primary concern: in order for the letter to fulfil its purpose, namely to generate a special bond between sender and recipient, the chosen idiolect has to be ‘appropriate’ (πρέπον/aptum) to the interpersonal relationship and its specific circumstances and exigencies. In an attempt to enact or encourage at least a semblance of ‘togetherness’, both practitioners and manuals repeatedly compare letters to oral conversations (dialogues), although often in combination with the caveat that the letter as a written form requires a higher degree of stylization. (Pointedly speaking, the ideal letter is characterized by its ‘artistic artlessness’.)67 A shared commitment to the genre’s stylistic values establishes a communion between sender and addressee that is further enhanced through the quasi-dramatic elements that form part of epistolary communication—not least the expectation that the letterwriter adjust the rhetorical projection of his character to his recipient. In other words, it is essential for the sender to take into consideration how he comes across as a person, ideally aligning himself with the outlook of his addressee. Moreover, epistolographers are (p.21) expected to compensate for the lack of synchronic immediacy by means of a vivid and coherent portrayal of their
character, including a convincing account of their actions and thoughts. This usually means for the writer to present an ‘image of his soul’, and to do so in such a way that the addressee will get the impression of being the writer’s soulmate. Both fictional and non-fictional letters from the ancient world thus suggest that the genre serves to establish and document special relationships, as writers tend to emphasize their close links with their addressees and to indicate that both belong to the same or at least a rather similar group of individuals who share certain values and beliefs. From this point of view, the norms and expectations of the genre encourage practitioners to assert a higher degree of personal affinity, sociability, and intellectual kinship between correspondents than may actually often have been the case, yet thereby perhaps further the realization (or at least approximation) in practice of what epistolary discourse frequently recommends to construct—or presupposes—in theory.
In Chapter2, ‘Couriers and Conventions in Cicero’s Epistolary Network’, BiancaJeanette Schröder shifts the focus from composition to delivery—or, rather, how the special exigencies of sending letters in the ancient world impacted on their composition and, more generally, the overall dynamics of epistolary networking. The risks involved in communicating via letters—delays or irregularities in delivery, damage in the process of transmission, loss of letters owing to accident or interception, breaches in confidentiality by nosy third parties getting unauthorized access to the correspondence—have stayed the same throughout the centuries, but the absence of a centrally organized postal service compounded the problems across the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. Letter-writers had a range of precautionary measures at their disposal, to which they could resort to manage risk, including self-censorship, the use of multiple copies and couriers, coded discourse, or retention of an archived master-copy,68 yet as a rule of thumb many correspondents will have adopted the same approach as Cicero seems to have done: ‘if something needs to be kept secret, best to wait for a reliable messenger; if the matter is too delicate, best not to entrust the subject matter to a letter at all.’69 Reflection on the vagaries of transmission forms part of the thematic economy of epistolary discourse: it is a distinctive feature of the genre and has been well documented and discussed in the secondary literature. Schröder’s chapter builds on this work, but takes it a significant step further. Using Cicero’s letters as case study, she shows that key aspects ancient letter-writers (p.22) had to bear in mind to achieve efficacious communication were not limited to proper ethopoeia, social and stylistic decorum, and cultivation of the addressee, but also included consideration of how the letter would reach the intended recipient—which inevitably involved a person who carried the letter.70 Without the benefit of a postal service that guarantees secure and confidential delivery, this intermediary figure takes on paramount importance, as an ineluctable variable that all writers needed to reckon with when composing their missives. As persons in their own right, the carriers presented a risk as well as a chance. Handing over potentially sensitive
information required judgement calls on the character of the carriers—their curiosity, their reliability, their degree of loyalty. If curious, they might read the letters entrusted to them and become partial to confidential data; if negligent, they might lose the dispatches in their care before delivery; if loyal, they could be instructed to supply the recipient orally with additional information, in support of the message contained within the letter (adding comments that the author may not have wished to commit to writing); if disloyal, such comments could of course also compromise the persuasive purpose of the missive. Cicero’s letters illustrate the extent to which at least one epistolary corpus that has survived from antiquity was profoundly influenced by the mode of transmission. Generalizing, Schröder argues that the impact of the carrier was pervasive, adding an extra, if often overlooked, social dimension to ancient correspondence that went quite unrecognized in the ‘dyadic focus’ of ancient theorizing on letters, but affected the contents of dispatches and hence also the genre’s potential for networking and community-building, from the moment of composition to the moment of delivery. If epistolary discourse likes to cultivate the conceit that dialogue by means of letters may aspire to something akin to an intimate conversation between friends who just happen to be apart, this generic ideal thus threatens (or, perhaps, is designed) to obfuscate a more complex reality. This ‘systemic deficiency’, however, albeit problematic, also ensures that ancient letter-writing is almost by definition communal in outlook: a third party is inevitably written into the fabric of the text, and at the very least as an absent presence that defines the terms of the sayable.
The same potential of letters to link individuals and communities in more or less open dialogue also defines the place and function of letters within the political cultures of the ancient world. The chapters in Section B, ‘Configurations of Power and Epistolary Communication: From Greece to Rome’, consider the role of letters in political communities and intercultural communication, with a range of case studies from the Greek and Roman worlds, in a chronological sweep that takes us from the fifth century BCE down to the end of the Hellenistic age (conventionally dated to 31 BCE).
(p.23) In Chapter3, ‘Tyrants, Letters, and Legitimacy’, Sian Lewis explores the part played by letters in how tyrants in fifth- and fourth-century Greece exercised power, with a specific emphasis on processes of decision-making and the role of state institutions that embedded the ruler within the wider political community, in an effort to go beyond such bland statements that Person X ‘made himself a tyrant’ or ‘established himself in power’. The focus on tyrants in the fifth and fourth century targets an interesting intermediary period in the relationship between power and writing in the ancient Greek world. For the earlier centuries, Herodotus, in his Histories, draws a clear distinction between the ways in which tyrannical rulers on the one hand and city-states on the other employ writing in their politics. As Deborah Steiner’s The Tyrant’s Writ or Leslie Kurke’s Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold have shown, whereas rulers use diverse
forms of writing to distance themselves from their subjects and conceal themselves behind signs, the quintessential mode of communication cultivated in the city-state is public and transparent debate in the context of the citizen assembly—though it remains an open and controversially debated question to what extent Herodotus himself was invested in this distinction, generated it subliminally through the way in which he selected and told his stories, or, indeed, captured a distinctive difference in the political cultures of Greece and the Near East.71 Conversely, in Hellenistic times, a similar contrast between ‘autocratic’ and ‘democratic’ modes of discourse dominates interstate diplomacy: John Muir and others have drawn attention to the fact that Hellenistic kings preferred to exercise their (personal) power by writings letters, whereas in ‘the world of the city state’ civic business was transacted by resolutions and decrees in the name of the entire polis. 72 Lewis’s point of departure is the observation that the ‘classical’ tyrants who ruled in Sicily and elsewhere and their use of (letter-)writing sit rather awkwardly in this schema: on the one hand, they belong to the Greek oikoumene and therefore complicate the association of tyranny with rulers in the East and of democracy, freedom and transparency with the polis, which was a key organizing principle for Herodotus; on the other, their frequent association with letters in our historiographical record confounds the idea that ‘rule by letter’ did not really come into its own until the Hellenistic period. In her analysis of how the tyrants of Sicily employed letters in their reign, Lewis sketches a nuanced picture that challenges various orthodoxies: while their use of letters was sporadic and tentative, such letters constituted one (problematic) form among others through which tyrants of the classical period conducted business, promoted themselves, and tried to legitimize their regimes.
In the subsequent Chapter4, ‘Powers in Dialogue: The Letters and diagrammata of Macedonian Kings to Local Communities’, Manuela Mari, building (p.24) on a slate of recent discoveries and publications, investigates how the Macedonian kings employed written missives (letters and so-called diagrammata, which might be glossed with ‘circular letters’) to interact with and to rule over cities within their reign and regions under their control, bringing to life the diplomatic activity between court and constituencies that defined the political culture of fourth-century Macedonia. Our surviving letters and diagrammata address both fiscal and military matters of special relevance to the royal court and more local issues, such as boundary disputes involving two or more communities, the territorial extension of a specific city, or the administration of sacred properties (within Macedonia proper or in areas under the kings’ control). In addition to the matters of substance that emerge from the correspondence, the different types of missives used by the kings also yield important insights into the administrative hierarchies and institutional procedures (as well as the ‘styles’ of exercising power) that sustained royal rule. Within this diplomatic activity, the controversially debated epistatai (the local administrators who received the
letters and were in charge of distributing the royal message) emerge as playing a key role. Whereas some consider them members of the court elite who responded only to the king and were dispatched by him to each town of the kingdom in order to oversee the execution of his orders, others regard them as truly civic magistrates, who were elected by their fellow-citizens and acted in some cases as eponymous officers. Reconsidering the evidence, Mari argues that both approaches capture something important: in her view, the epistatai occupied a Janus-faced position between the royal court and the local communities: as initial addressees of the royal correspondence but frequently nominated by the local community, they mediated between centre and periphery and thus functioned as vital nodes in imperial administration.
Mari’s exploration of the role of letter-writing in the political culture of fourthcentury BCE Macedonia segues naturally into Chapter5, ‘Letters and Decrees: Diplomatic Protocols in the Hellenistic Period’, by Paola Ceccarelli. Hellenistic kings spent much of their time in maintaining an extensive correspondence, with the help of a large court bureaucracy, which can be traced back to Macedonian institutions and traditions, but which now faced the task of sustaining far-flung reigns and a sense of cohesion among diverse and widely dispersed constituencies. The intense and active royal correspondence constituted a particularly testing mode of diplomacy for the polis communities that tried to cling to a semblance of their former independence, while needing to accommodate the ineluctable existence (and ubiquitous if often subliminal presence) of powers above the level of the individual city-state. The chapter offers a case study of how one such community, Magnesia on the Maeander, responded to the challenge. The dossier in question concerns the request of acceptance of a new contest for Artemis Leukophryene, first celebrated in 208 BCE, which the citizens of Magnesia on the Maeander addressed to all the (p. 25) Greek world; answers came from kings, leagues, and cities, which makes it possible to compare the different ‘styles’ of these documents, in particular the contrastive ideologies of power instantiated in the royal letter and the citydecree. In addition, Ceccarelli can show how the way in which they were set up, in the agora of Magnesia, affords insights into the Magnesians’ own perception of these acts of international diplomacy here publicly immortalized on stone— and how they used the responses, not least the royal letters, to project an image of a political community that was both internally cohesive and well-connected with the outside world.
Even though the various political agents in Ceccarelli’s case study spoke different languages of power, both kings and polis communities at least hailed from the same (Greek) culture and thus can be assumed to share an understanding of the implicit protocols in play in diplomatic correspondence, irrespective of differing preferences in terms of idiom, genre, or performativity. In cross-cultural communication this kind of intuitive uptake is much more difficult to achieve and the dynamics of (epistolary) interactions can go
