19
Epistolography
Catharine Edwards
1. Introduction. In the Envois section of La Carte postale (a text presented in epistolary form as a series of postcards addressed to an unnamed lover), Derrida asserts that ‘the letter, the epistle… is not a genre but all genres, literature itself.’ (1980) 48. If the letter is to be seen as a genre, it is one of particular fluidity (Rosenmeyer (1997) 31). Nevertheless, to be classed as a letter, a text does perhaps require a specific addressee (or addressees). The place of the reader, is more insistently foregrounded in a letter than in any other kind of writing (Altman (1982) 87-8). But the most crucial element is the separation of writer and addressee. As Altman has persuasively put it, a letter serves both to bridge the distance between writer and addressee and, at the same time, to remind us of that distance, while the author can choose whether to emphasise the bridge or the gap (Altman (1982) ch.1).
Letters involve writing for a specific occasion; they are the product of particular circumstances. Hence the frequent association of letters, as opposed to other kinds of text, with spontaneity, sincerity. A distinction is often invoked between between literary and non-literary letters, such as those found scribbled on pieces of bark from Vindolanda or on papyri from Egypt. Yet as de Pretis argues, we should not overemphasise the artlessness of letters written even by the relatively uneducated, as if this were a guarantee of sincerity (2002) 5-16. It makes more sense to stress the distinctive nature of the letter as a written document, in contrast to the spoken word. A written document always has the potential to be read by a third party. The ‘external’ reader, as we may term the reader who is not the addressee, is thus always an implicit presence.
The conventions of letter writing, the issue of what style might be appropriate to the composition of a letter, are by and large marginal to the concerns of ancient treatises on rhetorical style (cf.Malherbe (1988) 3). The first extended discussion of the subject occurs in a work entitled On style attributed to the otherwise unknown Demetrius and usually dated to the first century BC. Demetrius and other writers on style suggest an equivalence between letters on the one hand and conversation on the other. Similar comments on the relationship between letters and conversation are also to be found in specific letters from, for instance, Cicero Ad Att.8.14.1; 9.10.1. Seneca compares the style of his letters with that of a conversation between friends: ‘My letters should be just what my conversation would be, if you and I were sitting in one another’s company or going for a walk together – spontaneous and easy (inlaboratus et facilis)’ (75.1). Linked to this is the perception that, in Demetrius’ words: ‘A letter should be very largely an expression of character… Perhaps everyone reflects his own soul in writing a letter. It is possible to discern a writer’s character in every other form of literature but in none so fully as in the letter.’ (§227 trs.D.Innes in Russell and Winterbottom 1972). Later readers have often looked to the collections of letters which have survived from ancient Rome to offer privileged access to the people who wrote them. Thus have Cicero, the Younger Seneca and the Younger Pliny been seen as individuals whom the modern reader may come to know intimately.
Yet alongside these prose letters, which are often regarded as ‘genuine’ correspondence, we need to consider a number of poems composed in epistolary form. Scholars have generally been less ready to see these as written essentially for the addressee. Indeed some, most obviously Ovid’s Heroides, verse letters attributed to mythological heroines and heroes and addressed to their loved ones, are plainly fictional. Nevertheless it does, I think, make sense to consider all these varieties of letter together. In particular, looking at prose letters alongside verse ones can serve to highlight some of the more literary and self-conscious features of the former.
2 : Cicero. Cicero’s letters have generally been seen as offering revealing insights both into the eventful period in which Cicero wrote and into the personality of their author (see Levene, Chapter 2 above). The letters were published in two main collections, To his friends (Ad familiares) and To Atticus, as well as the smaller collections Ad Quintum fratrem and Ad Brutum (others may also have circulated in antiquity). To his friends (in sixteen books) also includes nearly 100 letters addressed to Cicero. This collection was assembled and published after Cicero’s death by his freedman M.Tullius Tiro (who seems to have kept copies of letters that were dictated to him, Fam.7.25.1). Tiro also collected most of the letters to Atticus (which Cicero seems mainly to have written in his own hand), though there is no firm evidence that the latter were in circulation until the time of Nero.
Cicero’s correspondence includes examples of a wide variety of different forms and registers of letter. Among the most distinct types are letters of recommendation and consolation; book 13 of Ad familiares is entirely devoted to the former. Cicero himself offers a basic classification of kinds and registers of letter in a letter to his friend Curio (Fam.2.4). The first kind is that which conveys important information to those who are far away. But when there is no such information to be sent, letters may be classed as ‘intimate and humorous’ (familiare et iocosum) or else as ‘austere and serious’ (severum et grave). Cicero’s addressees include those with whom Cicero was evidently on close terms such as Curio and Caelius but also others, such as the powerful aristocrats Lentulus Spinther and Appius Pulcher, whom he knew much less well. Letters to those in the second category tend to be couched in an elaborate and formal style which differs little from that of Cicero’s published works of other kinds. Letters to close friends, above all those to Atticus, are by contrast full of the vulgar terms, neologisms and diminutives which have come to be seen as the distinctive features of Cicero’s informal letter-writing. This latter style is of course no less self-conscious and carefully worked. The literary qualities of Cicero’s letters received much admiration in antiquity (Quintilian 10.1.107, Pliny Ep.9.2.2, Fronto Ant. 3.8.2, Caes. 3.15 van den Hout 2). Some literary aspects of the letters have recently been explored by Hutchinson (1998).
In some ways, the letters as a whole may be seen as a complement to Cicero’s oratory. These two modes of expression are explicitly compared by Cicero himself (Fam.9.21.1). The letters to Atticus in particular serve to parade their author’s urbanitas. In his public speeches, Cicero might present himself as indifferent to the charms of Greek art; he affects ignorance of the names of the most notable Greek artists in his speeches prosecuting Gaius Verres. His letters to Atticus, by contrast, show Cicero as an avid (if not especially discerning) collector, constantly urging his friend to locate antiquities to lend an appropriate air of refinement to Cicero’s villa (Att.1.4, 1.8). While it was considered inappropriate to use Greek in the context of more formal writings, Greek words and phrases frequently appear in Cicero’s letters, above all, those addressed to Atticus. Their particular frequency here serves not only to reflect and reinforce the degree to which both Cicero and Atticus were at home with Greek literary culture but also functions as an index of their intimacy.
Absence is a frequent concern in Cicero’s letters to Atticus. His separation from Atticus allows Cicero to formulate and reformulate the nature of their friendship, a friendship which takes part of its significance precisely from these prolonged periods of separation. ‘Whether working or resting, in business or in leisure, in professional or domestic affairs, in public life or in private, I cannot for any length of time do without your affectionate advice and the delight of your conversation’ (Att.1.17, 61 BC, tr. Shackleton Bailey). Later letters too proclaim Cicero’s dependence on Atticus and specifically on writing to Atticus, for instance 8.14.1 (49 BC): ‘I do, believe me, find a modicum of relaxation in these miseries when I am, as it were, talking to you, much more still when I am reading your letters.’ Elsewhere he writes: ‘I have nothing to write about… But since my distress of mind is such that it is not only impossible to sleep but torment to be awake, I have started this scrawl without any subject in view, just in order as it were to talk to you, which is my only relief.’ (Att.9.10, 49 BC).
Such proclamations might seem spontaneous, artless even. Yet we can also read these letters as carefully wrought instruments of self-representation – or perhaps rather self-fashioning. Cicero and Atticus are repeatedly contrasted, the better to delineate Cicero as an engaged public figure (see particularly Att.9.10). And it is in the context of a letter to Atticus (written after Cicero had been sent into exile in 58) that Cicero feels able to lament the dissolution of his carefully constructed public self: ‘I mourn the loss not only of the things and persons that were mine, but of my very self. What am I now?’ (Att.3.15). The letters chart shifts in Cicero’s self-perception, at the same time working to present a more fluid, intimate picture of their author to external readers, a picture which many have found significantly more attractive than those discernible from Cicero’s public speeches or philosophical writings.
Cicero’s letters were apparently composed without the anticipation that they would be published. They are full of allusions and references which need explication if they are to be understood by later readers. Indeed the letters to Atticus occasionally seem to assume that no-one besides the addressee will read them; Cicero comments, for instance, in 1.16 ‘I don’t feel that I am bragging when I talk about myself in your hearing, especially in a letter which I don’t wish to be read to other people’ (61 BC). The letters of Cicero are often contrasted, in this - and other - respects with Pliny’s letters, which, as we shall see below, were, it seems, written specifically with a view to publication. Yet towards the end of his life, Cicero did explicitly consider publishing a selection of his correspondence (Att.16.5.5; Fam.16.17.1). Even at the time they were written we should not suppose Cicero imagined that their addressees would be the letters’ only readers. There is perhaps something rather disingenuous in Cicero’s comments on the privacy of the letters, which could be seen as making his boasting, for instance, much more forgiveable. From his explicit injunction not to read letter 1.16 to others, we should perhaps infer that it was more usual for a letter to be passed around friends and family.
It is important, too, to distinguish between the letter as actually sent and the preserved or copied letter. In writing to Atticus, Cicero specifically talks of ‘examining and correcting’ his letters prior to publication, eas ego oportet perspiciam, corrigam (16.5.5). He chose to preserve certain letters – and must have edited at least some of them. It is clear he did not keep all the letters he himself was sent. That problematic or damaging letters were suppressed is a strong possibility. Many of the later letters to Atticus in particular have self-exculpation as their theme; letter 9.10 for instance (dated to March 49) quotes numerous passages from Atticus’ earlier letters endorsing Cicero’s political choices.
There was perhaps a sense in which ‘private’ correspondence offered a medium for the expression of political views at times when more public expressions of opinion – in the senate house, for instance, or the law courts – might be inhibited by a concern not to offend Rome’s dominant politicians. It may be no coincidence that most of Cicero’s surviving speeches date from the years leading up to his consulship in 63, while most of his surviving correspondence dates from the years which followed, thus serving to document Cicero’s time in exile, his re-establishment in Rome, his period as governor of Cilicia and the increasingly troubled years from 50 until his death in 43.
3 : Philosophical letters : Horace’s Epistles. Well before the ‘publication’ of Cicero’s letters, there were collections of letters circulating as literary texts, most notably the philosophical letters attributed to Plato and to Epicurus (some of which are still extant) and to Aristotle (now lost). While most scholars agree that the letters attributed to Plato are not authentic, they were well known and influential in antiquity. Indeed Cicero himself alludes to the letters ascribed to Plato (e.g.Att.9.10). The letters of Epicurus, addressed to individual pupils, served to clarify his philosophical doctrines and offer encouragement to his followers. These, too, were known to Cicero (cf.Tusc.2.45), though he did not choose an epistolary form for his own philosophical writings. The Epistles of Horace, however, written towards the end of the poet’s career, can to some degree be seen as drawing on this tradition of philosophical letter-writing.
The poetic epistle in Latin is first attested in the second century BC; the satirist Lucilius is known to have composed a letter to a friend, reproving him for not coming to visit when Lucilius was ill (frs.181-3, 341 Marx). Some of Catullus’ poems take the form of letters (e.g.13, 35, 65, 68a). However, Horace’s Epistles constitute the first collection of such writings, even if Horace disclaims their status as poetry (1.1.10; 2.1.111). The two books of Epistles frequently play on the conventions of everyday letter-writing (de Pretis (2002) 21-3). Each poem is addressed to a specific individual, such as Maecenas. They invite their addressees to visit the poet or come to a party (1.4 and 1.5), recommend one friend to another (1.12) and offer support for a friend seeking a position (1.9). Some of the poems create an epistolary effect through profusion of detail, while others. such as 1.6, are much more sparing in their use of formulae associated with letter-writing. Nevertheless, Horace’s use of epistolary form is central to the effect of the poems. In particular, the identity of the individual addressees, who include the slave in charge of Horace’s country estate, as well as Maecenas, and indeed Augustus himself, plays a crucial role (see de Pretis (2002) ch.3). Thus two epistles treating very similar subjects – the relationship between patron and client – can adopt quite distinct tones, apparently in response to the differing characters of their addressees, Scaeva and Lollius (Ep.1.17 & 1.18).
Ethics are insistently presented as a concern in the Epistles. The epistolary form, which foregrounds the author, allows Horace to pay particular attention to his own role as a fallible philosophical exemplar (Harrison (1995) 57-60). In Ep.1.1.1-12, Horace describes himself as analogous to a retired gladiator, withdrawing from the competitive engagements of public life. Yet as Oliensis comments: ‘This portrait of studious retirement effectively keeps its author in the world’s eye’ (1998)154. And while some of the poems in the collection seem to emphasise Horace’s ‘philosophical distance’, the Epistles also seem to present Horace as a figure of some public standing, a man whose relationship with some of Rome’s leading figures, including of course Augustus, may offer a model for others. In Mayer’s view, ‘Horace now defends and advises upon the life of the dependant in Roman society. The Epistles thus become his most essentially Roman production’ (1994) 5. Epistle 1.9 is presented as a letter to Augustus’ step-son Tiberius, asking a favour on behalf of Horace’s friend Septimius. Central to the poem is Horace’s apparent self-deprecation; Septimius has overestimated the closeness of the poet’s friendship with Tiberius (Oliensis (1998)184-5). Thus this letter simultaneously parades Horace’s modesty and asserts his status as someone who can lay claim to the friendship of the imperial family.
In the Epistles, Horace may be seen as exploiting a new form in which to pursue the ‘self-revelation’ characteristic of his earlier work (Oliensis (1998)13-4). Indeed the project of self-construction is pursued here more persistently than in any of Horace’s other works (de Pretis (2002)70). At last the real Horace is within the reader’s grasp, perhaps? But numerous features of these poems, in particular, the plurality of addressees serve to make the ‘self’ which emerges slippery and shifting.
4. Ovid’s epistolary poetry. Probably published in some form shortly after Horace’s Epistles I, Ovid’s single Heroidesmark another new departure; these poems are explicitly fictional. Ovid’s self-characterisation in the Art of love (3.345-6) lists among his modes of poetic expression the recitation of ‘letters in an assumed voice’ (composita… epistula voce) , and comments of himself ‘this type of work, unknown to others, he pioneered’ (there is dispute, however, as to whether Propertius’ fourth book of elegies may not have preceeded Ovid here; the book’s third poem is in the form of a love letter written by a Roman woman to her absent soldier husband). The collection of Heroides as we have it now comprises fifteen single epistles, beginning with the epistle of Penelope to Ulysses (which may well have been placed first in the collection by Ovid himself), and three pairs of double epistles (possibly written much later, in Ovid’s exile, and some of disputed authenticity) in which heroes and heroines exchange letters. Ovid’s Heroides offer variations on the lament voiced by a heroine abandoned by or separated from her lover, which was already an established theme in Greek and Latin literature. The Heroides have often been criticised for their repetitiveness but their similarities are perhaps rather a function of their sophistication. Their fictive authors model themselves on each other; their role-playing is at certain points quite self-conscious (see, for instance, Hypsipyle’s anticipation of Medea’s future at 6.149-51, discussed by Kauffman (1986) 41).