Fragmented Narrative: the Narratology of the Letter and Epistolary Literature in Ancient Greek
An International KYKNOS Conference at the University of Wales Trinity St David
21 – 24 September 2008
Recent scholarship in Classics and beyond has shown great interest in letters and epistolary literature of all forms (most recently in R. Morello & A. D. Morrison, Ancient Letters), including the narrative uses of the epistolary form (see especially N. Holzberg’s Der griechische Briefroman and P. A. Rosenmeyer’s Ancient Epistolary Fictions). The use of embedded letters to advance the narrative (among other functions) in genres such as historiography and the novel, and the potential for real or pseudonymous letters or collections of letters to function as (real or fictionalised) biography, autobiography, or historical narrative/novel, mean that letters in antiquity play a crucial role in the development of narrative literature of many kinds, especially biographical and novelistic. Spurious and fictional letters have also been recognised as important in tracing the origins of the novel in early work in this field, but have since then been marginalised by scholars working on the novels, as in other fields, until recently. The particular capacity of letters to reveal the private lives of the great and the good, and likewise of ordinary people, makes epistolary literature an essential consideration in studying the invention of prose fiction in antiquity. The great popularity of letters, with varying degrees of fictionality or literariness, as reading-matter rather than merely tools for communication, especially in the Imperial period, also makes it essential that we pay attention to this genre and its great quantity and variety of texts, if we are to understand the reading practices and appreciate the literature of antiquity without modern prejudices about the ‘artificiality’ of epistolary literature.
Letters are always about narrative, among other things: whether directly—narrating events to absent correspondents; or indirectly—presenting fragments of, or oblique hints at, an underlying narrative which the reader must reconstruct. In contrast to more general epistolary studies, the aim of this conference was to explore both this inherent narrative quality of letters and its use by Greek authors in a variety of genres and kinds of text; and the fragmentary, limited, sometimes even wilfully obscure nature of epistolary narratives which omit vital information in the name of verisimilitude. The result was a series of discussions of the narratives and the narratology of the Greek letter, taking into account fresh approaches to epistolarity from a variety of disciplines, and considering some usually neglected epistolary texts.
The literary qualities of many collections of Greek letters are often overlooked, despite the fact that they were evidently read (and in later cases written) as literature or as fiction and display the same awareness of generic conventions and self-consciousness of their literary nature as other kinds (e.g. engaging in intertextuality with famous earlier letter collections—notably the Platonic letters). The conference managed to restore letters to a place of prominence in scholarship on Greek narratives of all genres, and explored the great wealth of epistolary material in Greek which has been far less studied than similar texts in Latin—and in some cases (especially the so-called epistolary novels) have no obvious equivalent in Latin. Texts which are studied for other reasons but whose epistolary-literary form has not been examined in detail are also central to the project. (Many collections of letters are studied as part of the history of philosophy, oratory, medicine, etc., but there is much to be said about them as narratives and as epistolary literature.) Other texts, clearly spurious but purporting to be documents in the lives of famous historical characters, have been neglected largely because of their spuriousness, but are nevertheless significant in the development of epistolary and fictional literature and their relation to one another.
Central issues explored were:
the development of narrative (in any genre) in relation to embedded letters or collections of lettersthe relationship of epistolary texts to the beginnings of (auto)biography, novels, or any prose narrative, whether fictional or (pseudo-)historiographicalthe popularity and readership of epistolary literature the effect of the epistolary form on the narrative it contains: what difference does it make?particular themes and types of narrative which lend themselves well to ancient authors’ conception of the uses of lettersdifferences between sub-types of epistolary narrative literature: e.g. individual letters vs. collections, collections forming continuous narratives (Briefroman) vs. narrating separate events, narratives relying heavily on embedded letters at particular points or throughoutthe structure, unity and variety of collections of letters when composed to fit into a collection (e.g. later Platonic letters written to appear consistent with earlier (?) genuine ones), or composed as an ‘epistolary book’ (by analogy with ‘poetic book’; e.g. notably epistolary novels, Aelian, Alciphron)self-consciously literary or fictional qualities in Greek letters, including intertextuality with other literary texts and particularly allusions to earlier letters as literaturehow issues of narrative are negotiated in modern scholarly readings/uses of ancient epistolary texts
List of Speakers and Papers at the Conference
Prof. Patricia Rosenmeyer, (Wisconsin-Madison) ‘Epistolary Appearances: Texts and/or Objects’
Prof. Ewen Bowie (Corpus Christi College, Oxford) ‘Ceci, ce n’est pas une epitre: early poetic (non?)-letters.’
Dr. Angus Bowie (The Queen’s College, Oxford) ‘Letters in Herodotus’ narrative’
Prof. Deborah Gera (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) ‘Letters in Xenophon’s narrative’
Dr. Andrew Morrison (Manchester) ‘Narrative and Epistolarity in the“Platonic” Epistles’
Dr. Fritz-Gregor Herrmann (Swansea) ‘Form and function in Plato’s seventh letter’
Dr. Tim Whitmarsh (Corpus Christi College, Oxford) ‘Letters and figures: PSI XII.1285’
Dr. Thomas Rütten (Newcastle) ‘The epistolary novel about Hippocrates and Democritus’
Prof. Pamela Gordon (Kansas) ‘Stop Writing to Me: Epicurean Women and their Correspondence’
Dr. Jason König (St Andrews) ‘Sympotic letters: Alciphron, Athenaeus, Lucian’
Johanna Hanink (Queens’ College, Cambridge) ‘Biographical narrative in the letters of [Euripides]’
Asst. Prof. Lawrence Kim (Texas Austin) ‘The letter from Amasis in Plutarch’s Banquet of the Seven Sages’
Prof. Dimitri Kasprzyk (Bretagne Occidentale) ‘Manipulation of letters in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius’
Prof. Niall Slater (Emory) ‘Lucian’s Saturnalian Epistolarity’
Silvio Bär (Zurich) ‘Odysseus’ Letter to Kalypso in Lucian’s True Stories’
Prof. John Morgan (Swansea) ‘The epistolary ghost story in Phlegon of Tralleis’
Dr. Ian Repath (Swansea) ‘Narrative Exchanged: Letters in Achilles Tatius’
Owen Hodkinson (Lampeter) ‘Ps.-Aeschines’ 10th Letter’
Jane McLarty (Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge) ‘ ‘We wish to inform you that we are being killed with our families’: the emotional appeal of Christian martyrdom letters.’
Asst. Prof. Regina Höschele (Toronto) ‘Puella scripta - puella picta: Aristainetos' Epistolary Loves’
Organiser
Dr. Owen Hodkinson, University of Wales Trinity St David
Acknowledgements
This conference could not have taken place without generous financial support from the following sources:
University of Wales, Lampeter: Research Initiative Fund
University of Wales, Lampeter: Department of Classics
UWICAH
The Classical Association (providing four Postgraduate Bursaries)
