The Case of the Purloined Letter-Manuals: Archival Issues in Ancient Epistolary Theory

Abstract

This essay argues that the significance and nature of ancient epistolary theory have been underestimated and misunderstood due to the nature of the ancient materials, their history of transmission, and the prestige economies of modern (and ancient) academic hierarchies, and it discusses ways in which shifts of interpretive focus can further our understanding of certain aspects of ancient verbal skills training and theory.

Notes

¹As my work on ancient epistolary theory has spanned most of the past decade, I owe thanks to more people and institutions than can be cited individually. My greatest debts are to the organizers of the “Pepperdine” conferences on rhetorical criticism of the Bible (especially Gregory Bloomquist, Anders Eriksson, and Tom Olbricht), to Geoffrey Huck for material on academic publishing, to Manfred Kraus, Malcolm Heath, and Susan Miller for invaluable discussions, e-mails, and copies of works-in-progress, and to the staff of Rhetoric Review (especially David Reamer) and two manuscript readers (Richard Enos and George Kennedy).

²For an important discussion of concept of “archive” in rhetorical theory, see Ferreira-Buckley and the related articles in College English 61.5 (1999).

³See Camargo for discussion of medieval terminology.

⁴For a detailed discussion of the sources for ancient dictamen, see Poster (“A Conversation”).

⁵Kennedy (The Art of Rhetoric) omits it entirely, an oversight only perfunctorily remedied in his Greek Rhetoric under the Christian Emperors. Donald Clark's only discussion of letter-writing is a brief summary of comments by Seneca, Cicero, and Demetrius on epistolary style (103-06). Both of M. L. Clarke's studies of ancient rhetoric (Higher Education and Rhetoric at Rome) ignore letter-writing; when he condemns the lack of originality of the later Latin rhetoricians, he fails to note that Julius Victor is the only theorist he discusses who attempts a substantial treatment of letter-writing (Rhetoric at Rome 140). Two other works on Roman eloquence and education, Bonner and Dominik, also ignore the topic. Marrou, Murphy (Synoptic; A Short History), and Morgan omit ancient letter-writing instruction entirely. Harris does include very useful information on letter-writing and literacy, but letter-writing instruction per se is somewhat outside the scope of his work.

⁶See Bagnall and Cribiore for a selection of ancient women's letters. Cribiore (Writing) discusses ancient writing teachers, but not dictamen. Kraus discusses the impersonation of women in the exercise of ethopoeia, which was often done in epistolary form. None of these authors discuss ancient dictamen per se.

⁷Watson and Hauser provide a comprehensive bibliography (revision forthcoming) of rhetorical (and epistolary) approaches to the New Testament.

⁸For classics see Costa and Rosenmeyer; for literary studies see the essays in Huntington Library Quarterly 66 (2003): 3–4.

⁹See Porter (“What is ‘Classical’” and Classical Pasts) for discussions of what is considered classic in classical studies.

¹⁰See Graff et al. for a recent discussion of the movement toward inclusiveness in historical rhetoric and Lipson and Binkley (Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks) and Kennedy (Comparative Rhetoric), inter alia, for recent investigations into alternative rhetorical traditions.

¹¹For medieval dictaminal scholarship, see especially Camargo, Murphy (Rhetoric in the Middle Ages), Poster and Utz, and Poster and Mitchell.

¹²Chartier is a notable exception, as is some work in medieval and Renaissance rhetoric (see Poster and Mitchell for relevant bibliographies).

¹³For issues of authorship and prestige, see Foucault's “What Is an Author?” and Poster's “(Re)Positioning.”

¹⁴For textual problems of grammar handbooks and glossaries, see Dionisotti or Wouters. For transmission and accretive nature of Rhetores Latini Minores, see Reynolds (338-40); Kennedy describes a similar process for minor Greek rhetoricians under the Roman Empire (Art of Rhetoric 616 sq.). See Dilts and Kennedy for rhetorical technography. Gibson describes the complex textual history of commentaries and scholia on Demosthenes, illustrating a pattern of contamination, excerption, and revision typical of handbook materials.

¹⁵The standard method of citing ancient Greek and Latin works is by page or chapter number in either the editio princeps (first printed edition) of a work or a standard modern edition that supplanted it. The standard abbreviations for classical works can be found in LSJ (Liddell, Scott, and Jones's A Greek-English Lexicon). Throughout this article I cite Libanius's epistles by the number of the epistle in Foerester's edition of the text.

¹⁶See discussion of P. bon. 5 in Malherbe, Cribiore (Writing and Gymnastics) on role of formulae in education, and Rosenmeyer on formulaic nature of fictional letters. Cole makes the interesting point that early rhetorical handbooks may well have consisted of collections of models rather than prescriptive manuals.

¹⁷See Sussman for issues of university prestige hierarchies in classical studies, and Susan Miller (Textual) and Thomas Miller (“Disciplinary Identifications”) for similar issues with respect to rhetoric/composition.

¹⁸This issue has been discussed in some detail in the Faculty of Arts council at my own (Canadian) university, and my discussion of it here follows both internal committee reports and some of the public discussion of Canadian scholarship in recent issues of the bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

¹⁹For discussion of scholarly press and tenure issues, see the MLA statement found at http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/issues_scholarly_pub/repview_future_pub. For changing economics of scholarly book publishing, see the excellent selection of articles and references at http://aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/index.html.

²⁰The utility of non-elite texts, especially papyri, for understanding the New Testament has been widely acknowledged since the work of Deissmann (Light from Ancient Letters and Light from the Ancient East), but scholars in other disciplines have been slower to assimilate papyrological evidence into their work. See Bagnall for major issues concerning use of papyri for general studies of antiquity.

²¹See Kaster for social status of teachers of non-elite or elementary verbal skills. For similar issues of the status hierarchies in English composition (especially relative to other areas within English studies), see Susan Miller.

²²This also may reflect a preference for performance over theory in the second sophistic. Philostratus, for example, displays little interest in rhetorical theory; even when he discusses sophists who made major innovations in rhetorical theory, he ignores or dismisses their handbooks, and comments exclusively on their performances and their students' performances (discussed in Heath's Menander).

²³For the position and qualifications of the post of ab epistulis see Lewis, Lindsay, and Townend. It may also be the case that the Imperial Secretary should be thought of more as we might now use the term Secretary of State or Foreign Secretary than as a position involving letter-writing (which might actually have been done by their lower-level staff) and that we might consider the rivalry as one similar to contemporary tensions between appointed ambassadors and career Foreign Service. This may also reflect a general cultural shift, from conviction primarily by intrinsic to conviction by extrinsic ethos in postclassical ancient rhetoric (discussed in Poster's “Ethos”). See John Lydus's autobiography (Carney) for a first-hand account of an early Byzantine chancery.

²⁴Hercher and Weichart have both made valuable steps in this direction, but more needs to be done, especially in examining early medieval manuscripts for remains of ancient epistolary theory, a task that will be greatly facilitated by the completion of Emil Polak's monumental catalogue of medieval and Renaissance dictaminal manuscripts in libraries, which also includes medieval manuscripts of classical texts. The works on ancient school texts by Cribiore (Writing) and Morgan are quite useful but do not focus on letter-writing instruction per se. See Malosse for discussion of earlier editions of ps.-Demetrius and ps.-Libanius.

²⁵Malherbe's anthology, which collects and translates (into English) ancient epistolary manuals, is invaluable, but not comprehensive. Malosse's French volume contains translations of ps.-Demetrius and ps.-Libanius, with useful introduction, analyses, and notes. But far more work remains to be done than has been accomplished, for example, assembling the numerous comments about letter-writing theory scattered through Libanius's epistles in order to reconstruct a coherent picture of the theoretical reflections of one of antiquity's more effective epistolary sophists.

²⁶Several scholars in New Testament studies have begun the task of gathering papyrological evidence related to ancient dictamen, but it is a task several orders of magnitude larger than the rest listed here, and the contours of their project are often defined by a New Testament focus rather than by a general interest in the nature of secular education and careers throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity. Deissmann's work was seminal. General collections by biblical scholars of documentary papyrus letters accompanied by critical commentary include Kim and White, Stowers, and White (Light from Ancient Letters). There have been several specialized studies of papyrus letter genres as well, notably Cotton, Dionisotti, Keyes, Kim (Form and Structure and “The Papyrus Invitation”), Stirewalt (“Form and Function,” Studies in Ancient Greek Epistolography) and White (Form and Structure and Form and Function). Broader studies of papyrus letters in relation to epistolary theory within New Testament scholarship include Doty, Exler, and White (“New Testament”). Papyrus letters have also been treated by scholars investigating literacy education, especially Cribiore (Writing), Harris, and Morgan and several of the essays in Bowman and Woolf, but they do not discuss epistolary theory or instruction per se. Rosenmeyer understands fictional epistles as part of a tradition of literary fiction rather than of epistolary pedagogy.

²⁷Writers on epistolary theory have only rarely explored in any particular detail the career positions associated with letter-writing skills (for example, Poster, “Economy”), and studies of Roman administrative history have not focused on letter-writing education. Aubert discusses much of the primary material necessary to reconstruct how letter-writing skills affected employability in lower levels of estate management. For administrative history, including the workings of the imperial chanceries, see Braund, Carney, Honoré, Millar, and Petit's (Les Fonctionnaires) prosopographical analysis of Libanius's letters; see Bowman (Town Councils) and Oates (Ptolemaic) for focused studies of local Egyptian administration. For professional qualifications, including verbal skills, for various administrative posts, see Parks's The Roman Rhetorical Schools and Pederson's Late Roman Professionalism. For discussions of chancery Greek and Latin, see, for example, Benner, Fridh, and Vidén. Teitler provides a unique and outstandingly useful perspective on the role of stenography in Graeco-Roman administration, emphasizing a quite important phenomenon overlooked by most other scholars. Richards discusses ancient secretaries in some detail (albeit mainly in relation to the Pauline epistles).

²⁸Although biblical scholars have made significant efforts to include rhetorical scholars in their disciplinary conversations, reciprocal interdisciplinary conversations have been limited. The primary site of interaction has been a series of conferences and associated publications informally known as the “Pepperdine” conferences, founded by Tom Olbricht and colleagues. The group of scholars participating in this effort to bring together rhetoric and biblical studies has been impressively interdisciplinary, international, and ecumenical, including scholars from communication, English, philosophy, classics, religion, and biblical studies departments, from many (and no) faith traditions, and North American, African, European, and Asian countries. Some of the recent publications from the group include Eriksson, Olbricht, and Übelaker's Rhetorical Argumentation in Biblical Texts and Rhetoric, Ethic, and Moral Persuasion.

²⁹Despite excellent work by Cribiore on educational papyri and Kim and White on letters relevant to New Testament studies, there is no straightforward way to find papyri relevant to the study of ancient letter-writing theory and pedagogy. APIS, an online search engine covering papyri in six United States institutions (including Duke), simplifies searching those particular collections, as does the Vindolanda Tablets Online site. However, for most collections, the only method of searching for relevant information remains the brute force one of reading through complete festschrifts, proceedings, journals, and books in which editions of papyri are published in order to locate useful materials. The pitfalls for the nonspecialist are legion.

³⁰A model for this would be Petit (Les Étudiants and Les Fonctionnaires) on the students of Libanius. Unfortunately, the subelite and diffuse character of epistolary instruction makes prosopographical information considerably more difficult to recover. Teitler's work on stenographers is another possible model.

³¹See note 22.

Kim, Chan-Hie, and John L. White. Letters from Papyri: A Study Collection. Society for Biblical Literature, 1974.