Anna Tiziana Drago has produced an exemplary new commentary on Aelian’s Rustic Letters. The past few decades have witnessed great interest in Aelian’s literary output, with the De natura animalium and the Variae Historiae receiving most of the scholarly attention. In the area of fictional epistolography, however, Aelian is usually outshone by his contemporaries Alciphron and Philostratus. But Aelian’s artfully composed Rustic Letters, by and about characters from an imagined and idealized Attic countryside, stand on their own as interesting specimens of a literary genre that was in vogue in the late second and early third centuries. Drago’s commentary is more than a welcome addition to the bibliography on the sophist from Praeneste: it is now an indispensable guide to the Letters.
The introduction consists of a brief survey of the evidence for Aelian’s life and career (9–12), an overview of the debate concerning the letters’ attribution to Aelian and the manuscript tradition (12–19), and a lengthy excursus on the collection’s allusivity and complex engagement with the literary tradition that preceded Aelian (19–43). The authenticity of the letters is no longer questioned, though Drago leaves open the possibility that what we have represents only a selection of a larger original corpus: the title handed down by the manuscripts announces the work as being “from Aelian’s rustic letters” (ἐκ τῶν Αἰλιανοῦ ἀγροικικῶν ἐπιστολῶν), and the collections of fictional epistles by Alciphron, Philostratus, Aristaenetus, and Theophylact Simocatta are much longer than Aelian’s twenty. Of the two surviving manuscripts (Ambrosianus B 4 Sup. [= gr. 81] and Matritensis gr. 4693), the tenth century Ambrosian is the more valuable, and the strengths of its readings are borne out repeatedly throughout the commentary. Bypassing Domingo-Forasté’s problematic edition from 1994, Drago bases her text of the Letters on Leone’s critical edition of 1974, and she has conducted autopsy of the manuscripts where necessary and indicates as much in the commentary where problematic readings occur.
For each letter, Drago provides (1) the Greek text with line numbers, (2) an Italian translation, (3) prefatory remarks about the major themes, scholarly issues, and/or intertextual highlights pertinent to that letter, and (4) the commentary proper. Eight of the letters form three mini-sequences (7–8, 11–12, 13–16), and for each of these Drago provides a single preface that introduces the whole sequence. Though I am not a native speaker of Italian, Drago’s Italian translation of the letters seems both accurate and appropriately idiomatic.
Drago clearly appreciates the sophistication of the literary art that went into composing these densely allusive letters. The characters and plots of New Comedy are not an obvious choice for epistolary reimagining, and Drago foregrounds the intellectual and artistic challenges that Aelian faced in transforming dramatic motifs into letters (23). Drago appears always sensitive to the ways in which the intentionality of literary craft is balanced by creative choices that are more intuitive: Drago is astute at tracking down and highlighting Aelian’s deliberate allusions to specific passages from classical sources, but at other times she prudently acknowledges that the letters are the product of an imaginative alchemy that synthesized a lifetime of reading classical texts. Even when we can safely establish that letters 13–16 are based on Menander’s Dyskolos, for example, this sequence of letters nevertheless represents “il rifacimento organico di un modello” (25). These four letters represent an exchange between Cnemon, the dyskolos of the play’s title, and a neighbor named Callipides. In Menander’s comedy, Callipides is the sympathetic father of the amorous Sostratus, who is pursuing Cnemon’s daughter, but Callipides and Cnemon never actually meet on stage. Aelian’s fictional letters, however, imagine what a correspondence between these two characters might have looked like (28–29).
Drago also addresses the complex dialectic between Aelian, as external author, and the various internal authors of the epistolary collection. Between the rich network of models from the literary tradition, the ethopoiiai of Aelian’s epistolary correspondents, and Aelian himself as the principal figure authorizing the collection’s artistic organization, Drago identifies a richly playful “margine di interferenza e ambiguità, una confusione e sovrapposizione dei diversi livelli comunicativi” (43).
Drago quotes and cites the illuminating interpretive insights of others where appropriate, though she announces that she herself is generally disinclined to metaliterary interpretation, and in producing this erudite commentary she has preferred to remain instead on the “terreno solido” of identifying Aelian’s literary models and the traces of the literary tradition in the letters (78). In this regard, Drago succeeds mightily. Menander is Aelian’s chief inspiration throughout, but the sophist’s literary memory extends to the Old Comic tradition, as well, which creates a productive contamination of comic models (32–35). Aristophanic phraseology is a recurring feature of Aelian’s comic diction, and Drago sensibly attributes this to a mode of figurative expression rather than to intentional allusion to specific Aristophanic passages (36–37). That said, there are also instances when Aelian’s engagement with Aristophanes is more intentional, and in these moments Aelian appears to rewrite a specific Aristophanic hypotext. Letter 4, for example, clearly alludes to a choral passage from Acharnians (Ep. 4.3–4 = Ach. 995–998). But here, too, Aelian refashions the comic material: Drago refers to the sophist’s taming or domestication of the Aristophanic model, which brings the letters in line with Menander’s more gentle comic energy (39).
The literary tradition embedded in Aelian’s epistolary imaginings is sometimes so dense that it becomes impossible to untangle the network of models that might have inspired him. In letters 7 and 8, for example, an exchange between the farmer Derkyllos and his beloved Opora, Aelian capitalizes on the literal and metaphorical meanings of the hetaira’s name that had been a part of the symbolic imaginary extending back to Homer and archaic lyric poetry. The word opōra, referring both to the ripeness of summer and to the fleeting beauty of youth, was a commonplace in the literary discourse of seduction, in which the besotted lover encourages his beloved to yield to his erotic entreaties before old age makes her no longer physically attractive. Drago duly identifies the various strands of this literary tradition and traces Aelian’s possible indebtedness to a lost play by Alexis, Opora. Just as important, though, is the way in which Aelian makes creative use of the traditional material. Drago persuasively argues that Aelian performs here an “Alexandrian” refinement on a traditional “structural matrix” (101) by inverting the literary commonplace. In Aelian’s letter, the shrewd Opora wants money instead of the farmer’s rustic gifts, because she herself knows the figurative implications of her own name: old age is creeping and her beauty will fade, and so she has to save up for retirement.
In letter 18, which recounts Laches’ decision to give up the hardworking life of a farmer and to pursue instead the life of a seafaring merchant, Drago offers a detailed survey of the literary sources that the narrative evokes, beginning with Hesiod and moving through Sophron, Euripides, Callimachus, Moschos, Aratus, and Alcliphron, and even looking ahead to later variations on the theme by Macedonius the Consul (AP 6.30) and by Libanius (183-184). Drago is attentive to the ways in which Greek narrative motifs get filtered through the fabric of Roman cultural thought in Aelian’s literary imagination. A moralizing tradition within Roman poetry, for example, associates seafaring with greed, which in turn inflects the land/sea polarity in Aelian’s letter about a farmer whose ambitions lead him to seek an alternative livelihood. In other places, however, such cultural contextualization could be more comprehensive, as, for example, in the note on Laches’ alleged fantasy of doing business with Egyptians and Syrians. Here, Drago surveys important classical sources about Athens’ commercial interest in Egypt and Greek cultural stereotypes about Egyptians, while noting also a few comic references to Syrians in passages where characters talk about eating fish (186-187). What’s missing, though, is a sense of how Laches’ fantasies about Egypt and Syria might have resonated with the contemporary cultural interests of Aelian’s own age, i.e. Roman Egyptomania of the early third century CE as well as the connections with Syria signaled by the Severan rulers.
In letter 19, the rustic Mormias complains that his wastrel son has married and brought into his household a flute-girl from the city, who has no intention of living like a farmhand and contributing to the household. The narrative elements and the character types are all typically comic, but Drago here posits a new interpretation, that Aelian’s letter is an epistolary reworking and streamlining of a specific play: Menander’s Samia (191–196). The plots of the letter and the comedy are not exactly congruent, but Drago argues that both share overlapping themes and narrative ingredients: marriage, the emphasis on the wedding sacrifice, the passivity of the enamored son, the hetaira’s ingratitude and duplicity, and the role of the bilious old man, shared in fact by two characters in Menander’s play. Lexical parallels anchor Drago’s interpretation. In Menander’s play, Niceratus proposes putting Chrysis up for sale in the slave market (509ff.), and at the end of Aelian’s letter, Mormias, too, threatens deportation if his daughter-in-law does not assist with the farm work. Menander’s Demeas and Aelian’s Mormias both utter the same imprecation (ἐς κόρακας), the former against the hetaira (Men. Samia 370), the latter against his newlywed son (Ael. Ep. 19.12), and both fathers also threaten their respective sons with disinheritance using nearly the same verb (συναποκηρύττω, Men. Samia 509; ἀποκηρύξω, Ael. Ep. 19.12). Drago finally suggests that Mormias’ assertion in the letter that his son has brought home “a wild pigeon instead of a dove, [as] they say, a hetaira instead of a bride” (φάτταν ἀντὶ περιστερᾶς, φασίν, ἑταίραν ἀντὶ νύμφης, 6-7) recalls Demeas’s announcement that the Samian girl of the play’s title is his “bride-hetaira” (γαμετὴν ἑταίραν, 130). These linguistic antitheses, argues Drago, reinforce the gap between reality and appearance that is thematically central to both the comic plot and the epistolary narrative. Drago’s exposition in this section is characteristically painstaking, and even if there is no single piece of evidence that proves incontrovertibly that Menander’s Samia was the primary literary model for Aelian’s letter, the argument is nonetheless illuminating as a demonstration of how Aelian’s epistolary art distills and gives new literary shape to thematic and linguistic elements from Menander’s intricate plots.
Letter 20 is a sophisticated and ironic envoi to the collection as a whole, but Drago’s commentary here is more abbreviated than her analysis of the previous letters, with two pages of prefatory remarks and the equivalent of one page of commentary proper. Granted, the letter is short (twelve lines of text), but there is more to be said, among other things, about Phaedrias’ claim that rustic sophia requires no linguistic embellishment (γλώττῃ μὲν οὐ πεποικιλμένη, Ael. Ep. 20.8). Drago’s translation (“non espressa artificiosamente col linguaggio”) captures the sense, but there’s nothing on this phrase in the commentary, even though readers would benefit from a note that Phaedrias’ statement contrasts with Aelian’ own indulgence in compositional poikilia, as, for instance, when he claims proudly to have varied the content of the De natura animalium: ἀνέμιξα δὲ καὶ τὰ ποικίλα ποικίλως (ΝΑ ep.).
Drago excels at showing how Aelian’s creative imagination roamed across, appropriated, and transformed the traditions that preceded him, especially that of New Comedy. But Aelian did not live entirely in the literary past. Despite his moralizing tone and his pose of alienation from the sophistic culture to which he belonged, Aelian was inescapably a man of his times, and it will be worth exploring the Rustic Letters not just in terms of their orientation towards the classical past, but also as an expression of Aelian’s place in the culture of Severan Rome. Scholars of Aelian’s Rustic Letters are now equipped to tackle these important issues, thanks to the solid foundation of Drago’s excellent commentary.