by Scott McGill
24.2 Innovation and the Late Antique Letter Collection
Late antique letter collections often served to define the public persona of the figure who authored their contents, but they succeeded in doing so because they were often sophisticated literary creations specifically designed to function in the literary, social, and religious milieus of the later Roman world. This was, of course, not a late antique innovation. Pliny had already chosen epistolography over historiography to acquire literary immortality. He found the genre to be profoundly flexible, enabling him to dabble in the writing of a micro‐history within individual letters and to experiment with other mechanisms of self‐representation. Indeed, one could argue that Pliny’s discovery of the (auto)biographical potential of the letter collection had escaped even Cicero. Cicero had no doubt contemplated the possibility of publishing his own letters, but, when Lucceius declined his request to write a panegyrical monograph on Cicero’s consulship, Cicero resorted to writing a poem rather than a carefully selected correspondence. As recent studies have shown (Hoffer 1999; Marchesi 2008; Gibson and Morello 2012), Pliny’s letter collection, long considered dull because of an unfair and uninformed comparison with Cicero’s, is a highly sophisticated and polished literary creation, a true labor limae. In the preface to his collection, Pliny explains his rationale for rearranging the letters in a corpus, and his savvy in exploiting the possibilities that the epistolary genre affords cannot be overemphasized.
Pliny’s successful experiment in self‐representation and his exploitation of the macrotextual dimension of the letter collection were embraced and imitated by Sidonius Apollinaris, who explicitly cites Pliny as a model. In fact, the arrangement of Pliny’s collection into nine books of “personal” letters addressed to individuals and a book of “official” letters addressed to the emperor Trajan was thought for a long time to have provided the model for late antique collections such as those of Ambrose and Symmachus. Recent studies have taken a more nuanced view (Nauroy 2016; Sogno 2016; Salzman and Roberts 2011). Even though the editors of late antique collections arranged their collections with the same thoughtfulness and sophistication as Pliny, they did not resort to mere mechanical imitation of the actual arrangement. They also did not exactly replicate Pliny’s themes. Instead, even in collections of letters by senatorial figures whose social standing resembled that of Pliny, one can see a sort of productive engagement with that second‐century text in which Pliny’s model is consciously adapted and refined to reflect the specific circumstances of late antique elite life.
It is, then, no exaggeration to say that the letter collection was (re)invented in late antiquity. The sheer number of collections that survive, the number of different approaches their editors take, the level of sophistication their organization shows, and the interest in experimentation both at the macrolevel of the collection and the microlevel of the individual letter all point to a tremendous creative energy directed toward the fashioning of letter collections. But what, precisely, was a letter collection in late antiquity?
The word “collection” evokes the activity of an editor and his or her choice to arrange an existing correspondence or (in the case of fictional letters) to create a body of letters with a specific literary purpose in mind (Hodkinson 2007). The notion is clear enough, but it also points to a problem. Not all and, in fact, not even the majority of late antique letter collections were edited by the author of the letters. There is a wide spectrum of options. At one end of the spectrum we have the letter collection of Sidonius Apollinaris, carefully arranged by Sidonius himself and with a programmatic letter detailing the rationale for the arrangement as well as Sidonius’s epistolary models. At the other extreme we have the collections of Augustine or Paulinus of Nola, which were put together by later editors. And in between these two extremes, we have cases like the letter collection of Symmachus, which was organized by Symmachus himself but published by his son after his death and, in all likelihood, supplemented by a sixth‐century editor who added additional books of letters (8–10) on the model of Pliny’s collection. Each of these is a letter collection, but none of them is a product of the same process of literary creativity.
24.3 Innovation in the Individual Letter
The appeal of the late antique letter collection came not just from the characters and themes it developed so effectively on the macrolevel. The individual letters that made up the collection could also show incredible literary creativity precisely because the letter as a literary construction could be built from any kind of content. Some were short poems written in verse, others described long fictional situations not unlike a segment of an ancient novel, many were written for the specific purpose of recommending the carrier of the letter, and still more were filled with quite serious meditations on consequential events in the world. A letter collection could serve as a kind of literary curio cabinet that displayed an author’s ability to do all of these things, and this characteristic may explain the growing appeal and popularity of such an “elastic” genre.
The generic ambiguity of the letter invited experimentation, and several late antique letter writers did play with conventions and manipulated, with varying degrees of success, epistolary conventions to achieve their goals. Libanius, for example, blended epistolary forms in ways that enabled him to deploy his devastating wit against correspondents who charged him with being a negligent friend. In a letter from 392 that Libanius wrote to the retired military official Firminus (Ep. 1048, discussed in Watts 2015, pp. 197–198), he begins the letter with what seems to be an apology for neglecting to answer a number of letters Firminus had previously sent. The letter then takes a dramatic, whiplash‐inducing turn near its halfway point. Libanius transforms his apology into a counterattack by writing, “You should have looked for some other reason” for my silence other than a failure to be a good friend. Libanius goes on to tell Firminus about the death of his son and the devastating effect that it supposedly had on Libanius. Finally, Libanius concludes by telling Firminus that, if he had been a true friend, he would have written a monody for Libanius’s son rather than an insensitive letter of blame. Letters like these became such instant classics that, not even two decades after Libanius’s death, Eunapius (VS 496) would remark that his letters “are filled with such grace and sarcastic wit and an elegance that pervades all of his writings.”
Not all experiments were as successful. Augustine, for example, tried to pursue a new and bold course of action by “inventing” the letter of correction (Ebbeler 2012). A (poor) substitute for a visit, letters had been conceived traditionally as a conversation in absentia, and the expectation of a regular exchange of letters that had prompted the request of Firminus mentioned above was the basis of amicitia in the much wider and more global world of late antiquity. For late Roman senators like Symmachus, amicitia was idealized as the communion and commonality (unanimitas) of thoughts, feelings, and interests and, in practice, depended upon a willingness to “scratch each other’s backs.” Augustine, however, tried to promote the ideal of corrective friendship by writing letters to rebuke or correct the errors of his friends. As the example of Libanius shows, letters of rebuke existed before Augustine, and Epicurean circles promoted a similar ideal of friendly correction, but Augustine’s ideal of epistolary correction was modeled upon the example of Paul (2 Galatians). Augustine, then, tried (but failed) to Christianize this aspect of the epistolary culture of late antiquity. Even though Augustine promoted the ideal of a mutually beneficial friendship in which both correspondents are morally bound to correct each other, the letters that survive show only Augustine in the role of “corrector.” There is also no evidence that any of his attempts at correction were actually successful (though, on the importance of remembering how incomplete and therefore misleading the epistolary record is, see Ebbeler 2016). Unlike Libanius’s letter of blame, Augustine’s letters of correction did not become instant classics and failed to inspire imitators among his contemporaries. In the longue durée, however, his cor
rective letters can be seen as “as a late antique prequel to the institutionalized penitential practices of medieval Christianity” (Ebbeler 2012, p. 230). Augustine’s experiment is ultimately a testimony to the richness, liveliness, and inventiveness of late antique epistolary culture.
At the other end of the spectrum, we find the proverbial brevitas of Symmachus’s letters, which was as much admired by earlier readers of the letters like Alain de Lille as it was reviled by the nineteenth‐century editor of the Symmachan corpus, Otto Seeck. That stylistic tendency, too, can be seen as an innovation within the very restrictive limits imposed by Symmachus on himself because of his love of tradition (amor consuetudinis). Even though the correspondence of Symmachus does not contain the same programmatic letters that distinguish Pliny’s and Sidonius’s collection, Symmachus quite clearly places himself within the tradition of senatorial epistolography that saw in Cicero its ultimate model (Sogno 2014). Neither the political situation nor the highly codified epistolary etiquette would have allowed a fourth‐century Roman senator to write the kind of openly political letters that Cicero wrote (indeed, it is unclear whether Cicero would have published his letters without any changes since the purpose of a letter between “friends” of a certain social standing was never meant to inform, as Cicero himself acknowledges). The contrast with Pliny, who also blamed the decline of epistolography on the changed political circumstances, but whose letters delight because of the variety of themes explored, has been detrimental to Symmachus. It may very well be that Symmachus wrote little because he had nothing to say, but, given his reputation for eloquence, it is equally possible that Symmachus’s choice of brevitas was due not to a lack of intellect but to a precise stylistic choice (Sogno 2016). Unlike Augustine, who tried to transform epistolary practice and mores, Symmachus operated within the narrow confines and strict etiquette of traditional senatorial epistolography, which he set out to distill and preserve for posterity.
24.4 Conclusion
Neither the writing of individual literary letters nor the assembly of letter collections was a late antique invention. Authors working in both Greek and Latin had exemplars to which they could turn and established rules they were expected to follow, but they also understood that these rules allowed considerable scope for literary creativity. A letter could be a miniature history or a poem or even a fantastic travel narrative. It could contain expressions of genuine emotion, acts of brutal sarcasm, or lists of unadorned information. But, most importantly, a letter provided an author with a framework that nevertheless offered him the freedom to creatively express himself.
While the individual letter offered small tableaux on which an author could sketch literary scenes, the letter collection offered an expansive landscape on which an author could construct his own three‐dimensional literary identity. Not only was the collection a display space in which the artist could hang his literary sketches, but it could also serve as a careful sculpture of the public persona of the artist himself. A carefully assembled letter collection was a dynamic thing that showed the evolution of relationships and the emergence of character traits far better than any other genre could. It defined an author not just by the words he deployed and the deeds he performed but by the personalities of the men and women with whom he interacted. Late antique authors, their immediate literary heirs, and their later admirers appreciated that skillfully edited letter collections could even bend time in ways that redefined relationships and emphasized certain aspects of individual personae. These experimentations were usually subtle enough that scholars seeking to find chronological signposts or looking to pull “facts” out of late antique letters do not realize what the collection on which they depend was actually designed to do. But late antique, Carolingian, and Byzantine audiences fully appreciated the creative achievements evident in a potent individual letter and a carefully organized letter collection. Modern scholars are only now appreciating why late antique letters and letter collections genuinely merited such great esteem.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Pseudepigraphy
Javier Martínez
25.1 Introduction
“Pseudepigrapha” is a general term given to works whose stated authorship is false or spurious: The name that appears in the title of a text, its body, or recorded tradition does not reflect the actual author (Speyer 1971, p. 13). The term itself, meaning “falsely attributed,” is a Greek compound formed by the stem pseud–, “false,” and the noun epigraphē with the sense of “ascription.” Initially the term carried no negative connotations regarding the text’s deceptive intent: A drinking‐song might be attributed (rightly or wrongly) to Anacreon as readily as, even now, a proverb to Solomon or a witticism to Oscar Wilde (Martínez 2012). The scholarly term pseudepigrapha is quite broad in scope and implies certain historical ambiguities: Extant pseudepigraphical texts include a considerable number that might properly be considered as literary forgeries, but it is not uncommon to find the term used to describe pseudonymous works or as a simple label to indicate the problematic character of a text within a larger canon (Peirano 2012, p. 1). Because of this definitional vagueness, the attempt to establish guidelines that permit definition and classification of questionable texts has been a salient concern of many modern studies of pseudepigrapha and literary forgeries, ranging from the monumental work of Wolfgang Speyer (1971) and the influential guidelines established by Metzger (1972) to more recent studies by Baum (2001, 2013) or Ehrman (2014).