Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity

by Stanley Kent Stowers

Making use of letters--both formal and personal--that have been preserved through the ages, Stanley Stowers analyzes the cultural setting within which Christianity arose. The Library of Early Christianity is a series of eight outstanding books exploring the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts in which the New Testament developed.

Genres: History

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fifth book in the Library of Early Christianity series, this one discusses standard letters during the first centuries of the Common Era, given that most of the New Testament is made up of letters, and even those books that aren't letters often include letters within them. Most of Stowers's book consists of a discussion of various "genres" of letters and examples of them. In this sense, the textis not unlike the third book in the series, which provides examples of philosophical discussions of morality during the same time period. But where there the focus was on similarities of content, this book seems more interested in similarities of form (though that necessarily ends up including similar content). As such, this book was not nearly as interesting.

What worked best in this book was the first third of the work, where the author discusses letter writing at the time, rather than focusing on generic examples. Here, we see that Christian letters in fact adopted many of the same techniques as those written by non-Christians. Most interesting in these early discussions was Stowers's exploration of who wrote what type of letters--namely, how class and education affected the kind of letters one wrote. Lower classes, if they learned to write at all, learned very basic things about letter writing, while upper classes studied rhetoric and classic/proper letter form. Those who could not write hired professionals to write for them--and to read letters too.