Ancient letters
Subtitle: classical and late antique epistolography
By: edited by Ruth Morello and A. D. Morrison.
Contributors: Morello, Ruth.; Morrison, A. D.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 373
ISBN-13: 9780199203956
Subjects: Latin letters -- History and criticism.; Letter-writing, Latin -- History.; Authors, Latin -- Correspondence -- History and criticism.; Statesmen -- Rome -- Correspondence -- History and criticism.
Description: "Ancient letters are a notoriously varied and complex genre; under the heading of 'letters' come not only the everyday letters preserved among the Oxyrhynchus papyri but also imperial rescripts, New Testament Epistles, and a vast body of epistolary material (in prose and verse) on politics, philosophy, family life, medicine, and literature, as well as collections of fictional and pseudepigraphic letters." "This collection presents a series of case studies in ancient epistolography which explore the varieties and rhetorical advantages of the letter form, asking how each letter writer manipulates the epistolary tradition, why he chose the letter form over any other, and what effect the publication of volumes of collected letters might have had upon a reader's engagement with epistolary works. This volume is the first of its kind on ancient letters in any language, and it brings together both well-established and promising young scholars currently working in the fields of ancient literature, history, philosophy, and medicine to engage in a shared debate about this most adaptable and 'interdisciplinary' of genres."--BOOK JACKET.
Table of contents: title: What is a letter? / Roy K. Gibson and A. D. Morrison; title: Down among the documents : criticism and papyrus letters / G. O. Hutchinson; title: When who should walk into the room but : epistoliterarity in Cicero, ad qfr. 3.1 / John Henderson; title: Cicero's stomach : political indignation and the use of repeated allusive expressions in Ciceros correspondence / Stanley E. Hoffer; title: Didacticism and epistolarity in Horace's epistles 1 / A. D. Morrison; title: The importance of form in Seneca's philosophical letters / Brad Inwood; title: Letters of recommendation and the rhetoric of praise / Roger Rees; title: Confidence, invidia, and Pliny's epistolary curriculum / Ruth Morello; title: The letter's the thing (in Pliny, book 7) / William Fitzgerald; title: The epistula in ancient scientific and technical literature, with special reference to medicine / D. R. Langslow; title: Back to Fronto : doctor and patient in his correspondence with an emperor / Annelise Freisenbruch; title: Alciphron's epistolarity / Jason Knig; title: Better than speech : some advantages of the letter in the Second Sophistic / Owen Hodkinson; title: Mixed messages : the play of epistolary codes in two late antique Latin correspondences / Jennifer Ebbeler; title: St Patrick and the art of allusion / Andrew Fear.