01.03 - PROLEGOMENA TO THE BIBLICAL LETTERS AND EPISTLES.
iii.
PROLEGOMENA TO THE BIBLICAL LETTERS AND EPISTLES.
9. We can be said to possess true letters from ancient times—in the full sense of the word possess—only when we have the originals. And, in fact, the Papyrus discoveries of the last decade have placed us in the favourable position of being able to think of as our very own an enormous number of true letters in the original, extending from the Ptolemaic period till far on in mediaeval times. The author is forced to confess that, previous to his acquaintance with ancient Papyrus letters (such as it was—only in facsimiles), he had never rightly known, or, at least, never rightly realised within his own mind, what a letter was. Comparing a Papyrus letter of the Ptolemaic period with a fragment from a tragedy, written also on Papyrus, and of about the same age, no one perceives any external difference; the same written characters, the same writing material, the same place of discovery. And yet the two are as different in their essential character as are reality and art: the one, a leaf with writing on it, which has served some perfectly definite and never-to-be-repeated purpose in human intercourse; the other, the derelict leaf of a book, a fragment of literature. These letters will of themselves reveal what they are, better than the author could, and in evidence of this, there follows a brief selection of letters from the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, the English translation of which (from Greek) all but verbally corresponds to that given by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt in their edition of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.31 The author has selected such letters as date from the century in which our Saviour walked about in the Holy Land, in which Paul wrote his letters, and the beginnings of the New Testament collection were made.32
I.
Letter from Chaireas to Tyrannos.33
A.D. 25-26.
“Chaireas to his dearest Tyrannos, many greetings. Write out immediately the list of arrears both of corn and money for the twelfth year of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, as Severus has given me instructions for demanding their payment. I have already written to you to be firm and demand payment until I come in peace. Do not therefore neglect this, but prepare the statements of corn and money from the . . . year to the eleventh for the presentation of the demands. Good-bye.” Address : “ To Tyrannos, dioiketes “.
II.
Letter of Recommendation from Theon to Tyrannos.34
About A.D. 25.
“Theon to his esteemed Tyrannos, many greetings. Herakleides, the bearer of this letter, is my brother. I therefore entreat you with all my power to treat him as your protege. I have also written to your brother Hermias, asking him to communicate with you about him. You will confer upon me a very great favour if Herakleides gains your notice. Before all else you have my good wishes for unbroken health and prosperity. Good-bye.” Address: “To Tyrannos, dioiketes”.
III.
Letter from Dionysios to his Sister Didyme.35
A.D. 27.
“Dionysios to his sister Didyme, many greetings, and good wishes for continued health. You have sent me no word about the clothes either by letter or by message, and they are still waiting until you send me word. Provide the bearer of this letter, Theonas, with any assistance that he wishes for. . .. Take care of yourself and all your household. Good-bye. The 14th year of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Athyr 18.” Address : “ Deliver from Dionysios to his sister Didyme “.
IV.
Letter from Thaeisus to her mother Syras.36
About A.D. 35.
“Thaeisus to her mother Syras. I must tell you that Seleukos came here and has fled. Don’t trouble to explain (?). Let Lucia wait until the year. Let me know the day. Salute Ammonas my brother and . . . and my sister . . . and my father Theonas.”
V.
Letter from Ammonios to his father Ammonios.37
A.D. 54.
“Ammonios to his father Ammonios, greeting. Kindly write me in a note the record of the sheep, how many more you have by the lambing beyond those included in the first return. . . . Good-bye. The 14th year of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus, Epeiph 29.”
Address: “To my father Ammonios”.
VI.
Letter from Indike to Thaeisus.38 Late First Century.
“Indike to Thaeisus, greeting. I sent you the bread-basket by Taurinus the camel-man; please send me an answer that you have received it. Salute my friend Theon and Nikobulos and Dioskoros and Theon and Hermokles, who have my best wishes. Longinus salutes you. Good-bye. Month Germanikos 2.” Address: “To Theon,39 son of Nikobulos, elaiochristes at the Gymnasion “.
VII.
Letter of Consolation from Eirene to Taonnophris and Philon.40
Second Century.
“Eirene to Taonnophris and Philon, good cheer. I was as much grieved and shed as many tears over Eumoiros as I shed for Didymas, and I did everything that was fitting, and so did my whole family,41 Epaphrodeitos and Thermuthion and Philion and Apollonios and Plantas. But still there is nothing one can do in the face of such trouble. So I leave you to comfort yourselves. Good-bye. Athyr 1.”
Address: “To Taonnophris and Philon”.
VIII.
Letter from Korbolon to Herakleides.42
Second Century.
“Korbolon to Herakleides, greeting. I send you the key by Horion, and the piece of the lock by Onnophris, the camel-driver of Apollonios. I enclosed in the former packet a pattern of white-violet colour. I beg you to be good enough to match it, and buy me two drachmas’ weight, and send it to me at once by any messenger you can find, for the tunic is to be woven immediately. I received everything you told me to expect by Onnophris safely. I send you by the same Onnophris six quarts of good apples. I thank all the gods to think that I came upon Plution in the Oxyrhynchite nome. Do not think that I took no trouble about the key. The reason is that the smith is a long way from us. I wonder that you did not see your way to let me have what I asked you to send by Korbolon, especially when I wanted it for a festival. I beg you to buy me a silver seal, and to send it me with all speed. Take care that Onnophris buys me what Eirene’s mother told him. I told him that Syntrophos said that nothing more should be given to Amarantos on my account. Let me know what you have given him that I may settle accounts with him. Otherwise I and my son will come for this purpose. [On the verso] I had the large cheeses from Korbolon. I did not, however, want large ones, but small. Let me know of anything that you want, and I will gladly do it. Farewell. Payni 1st. (P.S.) Send me an obol’s worth of cake for my nephew.”
Address: “To Herakleides, son of Ammonios.”
10. But we must not think that the heritage of true letters which we have received from the past is wholly comprised in the Papyrus letters which have been thus finely preserved as autographs. In books and booklets which have been transmitted to us as consisting of ἐπιστολαί, and in others as well, there is contained a goodly number of true letters, for the preservation of which we are indebted to the circumstance that some one, at some time subsequent to their being written, treated them as literature. Just as at some future time posterity will be grateful to our learned men of to-day for their having published the Papyrus letters, i.e., treated them as literature, so we ourselves have every cause for gratitude to those individuals, for the most part unknown, who long ago committed the indiscretion of making books out of letters. The great men whose letters, fortunately for us, were overtaken by this fate, were not on that account epistolographers; they were letter-writers —like, the strange saints of the Serapeum and the obscure men and women of the Fayyûm. No doubt, by reason of their letters having been preserved as literature, they have often been considered as epistolographers, and the misunderstanding may have been abetted by the vulgar notion that those celebrated men had the consciousness of their celebrity even when they laughed and yawned, and that they could not speak or write a single word without imagining that amazed mankind was standing by to hear and read. We have not as yet, in every case, identified those whom we have to thank for real letters. But it will be sufficient for our purpose if we restrict ourselves to a few likely instances. The letters of Aristotle († 322 B.C.) were published at a very early period: their publication gave the lie, in a very effective manner, to a fictitious collection which came out shortly after his death.43 These letters were “true letters, occasioned by the requirements of private correspondence, not products of art, i.e., treatises in the form of letters”.44 This collection is usually considered to be the first instance of private letters being subsequently published.45 It is therefore necessary to mention them here, though, indeed, it is uncertain whether anything really authentic has been preserved among the fragments which have come down to us;46 by far the greater number of these were certainly products of the fictitious literary composition of the Alexandrian period.47—The case stands more favourably with regard to the nine letters transmitted to us under the name of Isocrates († 338 B.C.).48 The most recent editor49 of them comes to the following conclusions. The first letter, to Dionysios, is authentic. The two letters of introduction, Nos. 7 and 8, to Timotheos of Heracleia and the inhabitants of Mitylene respectively, bear the same mark of authenticity: “so much detail, which, wherever we can test it, we recognise to be historically accurate, and which, to a much greater extent, we are not at all in a position to judge, is not found in forgeries, unless they are meant to serve other than their ostensible purposes. There can be no talk of that in the case before us. In these letters some forms of expression occur more than once (7, 11 = 8, 10), but there is nothing extraordinary in that. If Isocrates wrote these we must credit him with having issued many such compositions.”50 These genuine letters of Isocrates are of interest also in regard to their form, as they show “that Isocrates applied his rhetorical style also to his letters. . . . Considered from the point of view of style, they are not letters at all.”51 The author considers this fact to be very instructive in regard to method; it confirms the thesis expressed above, viz., that in answering the question as to what constitutes a true letter, it is never the form which is decisive, but ultimately only the intention of the writer; there ought not to be, but as a matter of fact there are, letters which read like pamphlets; there are epistles, again, which chatter so insinuatingly that we forget that their daintiness is nothing but a suspicious mask. Nor need one doubt, again, the genuineness of the second letter—to King Philip: “its contents are most undoubtedly personal”.52 Letter 5, to Alexander, is likewise genuine, “truly a fine piece of Isocratic finesse: it is genuine —just because it is more profound than it seems, and because it covertly refers to circumstances notoriously true”.53 The evidence for and against the genuineness of letter 6 is evenly balanced.54 On the other hand, letters 3, 4 and 9 are not genuine; are partly, in fact, forgeries with a purpose.55 This general result of the criticism is likewise of great value in regard to method: we must abandon the mechanical idea of a collection of letters, which would lead us to inquire as to the genuineness of the collection as a whole, instead of inquiring as to the genuineness of its component parts. Undiscerning tradition may quite well have joined together one or two unauthentic letters with a dozen of genuine ones; and, again, a whole book of forged “letters” may be, so to speak, the chaff in which good grains of wheat may hide themselves from the eyes of the servants: when the son of the house comes to the threshing-floor, he will discover them, for he cannot suffer that anything be lost.—The letters of the much-misunderstood Epicurus († 270 B.C.) were collected with great care by the Epicureans, and joined together with those of his most distinguished pupils, Metrodorus, Polyaenus, and Hermarchus, with additions from among the letters which these had received from other friends,56 and have in part come down to us. The author cannot refrain from giving here57 the fragment of a letter of the philosopher to his child (made known to us by the rolls of Herculaneum), not, indeed, as being a monument of his philosophy, but because it is part of a letter which is as simple and affectionate, as much a true letter, as that of Luther to his little son Hans:—
. . . [ἀ] φεύγμεθαεἰςΛάμψακον ὑγιαίνοντεςἐγὼκαὶΠυθοκλῆςκα[ὶἝρμ]αρχοςκαὶΚ[τή]σιππος,καὶἐκεῖκατειλήφαμεν ὑγ[ι]αίνονταςθεμίστανκαὶτοὺςλοιποὺς [φί]λο[υ]ς.εὖδὲποιε[ι]ςκαὶσὺε[ἰ ὑ]γιαίνειςκαὶἡμ[ά]μμη [σ]ουκαὶπάπᾳ καὶΜάτρω[ν]ιπάνταπε[ί]θη[ι,ὥσπ]ερκαὶ ἔ[μ]προσθεν.εὖ γὰρἴσθι,ἡαἰτία,ὅτικαὶἐγὼκαὶο[ί] λοιποὶπάντεςσεμέγα φιλοῦμεν,ὅτιτούτοιςπείθῃπάντα . . . .
Again in Latin literature we find a considerable number of real letters. “Letters, official58 as well as private, make their appearance in the literature59 of Rome at an early period, both by themselves and in historical works,60 and, soon thereafter, those of distinguished men in collections.” 61 We may refer to a single example—certainly a very instructive one. Of Cicero († 43 B.C.) we possess four collections of letters; in all 864, if we include the 90 addressed to him. The earliest belongs to the year 68, the latest is of the date 28th July, 43.62 “Their contents are both personal and political, and they form an inexhaustible source for a knowledge of the period,63 though partly, indeed, of such a kind that the publication of them was not to Cicero’s advantage. For the correspondence of such a man as Cicero, who was accustomed to think so quickly and feel so strongly, to whom it was a necessity that he should express his thoughts and feelings as they came, either in words or in letters to some confidential friend like Atticus, often affords a too searching, frequently even an illusory,64 glance into his inmost soul. Hence the accusers of Cicero gathered the greatest part of their material from these letters.”65 The letters show a noteworthy variation of language: “in the letters to Atticus or other well known friends Cicero abandons restraint, while those to less intimate persons show marks of care and elaboration”.66 The history of the gathering together of Cicero’s letters is of great importance for a right understanding of similar literary transactions. “Cicero did not himself collect the letters he had written, still less publish them, but even during his lifetime his intimate friends were already harbouring such intentions.”67 “After Cicero’s death the collecting and publishing of his letters was zealously promoted; in the first place, undoubtedly, by Tiro, who, while Cicero was still living, had resolved to collect his letters.”68 Cornelius Nepos, according to a note in that part of his biography of Atticus which was written before 34 B.C., had, even by that date, a knowledge, from private sources, of the letters to Atticus;69 “they were not as yet published, indeed, as he expressly says, but, it would appear, already collected with a view to publication. The first known mention of a letter from Cicero’s correspondence being published is found at the earliest” in Seneca.70 The following details of the work of collection may be taken as established.71 Atticus negotiated the issue of the letters addressed to him, while the others appear to have been published gradually by Tiro; both editors suppressed their own letters to Cicero. Tiro arranged the letters according to the individuals who had received them, and published the special correspondence of each in one or more volumes, according to the material he had. Such special materials, again, as did not suffice for a complete volume, as also isolated letters, were bound up in miscellanea (embracing letters to two or more individuals), while previously published collections were supplemented in later issues by letters which had only been written subsequently, or subsequently rendered accessible. The majority of these letters of Cicero are “truly confidential outpourings of the feelings of the moment,”72 particularly those addressed to Atticus—“confidential letters, in which the writer expresses himself without a particle of constraint, and which often contain allusions intelligible to the receiver alone. In some parts they read like soliloquies.”73 The authenticity of the letters to Brutus, for instance, has been disputed by many, but these assailants “have been worsted on all points, and the authenticity is now more certain than ever. The objections that have been urged against this collection, and those, in particular, which relate to the contradictions between Cicero’s confidential judgments upon individuals and those he made publicly or in utterances of other times, are of but little weight.”74
11. The fact that we know of a relatively large number of literary letters, i.e., epistles, of ancient times, and that, further, we possess many such, is a simple consequence of their being literary productions. Literature is designed not merely for the public of the time being; it is also for the future. It has not been ascertained with certainty which was the first instance of the literary letter in Greek literature. Susemihl75 is inclined to think that the epidictic triflings of Lysias († 379 B.C.) occupy this position—that is, if they be authentic—but he certainly considers it possible that they originated in the later Attic period. Aristotle employed the “imaginary letter” (fictiver Brief) for his Protreptikos.76 We have “didactic epistles” of Epicurus, as also of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and we may add to these such writings of Plutarch as De Conjugalibus Praeceptis, De Tranquillitate Animi, De Animae Procreatione77—literary productions to which one may well apply the words of an ancient expert in such things,78οὐμὰτὴνἀλήθειανἐπιστολαὶλέγοιντοἄν,ἀλλὰσυγγράμματατὸχαίρειν ἔχοντα προσγεγραμμένον, and εἰγάρτιςἐνἐπιστολῇσοφίσματαγράφεικαὶυσιολογίας,γραφειμέν,οὐμὴνἐπιστολὴνγράφει.79 Among the Romans, M. Porcius Cato († 149 B.C.) should probably be named as one of the first writers of epistles;80 the best known, doubtless, are Seneca and Pliny. L. Annaeus Seneca81 († 165 A.D.) began about the year 57—at a time when Paul was writing his “great” letters—to write the Epistulae Morales to his friend Lucilius, intending from the first that they should be published; most probably the first three books were issued by himself. Then in the time of Trajan, C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus82 († ca. 113 A.D.) wrote and published nine books of “letters”; the issue of the collection was already complete by the time Pliny went to Bithynia. Then came his correspondence with Trajan, belonging chiefly to the period of his governorship in Bithynia (ca. September 111 to January 113). The letters of Pliny were likewise intended from the first for publication, “and hence are far from giving the same impression of freshness and directness as those of Cicero”;83 “with studied variety they enlarge upon a multitude of topics, but are mainly designed to exhibit their author in the most favourable light”;84 “they exhibit him as an affectionate husband, a faithful friend, a generous slaveholder, a noble-minded citizen, a liberal promoter of all good causes, an honoured orator and author”;85 “on the other hand, the correspondence with Trajan incidentally raises a sharp contrast between the patience and quiet prudence of the emperor and the struggling perplexity and self-importance of his vicegerent”.86 “All possible care has likewise been bestowed upon the form of these letters.”87
There are several other facts illustrative of the extremely wide dissemination of the practice of epistle-writing among the Greeks and Romans. The epistle, having once gained a position as a literary eidos, became differentiated into a whole series of almost independent forms of composition. We should, in the first place, recall the poetical epistle88 (especially of Lucilius, Horace, Ovid); but there were also juristic epistles—a literary form which probably originated in the written responsa to questions on legal subjects;89 further, there were epistulae medicinales,90 gastronomic “letters,”91 etc. In this connection it were well to direct particular attention to the great popularity of the epistle as the special form of magical and religious literature. “All the Magic Papyri are of this letter-form, and in all the ceremonial and mystic literature—to say nothing of other kinds—it was the customary form. At that time the pioneers of new religions clothed their message in this form, and even when they furnish their writings with a stereotype title of such a kind, and with particularly sacred names, it would yet be doing them an injustice simply to call them forgers.”92
12. A very brief reference to the pseudonymous epistolography of antiquity is all that is required here. It will be sufficient for us to realise the great vogue it enjoyed, after the Alexandrian period, among the Greeks and subsequently among the Romans. It is decidedly one of the most characteristic features of post-classical literature. We already find a number of the last-mentioned epistles bearing the names of pretended authors; it is, indeed, difficult to draw a line between the “genuine” and the fictitious epistles when the two are set in contrast to letters really such.93 As may be easily understood, pseudonymous epistolography specially affected the celebrated names of the past, and not least the names of those great men the real letters of whom were extant in collections. The literary practice of using assumed or protective names was found highly convenient by such obscure people as felt that they must make a contribution to literature of a page or two; they did not place their own names upon their books, for they had the true enough pre-sentiment that these would be a matter of indifference to their contemporaries and to posterity, nor did they substitute for them some unknown Gaius or Timon: what they did was to write “letters” of Plato or Demosthenes, of Aristotle or his royal pupil, of Cicero, Brutus or Horace. It would be superfluous in the meantime to go into particulars about any specially characteristic examples, the more so as the present position of the investigation still makes it difficult for us to assign to each its special historical place, but at all events the pseudonymous epistolography of antiquity stands out quite clearly as a distinct aggregate of literary phenomena. Suffice it only to refer further to what may be very well gleaned from a recent work,94 viz., that the early imperial period was the classical age of this most unclassical manufacturing of books.