third century, the philosopher Ariston found another definition: ‘When he has bought a slave, he does not bother to ask his name but just addresses him as “slave” . . . and writing a letter, he neither writes “Greetings” nor “Farewell” at the end.’
The Greek letters that survive – some 2,000 examples scattered around the world’s great museums – have value beyond their immediate content. They shed some light on the prominent role played by educated women, and certainly refute the notion that all were invisible in public debate. (The literacy rate in Greek cities is believed to have been less than 50 per cent, and the figure was lower for women, but the illiterate often hired scribes to communicate for them.) The letters have also enabled scholars to track developments in Greek language and grammar.
Predictably, the letters we find most intriguing are not the commonplace (the majority) but the quirky, the ones that make us gasp at their audacity or absurdity. In the first century BC a letter from a man working away from his wife (whom he calls sister, a common convention), is both caring and nonchalantly heartless.
Hilarion to his sister Alis, very many greetings – and to my respected Berous and Appolonarion. Know that we are still at this moment in Alexandria . . . I ask you and urge you, look after the child, and as soon as I receive my pay I will send it up to you. If by any chance you give birth and it is male, let it live; if it is female, get rid of it. You said to Aphrodisias, ‘Don’t forget me’. How can I forget you? I ask you therefore not to be anxious.
A letter from older to younger sisters carries a hectoring air:
Apollonia and Eupous to their sisters Rasion and Demarion, greetings. If you are in good health, that is well. We ourselves are in good health too. You would do us a favour by lighting the lamp in the shrine and shaking out the cushions. Keep studying and do not worry about mother. For she is already enjoying good health. Expect our arrival. Farewell. And don’t play in the courtyard but behave yourselves inside. Take care of Titoas and Shairos.
A testy letter from the third century AD, from an eager son at school to an unresponsive father, smothers its frustrations as best it can:
To my respected father Arion, Thonis sends greetings. Most of all I say a prayer every day, praying to the ancestral gods of this land in which I am staying that I find you and all our family flourishing. Look, this is the fifth letter I have written and, except for one, you have not written to me, even about your being well, nor have you come to see me. Having promised me, ‘I am coming’, you didn’t come so that you could find out whether the teacher was attending me or not . . . So make the effort to come to me quickly so he can teach me – as he is keen to do . . . Come quickly to me before he leaves for the upper territories. I send many greetings to all our family by name and to my friends. Goodbye my respected father, and I pray that you may fare well for many years along with my brothers (safe from the evil eye).
Remember my pigeons.
But for all their attractions, and for all their familiar templates, most Greek letters fall short of the key attribute we expect from letters in the modern world: they do not greatly enrich the personal experience. They may be fascinating, but the personal letters are rarely of consequence. Public letters – many purposely artificial, using the letter form as a new way of performing elaborate flights of philosophy and reaching a wider audience – are often just unperformed speeches, the equivalent of the ‘open letter’ in our modern media; many New Testament epistles would clearly model themselves on this practice.
The Greeks loved the idea of the letter and its high ambitions; they loved its epistolarity. But what of its private role as a conveyance of intimacy? Almost all letters were written to be read aloud; even private letters were primarily dictated to a scribe, and read in a low voice when received. There are rare snippets of private idiosyncrasy in Socrates and Plato, but the majority of correspondences are free of private emotion, and their oratorical heritage lends them a showy formality.
So what is lacking that we might expect to find? The historian John Muir notes that of the 2,000 or so papyrus letters we have, there are very few – he counts twelve or thirteen – that concern themselves with bereavement. Of these only six have sympathy as their main purpose, and a disproportionate three were written by women. Thus one of the few reliable mainstays of letter-writing in an age of email – the condolence letter – is almost entirely absent, and there is no logical explanation. And why were there no love letters? One possibility is that almost all were destroyed by the parties involved. Another, more plausible, is that letters were not yet regarded as the proper medium for such things. Because so many Greek letters were those of effect (or carried violent or dramatic instruction, such as that brought by Bellerophon), they may not have been considered appropriate for authentic outpourings from the heart. Muir also sounds a word of caution – their world was not as much like ours as we might imagine. The greetings and farewells were one thing, but ‘there may be a salutary warning against assuming that the many undoubtedly recognisable feelings and situations in the letters imply that we are meeting people . . . who had notions of individuality very like our own. The “otherness” of the ancient world is sometimes easy to forget.’
Individuality and authenticity – a letter that was both personal and informative – begins properly with the Romans, the first true letter-writers, and the first to establish the tradition of letters both as biographical source material and a literature to be gathered and enjoyed in its own right. The classical scholar Betty Radice has compared the ancient history of letters to a trip round a marble-floored museum, ‘the Greek statue stands aloof with his stylized enigmatic smile, while the Roman portrait bust is recognisably someone like ourselves, and its regular features speak for a single individual at a point of time’. To the modern reader, Latin letters tend to have another beneficial attribute over their Greek counterparts – their straightforwardness. They are intelligent without being flashy, direct rather than imaginative, unpretentious rather than conceited. If Greek letters are rooted in the theatre, Roman ones are rooted in the tavern.
The trail begins in the second half of the first century BC with more than 900 letters from Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero was the consummate statesman on a world stage at a time when the Roman Republic was in significant decline. His oratory – as a lawyer in court and in the senate – was allegedly stupendous, but it is his surviving letters that confirm his talents. His lifelong correspondence with his friend Atticus is boastful, playful and varied like no other correspondence before it, and its prolific and sequential nature enables us to build an unusually intimate biographical picture of a politician. In other letters he is compelling particularly because he is spontaneous, vulnerable and prone to hyperbolic excitement, and because his political success is fuelled by ambition, vanity and weakness. Cicero does not emerge as a particularly likeable character, but his letters have made him a valuable one: there were few figures with whom he did not communicate as Rome suffered paroxysms of decline in the decades before 45 BC, and no other collection of writing so illuminates this world. But Cicero performs another trick too, a grand epistolary deflection. His is the oldest substantive collection to show how the consummate politician flatters to deceive; his apparent confidences invariably advance his own ends and enhance his reputation.
Cicero at work: pompous perhaps, but never dull.
The survival and popularity of Cicero’s correspondence is due largely to the discovery of a long-lost collection by Petrarch in the cathedral in Verona in 1345, while a second haul almost 50 years later at Vercelli boosted the supply. Together, the letters made an immeasurable literary contribution to the formative years of the Renaissance; Cicero had laid bare the values of classical antiquity with enough detail to inspire its artistic and cultural reconstruction.
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