Note: My warmest thanks to Prof. Karen ní Mheallaigh for her patient and careful review of my English, and to Diego Morelli for the correction of the abstracts. Any remaining errors are mine.
Ancient epistolography is a huge field of research. Even if we limit ourselves to the classical world, the large number of letters of all sorts that have been handed down to us from this period attest to their popularity. There are, throughout antiquity, all kinds of letters, on all kinds of materials, coming from all over the Mediterranean and beyond. Moreover, the study of ancient letters is covered by different disciplines of research (papyrology, epigraphy, palaeography, as well as ancient history and classical philology), resulting in a great variety of approaches.
There are, indeed, many differences between the so-called ‘Berezan letter’ scratched by Achillodoros to his son on a thin sheet of lead, on the north shores of the Black Sea (SEG 26.845.3, 6th century B.C.),1 the invitation to her birthday party sent by Claudia Severa to her sister Sulpicia Lepidina on a wooden tablet, found at the site of Vindolanda, a Roman fort in north England (T.Vindol. II 291, 97–105),2 the official letter sent by the king Attalos III of Pergamum to the Council and people of Cyzicus on the 8th October 135 B.C. which survives in an inscribed copy whose remains are now in Berlin (Inschr. Perg. 248),3 and the letter collections of the Roman orators and politicians Cicero and Pliny, assembled in many books, or the large epistolary corpora of the Church Fathers Basil and Augustine, which all had a tremendous influence on posterity, both for their literary qualities and their historical value. These, in turn, may seem to have little in common with Alciphron’sLetters, a literary work4 divided in four books according to the social status of the addressees (fishermen, farmers, parasites and courtesans) and imaginatively located in 4th century Athens, or with theLetters of Phalaris, pseudepigraphic letters attributed to the semi-legendary tyrant of Acragas in Sicily, who was known for the brazen bull in which he roasted his enemies alive. The amount and variety of the material as well as its heterogeneity makes a totalizing survey of ancient epistolography difficult. While scholarship on ancient letters and letter writing has continued to increase in the last decades, therefore, classicists have moved away from holistic attempts at categorization or definition, choosing to engage in more specific approaches instead.
One of these approaches is the study of ‘literary’ letters: that is, of letters that have been handed down to us in manuscripts as literary works (mostly as collections). They have been touched on and collected in sever
