Patricia A. Rosenmeyer - Ancient Greek Literary Letters

In the sixth book of the Iliad, Homer recounts the story of Bellerophon, a handsome young man of noble blood who visits King Proteus in Argos. The kings wife Anteia falls in love with their guest and tries to seduce him, but when Bellerophon refuses to play along, she quickly turns the tables on him. Anteia announces to her husband that the young man has assaulted her, and the king is forced to take action. Unwilling to pollute his own hands with the murder of a guest, Proteus sends Bellerophon away with a sealed message in his hands to deliver to Anteias father, the king of Lycia (Il. 6. 16770):

He rejected the idea of killing him, since he had an honorable heart;
instead he sent him to Lycia and gave him a grim message to take along,
writing down many things in the folded tablets, things that would destroy a mans soul;
he commanded Bellerophon to show them to Anteias father, plotting to have him killed.

These folded tablets with their fatal commands are the first step in a series of delayed death sentences, as the king of Lycia is no more eager to commit murder than Proteus had been. Bellerophon fortunately survives Anteias false accusation and the kings death warrant. The tablets are presumably recycled, sent back later with some more mundane message inscribed on their surfaces. On another level, the epistolary part of the story is recycled in Shakespeares Hamlet, where the dramatist finds the idea of a dangerous sealed letter in the unwitting protagonists hands too enticing a plot device to ignore.

This literary anecdote shows in a nutshell just how far back the epistolary impulse can be traced in the Greek imagination, and how influential it was for later Western literature. The first recorded example of an epistolary acta reference to a folded tablet with written signs, whether alphabetic or pictographicoccurs in our earliest extant example of ancient Greek literature, and may have been part of an even older mythic tradition.

When we start consciously looking for them, letters can be found lurking in every corner of ancient Greek writing. But this book aims not only to bring the letters themselves into clear view for contemporary readers, but also to draw attention to what lies at the very heart of the various types of letters collected here, namely the epistolary impulse at work in Greek literature, the Greek epistolary imagination. We can set aside the question of whether letters are fictional or real, historical or literarya highly problematic issue that has been addressed elsewhere (Trapp 2003; Rosenmeyer 2001; Luck 1961)and focus instead on the writers imagination, both his personal imagination and the large part of his imagination that is culturally determined and shared. Many writers chose to include letters in other narrative genres: Euripides brought letters on stage; historians included letters for their documentary cachet; Greek novelists sprinkled their stories with letters exchanged between separated lovers; and epigrammatists played with the idea of epigram as letter (paradoxical in that the purported origin of the epigram was an inscription on stone, surely one of the least portable of all ancient writing surfaces). By the second and third centuries CE, many centuries after Homers epics were written down, imaginative letters evolved into an established genre in their own right: Aelian and Alciphron excelled in epistolary impersonations, imitating the voices of the lower classes; Philostratus emerged as a master of epistolary spin, taking one theme and subtly tweaking it in half a dozen letters to different addressees; and anonymous writers competed with one another in their particular form of ghostwriting for the rich and famous.