CLASPHIL 216: Greek Epistolography

Letters were an important medium of long-distance communication in the ancient Mediterranean, be it for private matters, official affairs, or business transactions. Soon after its emergence in the Greek world, the epistolary form was adopted by educated elites and transformed into a literary genre, which developed distinctive motifs and was used, for instance, to convey philosophical and political ideas, to establish and foster ties with peers, or to narrate stories. This seminar will explore a broad range of texts that employ or toy with epistolarity and that discuss or theorize letter-writing. These include discourses of written communication in archaic and classical literature (especially Homer, Herodotus and Euripides); literary letters of the classical and Hellenistic periods (e.g., Plato, Demosthenes, Epicurus); Hellenistic and Roman papyrus letters; the Pauline Epistles; fictional letter-collections and epistolary novels of the Hellenistic and imperial periods; late antique and Byzantine letter-collections of churchmen and literati; letter-writing manuals; and the prose and verse letters of Renaissance humanists. On the basis of primary and secondary source readings we will discuss aspects of oral and written communication, materiality, form and function, genre, fictionality, and narrative in Greek literary and non-literary contexts from the archaic period to the Renaissance.