Table Of ContentAncient Love Letters
Ancient Love
Letters
Form, Themes, Approaches
Edited by
Anna Tiziana Drago and Owen Hodkinson
ISBN 978-3-11-099969-3
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Table of Contents
Anna Tiziana Drago and Owen Hodkinson
Introduction 1
Part 1 The ‘Grammar’ of the Epistolary Genre: Structural
Perspectives
Ingela Nilsson
Chapter 1
Greco-Roman Love Letters and Modern Genre Theory 23
Rafael J. Gallé Cejudo
Chapter 2
Mapping Some of the Generic Borders of the Greek Love Letter 39
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
Chapter 3
The Body and the Letter 61
Ewen Bowie
Chapter 4
Letters Before Letters 81
Part 2 Intertextuality: Literary Models, Topoi, Conventions,
Imitative Strategies
A.D. Morrison
Chapter 5
Lookin’ for Love (in Plato’s Epistles) 103
Antonios Pontoropoulos
Chapter 6
The Structure and Ordering of the Philostratean Love Letters 119
VI TableofContents
Anna Tiziana Drago
Chapter 7
Hyperliterarity, Intertextuality and Formalized Erotic Language. The Letters of
Aristaenetus 145
Owen Hodkinson
Chapter 8
Philostratus’ Erotic Epistles and Latin Elegy Revisited 159
Zara Chadha
Chapter 9
Sealed with a Curse: Elegy, Epistolography, and Magic Ritual in Ovid
Heroides 6 181
Part 3 Cultural Issues and Backgrounds
Émeline Marquis
Chapter 10
Alciphron: The Erotic Letters in the Spotlight 203
Melissa Funke
Chapter 11
Epistolarity, Eroticism, and Agency: The Female Voice in Fictional Greek Love
Letters 223
Steven D. Smith
Chapter 12
Is Diogenes in Love witha Eunuch? The Destabilising Power of Erōs in the
Letters of Theophylact Simocatta 237
Lucio Del Corso
Chapter 13
In a Sentimental Mood? Love, Sex, Marriage (and Other Catastrophes) in
Personal Letters (and Everyday Documents) from Graeco-Roman Egypt 255
Bibliography 283
Notes on Contributors 307
TableofContents VII
Index Nominum 311
Index Rerum 317
Index Locorum 323
Anna Tiziana Drago and Owen Hodkinson
Introduction
I History of a corpus: loss, lack… and finding
love again?
A generally well-read person of our era, not trained in classics or the study of
antiquity,wouldprobablybesurprisedtolearnthat“loveletters”arenotpartic-
ularly prominent among classical literary works, nor considered an important
fieldofstudybymostclassicalscholars.¹Afterall,ifoneweretoasksuchaper-
son today to name a type of letter, it would not take long for most to respond
“the love letter” (whether they were thinking of real or of literary letters).Yet
ask a classicist for the most famous examples of epistolography from Graeco-
Roman antiquity, and Ovid’s Heroides would only be the first-named example
for those with particular research interests, after some of Cicero, Pliny, Seneca,
Horace, or after Libanius, or the New Testament Epistles, or numerous others;
ask a student of antiquity to name classical types of letter, and you might
wait a long time or forever to hear the label “love letter” (and the hypothetical
respondent might well not even apply the term to Ovid’s Heroides).The small
surviving remains of ancient epistolary theory and composers of model letters
for imitation largely overlook the love letter: only one, Ps.-Libanius, mentions
the love letter, the erôtikê epistolê,with examples of the sort of thing it might
contain.² But this is not because the texts—and thus potentially the genre—do
SeeHodkinson(2014)463–470forapreviousattemptatanoverview.Studiesconsideringthe
‘loveletter’inantiquitytakingonliterarytextsbymorethanoneauthorandindifferentforms
(e.g.bothproseandpoetry)arerare:e.g.Rosenmeyer(1996);Gunderson(1997).‘Real’lovelet-
tersasopposedtoliterarycompositionsarerareenoughforRichlin(2006)8tosaythat“Thereis
nootherextantcollectionoflovelettersfromantiquity[besidethatbetweenMarcusAurelius
andFronto].”
Ps.-Libanius,Epist.Char.44,discussedinGalléCejudo’schapterbelow.“Epistolarytheory”is
usedtodescribevariousrhetoricaltreatisesdealingwithorcategorisingtheformalcharacteris-
ticsandpurposesofletters,oftenasasmallpartofalargerworkconcernedmostlywiththe
manygenres of speech classified by ancient rhetoric; also some collections of model letters,
whichweremeantasmanualstolearnfrom,andforimitationandforelaboration/adaptation
as appropriate.Theremust have been far more in existence than the few thatcomedownto
us,whicharecollectedinMalherbe(1988)andMalosse(2004).Thegoalofmostoftheseisevi-
dentlyprofessionalletter-writing,whichexplainstheneglectoftheloveletter.SeefurtherGallé
Cejudo,thisvolume.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989472-001
2 AnnaTizianaDragoandOwenHodkinson
not exist: rather, it is the result of a combination of sometimes quite unrelated
facts and phenomena of the centuries between antiquity and the present.
Thefactthatthemostfamousauthoroflettersonamatorythemes,Ovid,was
outoffashionwithclassicalscholarsduringalongperiod,inwhichhisapprox-
imate contemporaries received fulsome modern scholarly attention, is one con-
sideration; related to this is the fact that his Heroides, the amatory-epistolary
work in question,was out of fashion even among Ovidian scholars until recent
decades.Thattheseclassicalamatorylettersarealsoelegiacpoemsonmythical
themes,andthusstudiedindifferentcontextsfromthatofthe“loveletter”,and
thattheyareattributedtoabandonedloversattheendofafailedloveaffairare
coincidencesthatleadtopotentialmismatchesbetweenclassicalexamplesand
modernideasofwhatconstitutesa“loveletter”.OtherLatinexamplesarefewer
andfurtherbetween:Propertius4.3,doubtlessinfluentialfortheHeroides,isan
elegiacepistlebetweentwolovers,butissomethingofanoveltyforitsepistolary
forminabookofelegies;expressionsoflove,includingbutnotoftensolelyfrom
husbandtowife(i.e.oftenaddressingtherestofthefamilytoo),cansometimes
befoundinCicero’sandPliny’sletters,whilethehomoeroticepistolaryexchang-
esbetweentheEmperorMarcusAureliusandhisformertutorFrontohavebeen
neglected in the modern era because of contemporary prejudices.³
Meanwhile, among all the less familiar books of classical letters with ama-
toryanderoticthemes,completelydifferentsetsofcircumstanceshaveledtoan
evengreaterneglectthan the Heroides suffered.To takejustoneexample, Phil-
ostratus’(3rdCenturyAD,Greek,prose)EroticEpistles,addressedtoanonymous
beloved women and youths, and full of allusions to earlier Greek and perhaps
Latin erotic and other literature: Philostratus’ letters were certainly available
toreadersofGreekandtowould-beimitatorsandtranslatorsalmostcontinuous-
ly in MSS and then printed editions, through Late Antiquity and Byzantium,⁴
thentheRenaissance,⁵untiltheearlierperiodofmodernclassicalscholarship.⁶
If we examine only their English-language Nachleben for instance, they have
Richlin(2006)6–8.
AllusionsbyAristaenetus(6thAD):Drago(2007)225–227;295–297;473–477;allusionsbyBy-
zantineauthors:Hodkinson(forthcomingb).
Philostr.Epp.areincludedinanAldineeditionofGreekletters,Musurus(1499),andtherefore
widelyavailablethenceforth:seeBennerandFobes(1949)409–411foralistofeditionsfollow-
ingMusurus’,andtranslationsintomultiplelanguages.
I.e.,thatperiodofscholarshipforwhichtheproductionofneweditionsofallancientauthors
andtexts,regardlessofwhattheeditorsandtheirreadersmighthavethoughtoftheirqualities,
wasoneoftheprimarygoals.ThisperiodproducedHercher’s1873EpistolographiGraeci,includ-
ingourPhilostrateanletters,andthefirstmoderneditionsofallPhilostratus’worksincluding
theEpistles,Kayser(1844),(1870–71).
