Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature

by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

A comprehensive look at fictive letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus, first published in 2001. It includes both embedded epistolary narratives in a variety of genres (epic, historiography, tragedy, the novel), and works consisting solely of letters, such as the pseudonymous letter collections and the invented letters of the Second Sophistic. The book challenges the notion that Ovid 'invented' the fictional letter form in his Heroides and considers a wealth of Greek antecedents for the later European epistolary novel tradition. Epistolary technique always problematizes the boundaries between fictionality and reality. Based on a process of selection and self-censorship, the letter is a construction, not a reflection, of reality. The author bypasses the question of sincerity for a close look at epistolary self-representation, the function of the letter form and the nature of the relationship between writer and reader in a wide range of ancient Greek texts.

382 pages, Kindle Edition

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.