Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature

by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

This book offers the first comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus. By imaginary letters, it means letters written in the voice of another, and either inserted into a narrative (epic, historiography, tragedy, the novel), or comprising a free-standing collection (e.g. the Greek love letter collections of the Imperial Roman period). The book challenges the notion that Ovid "invented" the fictional letter form in the Heroides, and considers a wealth of Greek antecedents for the later European epistolary novel tradition.

382 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2001

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rosenmeyer explores the problems of fictive letters in this book and constitutes them as a literary category, a kind of sub-genre, which can be theorised in its own right. Contesting the idea that Ovid 'invented' epistolary fiction with his Heroides, this goes back to letters and their functions in Greek literature.

Rosenmeyer is especially good on the way letters are implicitly, sometimes explicitly, connected with deception (e.g. the Bellerophon story story in the Iliad, Agamemnon's letter to Clytemnestra, Phaedra's letter of false accusations) as well as raising issues about forgery and authenticity, themes which appear repeatedly in Hellenistic romance.

This is a suggestive book which raises lots of issues for further research, and lays a a good foundation for the embedded letters we find in medieval texts (e.g. Troilus and Criseyde, and the development of the epistolary novel from the seventeenth century onwards.