This fourth book of Alciphron is different in that the characters (the letter writers) are not purely fictional, but fictionalized versions of historical figures (courtesans and their alleged lovers) from classical to early Hellenistic Athens. This kind of historical setting is typical of imperial Greek literature and also characteristic of other pseudonymous letters; Schmitz aptly likens their appeal to that of modern historical novels.29 The basis for the “historical” content of book 4 is a preexisting tradition of anecdotes about historical courtesans, for which contemporary readers evidently had a taste: there is much similarity with Athenaeus’s book 13,30 while Lucian’s Dialogues of Courtesans combines the interest in the courtesan with the freer character-creation of Alciphron’s other books and of Aelian. Alciphron 4 adapts the “source” material to the epistolary form quite markedly: as Rosenmeyer notes, the self-conscious use of epistolary markers is far more frequent than in books 1–3.31 This may be precisely because of the difference in content and greater reliance on preexisting material, leading the author to mark the material as his own by a very clear change of genre.
PHILOSTRATUS’ EPISTLES AND THE EPISTLES OF APOLLONIUS
The importance of epistolography to the Second Sophistic, defined by Flavius Philostratus, is further shown by two sets of letters related to the Philostratean corpus.32 The seventy-three Epistles attributed to a Philostratus are now usually agreed to be the work of Flavius Philostratus himself.33 The letters attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, though many may well be genuine and certainly predate Philostratus, include some quoted (or perhaps “quoted”) in Philostratus’s fictionalizing biography of Apollonius; these and perhaps others may be later pseudonymous letters, possibly by Philostratus himself.34 The Dialexis on letters by Philostratus of Lemnos quoted above labels Apollonius a model epistolographer, and is mentioned approvingly by Flavius Philostratus (VS 628), showing the latter’s interest in epistolary composition.
The references to and use of letters of (Pseudo-)Apollonius by both Philostrati shows that there was a collection of Apollonian letters circulating and being read before and during the Second Sophistic, as Jones notes;35 these earlier letters, probably including some genuine, were very likely embellished and added to at various later periods, and the extant letters (114) are very varied in length, addressee, and theme. Fourteen of them (Ep. 42a–h, 77a–f) are quoted in V A, the others transmitted in a complex manuscript tradition or (Ep. 78–100) via Stobaeus’s fifth-century anthology of moral reflections.36 Philostratus says that Apollonius wrote to “kings [including Roman Emperors], sophists, philosophers, Eleans, Delphians, Indians, and Egyptians, on the subject of gods, about customs, morals, and laws, setting upright whatever had been overturned among such people” (V A 1.2.3). Many are extremely short pieces of advice, admonishment, or moral apophthegms of only a single short sentence. The letters included in V A are similar in their functions to embedded letters in other historiographical or biographical narratives, but given the marked fictionalizing tendency of V A the likelihood that letters have been significantly adapted or invented by Philostratus to serve the purposes of the containing narrative is high.37
Philostratus’s own letters fall into two groups: Erotic Epistles, fifty-five prose love poems addressed to anonymous women and boys; and eighteen other letters to friends or other historical figures. The latter are far from being straightforward records of Philostratus’s real correspondence, however; some are highly self-conscious literary works, of a piece with the rest of the corpus. Of particular interest for the (perhaps) historical context of Philostratus and his sophistic is Epistle 73 to Julia Domna, wife of the emperor Septimius Severus, and supposedly the patron of a circle of sophists and writers including Philostratus.38 If, however, the Plutarch referred to in the letter as if alive is the long-dead author of that name, as it appears, then we are dealing with a metaliterary game in keeping with other Philostratean works which discuss literary and rhetorical models.39 Other addressees include Antoninus (72; probably the emperor Caracalla), Chariton (66; possibly the novelist), and Epictetus (42, 65, 69; possibly a rival sophist). In the range of addressees and tone, some of the nonerotic letters, especially the very short ones (e.g., 65–66), are very similar to and likely influenced by the letters of Apollonius.
The Erotic Epistles are a collection of prose epigrams or elegies to pederastic and heterosexual beloveds;40 often the same theme is repeated in several letters but treated in a different—sometimes opposing—manner, which makes the book an example of the sophist’s art of arguing both sides of a case, and gives great internal variety and interconnections between individual letters.41 For instance several letters treat the common erotic topos of artificial vs. natural beauty (including boys “prolonging their youth” by shaving or not) and the related question in pederasty of the beloved’s ideal stage of maturity (Ep. 13–15, 22, 27, 40, 58).42 Many letters concern accompanying gifts, including several times roses, both to boys and women (Ep. 2, 4, 46, 54). Among the standard erotic motifs and Plato-influenced emphasis on eyes and the gaze in connection with eros,43 many letters have what Benner and Fobes labeled a “strange, brooding spirit” and several “grotesqueries,”44 including foot fetishism (Ep. 18, 36–37) and a sort of masochism (5, 23, 47) which could be connected with the (Roman) elegiac idea of servitium amoris.45 Philostratus in this book as elsewhere does not simply keep to expected themes and forms of expression, embarking on sometimes unusually dark elegiac reveries, including very specialized tastes and therefore in literary terms recherché themes.
PSEUDONYMOUS LETTER COLLECTIONS
Far the most frequent type of Greek letter from all periods is the letter attributed to a historical figure but evidently composed later, either as a school exercise in ethopoiia and prosopopoiia, as a more developed literary text employing those techniques, or as a way of authenticating fictional biographical information about a public figure—and thus an opportunity to “discover” the private lives of figures whose published works lacked biographical information (e.g., the letters attributed to Plato or Euripides, or the correspondence between Paul of Tarsus and Seneca).46 Such collections usually accumulated letters by various authors composed over several centuries, naturally grouped together by editors in the manuscripts from which we receive them. Many such collections cannot thus be read as a compositional unit, or indeed as the product of a particular period (and indeed it is usually very hard to date such texts with any more accuracy than a range of several centuries). Some collections which probably (in large part or entirely) date from around the Second Sophistic include those attributed to Aeschines,47 Chion of Heraclea,48 Crates of Thebes,49 Euripides,50 Phalaris,51 the Socratics,52 and Themistocles.53 The biographical impulse to epistolography noted above is very evident in many of these collections, as is moralizing or other philosophical advice (cf. the letters of Apollonius) in those attributed to philosophers. These letters often engage with earlier examples in the genre, especially those attributed to Plato,54 and naturally with the Demosthenic Epistles in the case of Aeschines;55 as well as with other, nonepistolary biographical traditions.56 Many such texts essentially continue in the same literary-epistolary tradition begun with the collections of letters by or attributed to Plato, Epicurus, Demosthenes, and Isocrates which are known to be circulating already by the late classical to early Hellenistic periods.57 Where the genre shows significant development in the Second Sophistic is in the arrival of the epistolary novel, discussed in the next section.
EPISTOLARY NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES IN EPISTOLARY FORM
Rather than a steady accretion of letters attributed to a historical figure over time, written by different authors with various aims and degrees of skill in composing convincing pseudonymous letters, an epistolary novel or Briefroman would normally be taken to have a single author and to have been composed as a unit, and thus should more correctly be termed a book than a “collection.”58 Nothing in antiquity is quite so coherent an epistolary novel as modern examples of the ge
nre, apart from the letters attributed to the tyrannicide Chion of Heraclea (and no ancient epistolary novel comes close in length either to the extant ancient novels or to modern epistolary novels); the other strongest contender is the book of letters attributed to Themistocles.59 The first study to explore the applicability of the term Briefroman to ancient texts in any detail was Holzberg’s short edited volume,60 although this includes many pseudonymous letter collections under that heading which have no such narrative unity or coherence.
Because of their association with other pseudonymous letters, these narratives have not gained the recognition they deserve for their creation of another new genre roughly contemporary with the Greek novel:61 a hybrid between literary letters (and their usual autobiographical slant) and novelistic, historiographical, and other extended narratives (which themselves often include embedded letters). Neither novel was translated in Reardon’s Collected Ancient Greek Novels,62 which extended in other directions quite far to the “fringes” of the novel genre, though a recent translation of Greek novels now includes Chion.63 With their generic invention and innovation, at the same time as their use of ethopoiia and rhetorical arguments aimed at defending the political-philosophical stances of the central characters, these novels are in several ways typical sophistic texts. Another way in which they fit the Zeitgeist is in their highly self-conscious natures: both are full of metafictional comment on their genre and narrative, including on the status of the “letters” which comprise the narrative as both self-authenticating “documents” and as fictive compositions.64 This is in part because of the epistolary genre’s particular capacity for literary self-consciousness and metafiction, which is exploited a great deal in fictional letters of the Second Sophistic.65
In addition to epistolary novels there are at least two short stories in epistolary form which as far as we know do not belong to a connected narrative (whether epistolary or more conventional): a miniature comic-erotic novella transmitted as [Aeschines] Ep. 10 (but having nothing to do with the other “Aeschinean” letters), and a romantic ghost story partially preserved in Phlegon of Tralles’s Book of Marvels (1). Both could perhaps be connected with the elusive “Milesian Tales” genre of titillating or salacious stories,66 and thus with the ancient novel genre. Recent studies of each have demonstrated that the epistolary genre is not a random choice but an important feature of the authors’ narrative techique and responsible for stylistic and other choices they made.67 In addition, there being no “short story” genre as such in antiquity, the epistolary form is a convenient prose narrative medium of the appropriate length for these stories; the form’s variety for literary miniatures of all kinds thus sees in these two texts development in a further direction.
Both epistolary novellas may have further connections with the longer ancient novel genre: in both the theme is romantic or erotic, and the characters are ordinary people not figures of myth; thus, and in other respects, they are generically aligned with the comic narrative of the novel (indeed [Aeschines] labels his story a comedy, §9). In addition, [Aeschines]’s female protagonist is named Callirhoe, like that of Chariton’s novel, which might well be a deliberate reference and thus a metafictional “label” showing the reader this story’s generic affiliation with the Greek novel genre.68 In the case of Phlegon, the evident and self-consciously highlighted importance of the epistolary form as an authentication device for the narrative is reminiscent of this use of letters in the novelistic texts of Dictys Cretensis and Darius Phrygius (see “Embedded Letters,” below), as well as the “self-authenticating” narratives of epistolary novels. Moreover, by a curious coincidence (if it is one), there is a similar reference to the novelist Chariton through the character name Charito in Phlegon’s ghost-story, which also makes a metafictional statement about the genre of the story and its relation to the Greek novel genre.69
EMBEDDED LETTERS
A final category in which the epistolary genre is especially important in the Second Sophistic is the use of embedded letters within longer narratives, which increases greatly in amount and in variety from their long-established use as quoted documents in historiography. Mimicking this historiographical usage (in this as in several respects), many ancient novelistic texts contain some “quoted” letters between their characters, which contribute to their wider alignment with the historiographical genre, and specifically pretend to “authenticate” the fictional narratives since they contain this “documentary evidence”; several studies of the ancient novel have focused on the various ways they use embedded letters.70 The Alexander Romance in its various recensions always contains quoted correspondence between Alexander and his family, advisors, and rivals, some of it also circulating independently in pseudonymous letter collections; earlier versions of the Alexander Romance may have influenced the Second Sophistic novelistic texts, as well as Philostratus’s V A, in this respect.71 Even in historiographical and biographical texts, the use of quoted letters becomes more extensive over time (e.g., in Josephus or Diogenes Laertius),72 but in fictional or fictionalizing texts there is room for more varied manipulation of the combined epistolary and narrative forms, as in Philostratus’s V A.
In the case of novels’ narrators “quoting” letters from their characters, it is clear that the letters are written to form part of the surrounding narrative and have no independent existence or circulation; therefore the narrative techniques used to connect embedding and embedded text can be more complex and sophisticated than in historiographical texts or the Alexander Romance. Similar to the novels is the inclusion in Lucian’s Verae Historiae of a letter from Odysseus to Calypso (Ver. hist. 2.35–36).73 In some of these cases the inclusion of letters serves—just like quoted direct speech in epic or indeed the novels themselves—simply as variation from the usual narrative perspective and focalization of the surrounding text, that is, to give the reader for a time direct access to the words and thoughts of one of the characters. Unlike speech, though, their presence (since relatively uncommon within these narratives) stands out; and in the ideal romances, they are expedients for situations in which the protagonists are separated from each other, thus facilitating crucial communications at these equally crucial points in the plot. At the same time, and also unlike verbal communication, their physical presence as objects within the plot means that characters can interact with their messages in an extra (letter-specific) set of ways—losing and discovering them, intercepting them, forging them. These plot devices using letters are already present from the earliest Greek epic and tragedy,74 and in historiography,75 but the everyday and highly frequent nature of letters by the time of the novel means that they can plausibly be embedded more frequently in the later texts and thus give the authors wider scope for variations on the embedded letter device.
The letters in the Trojan War fictions of Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia are different in that they preface and authenticate the following narratives as part of an elaborate artifice: letters report the discovery of an ancient text telling the long-lost true version of events in the Trojan War, which is appended to the letter. A similar case in its use of epistolarity is the novel of Antonius Diogenes, which, however, survives only in summary.76 Such cases of course rely on the use of the letter form as documentary evidence by historiographers, and crucial to this authenticating use is the reader’s implicit trust that the historiographical narrator does in fact have access to the physical object which is the quoted letter, and is thus able to report verbatim (rather than from memory, less reliably). When transferred to the authentication of fictional texts such as these, one of the particular functions of the epistolary genre is again employed in combination with a fictional narrative form, and again exploits the letter’s status as physical object, to create a further innovative effect.
CONCLUSIONS
As has been shown in this brief survey, the epistolary form in Second Sophistic literature saw very wide and extremely varied use, its flexibility making it among the most popular literary f
orms. This is in part a development upon and use of a vast and ever-increasing corpus of pseudonymous and (less so) authentic letters from the classical and especially Hellenistic periods onward; but it is upon this foundation that the generic variations and combinations within epistolary literature, and experimentation and broadening of the traditional limits and functions of the letter form, could be built. This experimentation with and development of a prose (often narrative, usually miniature) genre is characteristic of the Second Sophistic, as is the use by some authors (notably Aelian, Alciphron, and Philostratus) of a prose form to adapt and recast poetic forms. In other respects too, much of the epistolary literature of the Second Sophistic reflects the zeitgeist: in terms of connections with contemporary forms such as the novel, for instance, or of rhetorical techniques such as ethopoiia and prosopopoiia which sophists in other genres, too, made into literary genres. But perhaps the most notable way in which many Second Sophistic letters are of their time is the obsession in many cases with a pre-Roman, very often classical Athenian, past; many epistolary texts center on the historical figures of past eras (indeed for pseudonymous letters the bringing to life of such figures “in their own voice” through prosopopoiia is the primary conceit), and they usually also imitate the past period’s written forms by employing Atticism of language and imitating the style of great authors. Thus in many respects, across the spectrum of texts composed in this form in this period, epistolary literature provides one of the most representative cross-sections of the concerns and trends of Second Sophistic literature.
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 82