Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature

The first comprehensive look at fictive letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus. 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.

• Close reading of a variety of ancient Greek texts • Applies modern literary theory to ancient texts • An overview of the epistolary form in antiquity

Acknowledgments; Prologue; Part I. Epistolarity: An Introduction: 1. A culture of letter writing; Part II. Epistolary Fictions: 2. Homer: the father of letters; 3. Letters in the historians; 4. Staging letters: embedded letters in Euripides; 5. Letters in Hellenistic poetry; Part III. The Epistolary Novel: 6. Embedded letters in the Greek novel; 7. The Alexander Romance; 8. Pseudonymous letter collections; 9. Chion of Heraclea: an epistolary novel; Part IV. Epistolography in the Second Sophistic: 10. The Letters of Alciphron; 11. Aelian’s Rustic Letters; 12. The Erotic Epistles of Philostratus; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.