[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Ptolemy to Tertulla, greetings.
This review was discovered by two shepherds in the ruins of a tomb in Ephesus, after King Alexander liberated the city. Unable to read its script but thinking it contained certain mysteries, they dedicated it at the Temple of Artemis, where I first encountered the text and translated it in the simple style of the original. Determine for yourself whether it offers a true account. Farewell.
Just kidding. Or am I? Would it matter? These are the sorts of questions posed by this volume on Fictionality in Ancient Epistolography. Aiming foremost to problematize the “essential distinction between authentic and inauthentic letters” (4) in classical scholarship, the editors have crafted a thematically coherent study that illustrates why fiction is a factor even in epistolary collections traditionally treated as authentic. Or, conversely, why the usual labels like “spurious” or “pseudonymous” are not nuanced enough to capture the full spectrum of fictionalizing strategies that unfold in letters deemed fake. The ten chapters are consistently high quality in their argumentation and analyses. And they are all trained on the central thesis that “fiction is an inherent and fluid property of letters which ancient writers recognised and exploited” and that “what is at stake in defining letters as fictional or not” (14) is worth interrogating. Across the contributions, readers will find a trove of interpretive frameworks for detecting and deciphering epistolary fiction, especially in those hyperfictional instances where the tokens of literary authenticity evince artifice or where unreality can better capture the truth of sensory experience. At the same time, the volume approaches but never quite establishes whether there is something distinctive about epistolary fiction or whether it follows the Derridean pronouncement that the letter is generic “mélange.”[1] Perhaps epistolary fiction too is a mixture of all other fictional genres.
The volume opens with an introduction by the co-editors, which efficiently surveys the lay of the epistolary land in classical literature and scholarship. Claire Rachel Jackson and Janja Soldo discuss the necessary but insufficient categories of pseudonymous epistolography, epistolary novels, and rhetorically stylized letters as the established frameworks for defining fiction in ancient letter collections. They argue that the sheer variety of ways that ancient and modern editors have organized ancient letters (by language, meter, author, etc.) makes the epistolary genre “uniquely well-placed to unsettle disciplinary boundaries” (12). The introduction’s sustained emphasis on epistolary scholarship, from Bentley to Rosenmeyer, may leave some readers yearning for just a bit more exuberance about antiquity’s love affair with letters. Right from page 1, we plunge into problematizing and disrupting the epistolary status quo. By the same token, this opening salvo signals that the chapters to follow focus as much on matters of disciplinary debate as they do on the ancient letters directly. In the history of epistolary scholarship on Pliny, Ovid, and others, we encounter quite a lot of what Michael Trapp will identify as “scholarly and critical fictions” (91).
The volume proper is divided into four thematic parts, on “(auto)biographical,” “editorial,” “pseudepigraphic,” and “ekphrastic” fictions respectively. The organization is smart and guides readers from better-known forms of epistolary fantasy (e.g., fictionalized lives) to the unexpected fictions that arise from editorial intervention or the fusion of epistle with ekphrasis. Hellenists will be disappointed, I suspect, to find only two of the nine chapters devoted to Greek letters (those of Jackson and Trapp), especially when Pliny gets two treatments and Ciceronian letters get three. But the editors do have a point that Latin epistles may deserve “particular space” (14) due to the extensive focus on Greek epistolary fictions in the literature to date. Furthermore, I was struck by the extent to which each chapter contributes a (mostly) novel heuristic for epistolary fiction that can be applied, tested, and refined with any number of letter collections, across languages and genres. Roy Gibson’s deep dive into Pliny’s epistolography against the backdrop of the Augustan poetry book, for example, serves a larger argument that “we need to construct individual theories [of epistolary fiction] for individual authors, working from the text up to personalized theory” (22–23). What makes Pliny distinct from Augustan predecessors, he posits, is the “centrifugal” force of his epistolary signification beyond his own “literary programme” (38). Similarly, Jackson sees in her chapter on the Imperial-era Letters of Euripides a series of ludic feints that “exaggerat[e] rather than naturalis[e] the work’s status as a fiction” (67). The missives of “Euripides” revise the tragedian’s biographical record but then trouble their own revisionist history in such a way that conscious fiction becomes self-conscious fiction and then self-self-(self?)-conscious fiction in the process.
Other tools for epistolary fiction that emerge from this volume have to do with space and time, and how literary mimesis becomes the dubious currency of authenticity. Catharine Edwards’ chapter on the Epistulae ex Ponto attends to the familiar force of materiality in Ovid’s letters (pressed wax, weathered scrolls, 81–83). But she also highlights the disjunction between the poet’s hasty composition, “the unbearably slow transmission of Ovid’s work” (84), and the fracturing illusion that author, addressee, and reader can ever really occupy the same epistolary space-time. Serena Cammoranesi, in her chapter on Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares, illustrates that time is manipulated not only by authors but also by editors of ancient letter collections. By rearranging Cicero’s civil war correspondence according to topic and addressee, his editors orchestrate “flashbacks and flash-forwards” (113) in the arc of the orator’s relationships, and they repeatedly reset the clock of defeat for Cicero and Pompey (119). Ruth Morello’s chapter on the Ad Familiares also traverses the temporal layers of Cicero’s “epistolary palimpsest,” which harnesses ekphrastic spectacle and imagined futures to toggle between alternative Ciceronian “realities.” While the sudden appearance of the actress Cytheris in Fam. 9.26 freeze-frames Cicero in a tragically embarrassing present that has devolved from his “lost republican past” (194), his correspondence with Caelius Rufus envisions Rome’s coming years as an architectural model that reconfigures the language of sight into an “imaginative autopsy of the future” (199). All three contributions, in sum, bear out the claim that authentic letters give life to fictional temporalities and imagined exchanges between the “real” people who write and read them.
Another important insight that emerges from this volume is that the very criteria we cling to when trying to establish epistolary authenticity—what Emilia Barbiero terms “the real real” (213)—can just as easily become the stratagems of a first-rate pseudepigrapher. Kathryn Tempest drives right at the heart of this paradox in her chapter on the Ciceron-ish Letters to Brutus 1.16 and 1.17. By constructing conscientious “impersonations” of Brutus and Cicero with an allusive “checklist” of material drawn from their writings and the later rhetorical tradition, Pseudo-Brutus combines a deep literary-historical knowledge of the past with pseudocumentary details that “paradoxically support [the text’s] identification as inauthentic” (143). Trapp approaches the fragility of scholarly efforts to establish the “authentic” record from a different angle, by probing the incoherence between “Arrian’s” epistolary account of his Epictetean logoi and the actual Dissertations to which his letter is appended. Rather than divorcing this letter from the Dissertations or adjudicating epistolary deceit or even defending its authenticity on the basis of Arrian’s “real” style, Trapp more profitably explores how the letter’s apologetics play on ancient anxieties about written versus spoken dialogue (98–99) or about the difficulty of doing justice to a philosophical legacy (102–103). His comparative reading of Arrian’s Letter to Lucius Gellius with the pseudepigraphic letters of Xenophon show even ambiguous epistles to be a valuable “paratextual resource” for the texts they accompany (103).
There are two key questions that this volume sparks but does not fully answer. One is the relationship between epistolary fiction and the fiction-making machine that is Imperial rhetoric. With one exception (Soldo’s), every chapter in this book treats letters written between the late Republic and principate, a period when rhetorical handbooks, exercises, and declamations became prolific in educated circles. While the label “school exercise” was once used to impugn the authenticity or quality of ancient texts,[2] several chapters in this volume exemplify how “thinking rhetorically” makes us much better attuned to craft in epistolary fiction. This comes through clearly in the chapters of Tempest, on Pseudo-Brutus and the declamatory role-playing of Republican personae, and of Barbiero, on Pliny’s epistolary ekphrasis. Barbiero draws into her rich readings of Pliny’s visions and “mimetic mimesis” (229) the instructions of Nicolaus’ Progymnasmata and Quintilian’s summation of phantasia (224–45). She leaves little doubt that Pliny, himself a student of Quintilian, brings a full repertoire of word-painting to bear in his multisensory letters. But that’s just it: what is the relationship between rhetorical fiction and epistolary fiction? Is epistolary fiction an offshoot or specialized strand of rhetorical impersonation? Is it a sophistic chimera, mixing and matching the techniques of epideictic elaboration and forensic invention? And if so, is all this (in)authenticity fuss a moot point? Perhaps it makes no more sense to regard Pseudo-Brutus a fraudster than we would a Roman student personifying Brutus for a declamation. These questions are not just for Tempest and Barbiero, for there are also rhetorical maneuvers afoot in the Euripidean exchanges with Archelaus and in the Ciceronian counterfactuals that Cammoranesi explores.
A second question is at what point classicists might begin to recognize the voices and events in epistolary fictions as the “real real” in their own right, and not always as derivations or reimaginings of an original. For all the impetus in this book to break down the authentic/inauthentic binary, the contributions also rely heavily on the “master text” (e.g., the established, authentic, canonical) to delineate how fiction works in ancient epistolography. I sensed this acutely in Soldo’s chapter on the apocryphal letters between “Seneca” and “Paul,” where she grapples with the fact that this correspondence “is so bad at pretending to be real” (164). This is because the fictional letters approximate neither the style nor the philosophical-theological depth of the correspondents’ real works. In a judicious analysis, Soldo reads the Senecan “forgery” with and against the Epistulae Morales, showing how this pseudepigraphic refashioning of Seneca—reunited with Lucilius, criticizing Nero, endorsing written philosophy over live instruction—represents an “innovative contribution” to the true tradition (165). But at a certain point, one has to wonder: if “Seneca” doesn’t walk like the Seneca and talk like the Seneca, then must our reading of the epistolary version be so tethered to the “original”? Soldo unveils an important revelation towards the end of her chapter, that the pseudepigraphic “‘Seneca’ and ‘Paul’ are not presented as figures made of bone and flesh but as authors whose inner lives are only accessible through their writings” (174). There are echoes of this idea in Edwards and Morello’s chapters as well: how the voice of an Ovidian letter is ever “distinct from the voice of the poet” (72), or when Cicero wonders whether there is life beyond “the confines of one’s own literary productions” (192). As we come upon classical lives lived only in litteris (Fam. 7.1), can we imagine ancient readers for whom, or ancient contexts in which, the pseudepigraphic Seneca and Paul became equally authoritative voices from the past? The continuation of a prodigious industry of epistolary fiction well into Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages suggests that we should.
Any volume that stimulates this many good questions about the protean forms of epistolary fiction in antiquity and, crucially, provides the hermeneutic toolkit with which to start answering them is a success in my book (or maybe it’s Ptolemy’s book … or Tertulla’s?). Its chapters have implications for ancient epistolography and narrative fiction well beyond the authors they cover. Taken together, they offer a rewarding resource for scholars across the disciplinary spectrum—no kidding.
Authors and Titles
Claire Rachel Jackson and Janja Soldo, “Introduction: Fictions of Genre”
Part I: (Auto)Biographical Fictions
Roy K. Gibson, “Fact and Fiction in Pliny’s Epistles: The Augustan Poetry Book and its Legacies”
Claire Rachel Jackson, “Fiction and Authenticity in the Letters of Euripides”
Catherine Edwards, “Greetings from the Margin: Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto”
Part II: Editorial Fictions
Michael Trapp, “Just Some Notes for My Own Use: Arrian’s (‘Arrian’s’?) Letter to Lucius Gellius”
Serena Cammoranesi, “Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares: From Authentic Letters to Literary Artefact”
Part III: Pseudepigraphic Fictions
Kathryn Tempest, “The Latin Letters of Pseudo-Brutus (Cic. Brut. 1.16 and 1.17)”
Janja Soldo, “Fictionality and Pseudepigraphy in the Apocryphal Letter Exchange between Seneca and Paul”
Part IV: Ekphrastic Fictions
Ruth Morello, “Fictions in the Real World: Language and Reality in Cicero’s Letters”
Emilia A. Barbiero, “Let’s Get Real: Ekphrasis, Reality and Fiction in Pliny’s Epistles”
Notes
[1] Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion) 54: “Le mélange, c’est la lettre, l’épître, qui n’est pas un genre mais tous les genres, la littérature même.” See Soldo and Jackson’s own discussion of this definition on p. 12.
[2] As recognized by Tempest (134) and Soldo (163).