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This chapter shows how the Epistulae morales, with their serialized habit of meditatio mortis (“death rehearsal”), create an interpretive framework for Seneca's death. Amid Seneca's innovative uses of the epistolary collection as a literary form, the programmatic first letter identifies the paradoxical concept of cotidie mori (“dying each day”) as a central focus. In the course of the correspondence cotidie mori is mapped out across two dimensions: the sequence of letters, with its momentum and multiplicity; and the internal structure of the single letter, with its singularity and closure. These literary manifestations of daily mortality offer a useful framework for thinking about Seneca's own actual death, and about Paulina's willingness to die with him.

This chapter tests the practical usefulness of four theoretical frameworks that have been proposed for the analysis of linguistic politeness: those of Brown and Levinson, Watts, Terkourafi, and Hall. A non-technical explanation of these theories and the arguments normally used for and against each is provided. The theories are then used to analyse a corpus of 661 passage from Cicero’s letters (i.e. all passages in the letters where Cicero uses one of his favourite words for ‘please’, rogo, oro, peto, quaeso, or velim). The analysis indicates that politeness theories can be helpful in understanding even very well-known Latin expressions like these, but at the same time no one theory can be applied as a template on its own, because each has some serious drawbacks. Nevertheless several theories have strengths that allow them, if judicously applied in the context of careful examination of evidence, to enhance our understanding significantly.

The epistle as a representation of Arabic literary genres has a long history. Historical and literary sources abound with samples of letters believed to have been exchanged during the early Islamic period, which provide a glimpse into the early political and social activity in Islamic society and into the early Arabic prose style. Written contracts and epistles existed in the advent of Islam, and the commandment to register debts with a scribe is found in the Qur'an. Epistolography, the art or science of letter-writing, is believed to have developed quickly into the most important form of writing in Islamic society. This chapter examines the background of letter-writing in the Islamic Middle period, particularly during the 5th to 9th/11th to 15th centuries. While it is assumed that many of the characteristics of letter-writing in pre-modern Islamic society are indicative of the cultural, historical and intellectual trends, as well as the unique literary style, of Arabic letter-writing, Chapter 1 also examines to what extent letter-writing in Western culture has influenced Arabic epistolary writing. It also discusses insā, which serves as key to the artistic prose style that dominated Arabic literature for several centuries, as well as some of the principles of insā, which have been carried out through the modern period.

The prominence of epistolography prose has remained because it was effectively guaranteed by a debate that attempted to justify the superiority of prose over poetry, and to a lesser extent, prose over oratory. The popularity of epistolography prose was also sustained by the very fact that the secretary controlled the literary climate to which the epistolary genre belonged, and exploited that situation to emphasise that his pen was also his sword. This chapter aims to determine why and how letter-writing come to prominence as the most important form of artistic prose communication, and how it remained the most popular form of writing for many centuries. It discusses the complex relationship between poetry, oratory and prose in Arabic literature as it is presented by the pre-modern literary critics, and illustrates how some of them argued that epistolary prose was the supreme literary art form. The discussion is balanced by brief evaluation of those writers who attempted to assert the authority of poetry over prose.

This chapter first evaluates the older and current trends in New Testament rhetorical criticism before examining how the Hellenistic rhetorical culture of Greece and Rome influenced one of the most famous apologists of the new Christian faith, Paul of Tarsus. Paul's letters reveal elements of rhetorical form and argumentation, and have consequently attracted great scholarly attention. Yet it is his orations which can be studied more profitably from a rhetorical perspective: Paul's speeches demonstrate an awareness of conventions, forms, structures, and arguments according to the rhetorical situation they are addressing. Furthermore, in this analysis of the speeches in Acts, the chapter traces a number of continuities between past models of rhetoric, as well as charting how those models changed in line with the need for a new audience.

This chapter introduces the reader to the book as a whole. The volume establishes a few basic starting points for interpreting late antique letters and letter collections. First, it rejects the letter/epistle dichotomy established by Adolf Deissmann in the early 20^th century in favor of a much broader conception of the epistolary genre. Second, it insists that readers conceive of authorship, complete with generic design and self-presentational concerns, in relation to the editorial activity of compiling late antique letter collections. Third, it suggests that the engine driving the popularity of letter collections was the dramatic increase in civil and military bureaucracy beginning in the 4^th century. Social competition was in full force, and letter collections offered new tools with which elites could construct novel self-presentations.

This chapter studies the correspondence between Acontius and Cydippe (Heroides 20–1). The main argument is that Ovid highlights the fundamental confluence of the love letter with legal correspondence. The discussion ranges widely through comparative material from contemporary Latin elegy (Propertius in particular) to its intertextual matrix (Callimachus’ Aetia), in order to spell out the dependence of both poetry and law on precedent. Core aspects of Heroides 20–1, such as the materiality of the text, iterability, performativity, and intertextuality show that the invention of love is inextricably related to the invention of law. The chapter further investigates the triangulated relations between magic spells (carmina), love poetry (carmina), and legal statements. In its historical context, the crucial role of epistolography in the production and communication of laws in the Roman Empire is important for understanding the legal force of Ovid’s love letters.

This chapter considers the interrelated questions of the mode and sequence of publication of Pliny’s letters and argues that signs of artistic arrangement within and among the individual books point to both the original groupings and to Pliny’s broader literary goals. It employs two types of arguments not previously brought to bear on the issue: literary critical arguments focused on significantly placed thematic and verbal correspondences evoking intertextually poignant analogues for Pliny’s literary aspirations, and philological/cultural-historical arguments centring on the form in which Pliny’s books have come down to us and the various contemporary modes of publication of short collections of miscellaneous occasional works. A brief conclusion puts forward a summary hypothesis of the most probable sequence of publication of the nine books of private letters but places less weight on details of the proposed reconstruction than on the implications of its methodology for Pliny’s aims as a literary artist.

Alciphron’s collection of 123 fictional letters recreate in miniature the world of Menandrian New Comedy. Three of these letters, however, involve a basic scenario that is reminiscent of Clouds: disputes between a father and son and, in one case, a hetaira and her lover, regarding the corrupting influence of philosophers. Language borrowed directly from Aristophanes’s play further cements this connection. In this context, Old Comedy is subsumed into a New Comic context, and Clouds emerges as a literary shorthand for denoting corrupt philosophers. Yet the epistolary format also provides Alciphron with a way to recreate the dramatic elements of the original play: his readers are given unfettered access to the characters and are asked to fill in what is left unsaid by the letter from their knowledge of Aristophanes’s play.

This chapter hypothesizes about the nature of Cicero’s planned but never published letter collection, and argues that Cicero was inspired both by Greek epistolary theory and by Greek letter collections of classical figures like Plato and Demosthenes. Many of these letters were elaborate self-defences whose authenticity was vouched for by epistolary theory, in which letters were taken as unmediated glimpses of the sender’s true character. For this reason, this chapter argues that Cicero likely planned to publish a collection of his letters about the civil war. Many of these letters portray Cicero as an ideologically consistent statesman who foresaw the outcome of the war but joined the losing side out of a sense of duty. A version of this account published in letter form would have had a unique air of authenticity, and been an important component in the literary legacy of a classic.

The Introduction surveys scholarly work on letter-writing in the ancient world. While generally of a high standard and often interdisciplinary in nature, bridging such fields as Near Eastern and Jewish Studies, Biblical Studies, Patristics, and Classics, research on ancient epistolography often marginalizes the role of letters in constituting and sustaining communities of various stripes (political, social, ethnic, religious, philosophical). The introduction explores various reasons for this oversight (the overriding importance given to face-to-face communication in public settings, the apparently ‘private’ nature of corresponding via letters, its low rank in the hierarchy of genres, and the marginal status this aspect of letter-writing has in ancient epistolary theory) before outlining why letters played such a vital role in ancient community-building, with an emphasis on long-distance communication, permanence, and the genre’s ideological flexibility and strong pro-social outlook. The second half offers a narrative of the volume, with summaries of its thirteen case studies.

The chapter explores reflections on the practice of letter-writing, with equal attention to instructional handbooks (esp. Demetrius’ Περὶ ἑρμηνείας‎, Iulius Victor’s Rhetorica, Pseudo-Demetrius’ Τύποι ἐπιστολικοί‎, Pseudo-Libanius’ Ἐπιστολιμαῖοι χαρακτῆρες‎, and Erasmus of Rotterdam’s De conscribendis epistolis) and the meta-generic statements that letter-writers routinely embed in their correspondence (with a special focus on Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Pliny the Younger). In both types of sources, what one might call the social dimension of style registers as a primary concern: in order for the letter to fulfil its purpose, namely to generate a special bond between sender and recipient, the chosen idiolect has to be ‘appropriate’ (πρέπον‎/aptum) to the interpersonal relationship and its specific circumstances and exigencies. Shared stylistic values and the willingness of the letter-writer to adjust his character to that of the recipient generate a sense of community between the correspondents.

This chapter continues the thesis of Chapter 10 in demonstrating that a kinesthetic shift occurred in the arts from a centrifugal to a more tensional pattern of motion over the course of the Middle Ages. This chapter demonstrates that same thesis in the arts of perspective, keyboard music, and epistolography. The argument is that each of these major fields is defined predominately by a distinctly tensional pattern of motion and a relational aesthetics. All the newly dominant arts of the Middle Ages are defined by the kinesthetic pattern of relational or linked tensional motions holding images together and apart. The brilliant insight of the Middle Ages is that aesthetic form is nothing other than the polygonal intersection of a network of material kinetic relations.