To the Letter. Simon Garfield
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There were probably more; this is what survives. Seneca’s letters were rather longer than the norm, ranging from 149 to 4,134 words, with an average of 955, or some 10 papyrus sheets joined on a roll. Philological scholars with time on their hands have calculated that a sheet of papyrus of approximately 9 x 11 inches contained an average of 87 words, and that a letter rarely exceeded 200 words. Cicero’s letters ran from 22 to 2530 words, with an average of 295.
Chapter Four
Love in Its Earliest Forms
You will not believe what a longing for you possesses me.
Around AD 102, more than 20 years after Vesuvius, Pliny was writing to his third wife Calpurnia.
The chief cause of this is my love; and then we have not grown used to be apart. So it comes to pass that I lie awake a great part of the night, thinking of you; and that by day, when the hours return at which I was wont to visit you, my feet take me, as it is so truly said, to your chamber, but not finding you there I return, sick and sad at heart, like an excluded lover.
Calpurnia had been unwell; Pliny had been away on legal business. In another letter he wrote:
You say that you are feeling my absence very much, and your only comfort when I am not there is to hold my writings in your hand and often put them in my place by your side. I like to think that you miss me and find relief in this sort of consolation. I, too, am always reading your letters, and returning to them again and again as if they were new to me – but this only fans the fire of my longing for you. If your letters are so dear to me, you can imagine how I delight in your company; do write as often as you can, although you give me pleasure mingled with pain.
The letters were an addiction now, reinforcing the couple’s devotion just as they confirmed their absence. ‘Write to me every day, and even twice a day: I shall be more easy, at least while I am reading your letters, though when I have read them, I shall immediately feel my fears again.’
How can the modern reader not be stirred by these outpourings? But Pliny’s letters (alas we don’t have Calpurnia’s) are valuable for another reason beyond their intimacy. They’re almost all we’ve got. Beyond them, as we’ve seen, there’s little evidence that epistolary love existed at all in the ancient Roman world.
But there is one other exception, discovered by chance in the Ambrosian Library in Milan in the nineteenth century. Cardinal Angelo Mai was something of an expert in the palimpsest – a scroll or document that has been scrubbed clean of its original inscriptions to be used again. In 1815 he came across something exciting written beneath something boring: the Acts of the first Council of Chalcedon of 451 concealed the second-century correspondence between leading orator and teacher Marcus Cornelius Fronto and a youthful Marcus Aurelius written some twenty years before he would become Roman emperor.
Three years later, the cardinal discovered further letters beneath the same Council document, this time in the Vatican Library. Both finds created an air of expectation. Could this be an early nineteenth-century revelation of the formative years of one of ancient Rome’s great emperors? Absolutely, but not in the way anyone expected. In fact, when Cardinal Mai published his new collection the response was one of widespread disappointment. The letters appeared to be primarily about Latin prose style. The first full English translation appeared only in 1919, and again the response was muted. But hidden in plain view were many expressions of love and physical intimacy that may have struck even the most liberal of Georgian readers as a tad excessive; Mai had found a stash of something approaching imperial pornography, a rare documentary example of boy meets boy, or, more accurately, boys.
Marcus Aurelius, lovelorn and erotic.
In recent years an even stronger theory of infatuation between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius has been advanced, culminating in 2006 with the publication of Marcus Aurelius in Love, edited and translated by Amy Richlin. Richlin is in no doubt about their deep mutual affection, and wonders how deep this went. She suggests that the ‘disappointed’ Victorian reaction to the letters may suggest that their intimacies were judged to be in bad taste, and that it upset the traditional view of Marcus Aurelius as a saintly hero. But she finds it intriguing that even in the later periods, the letters were seldom analysed for their erotic qualities, nor regularly examined by students of gay history as a fine epistolary exemplar of homosexual love.
The letters between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto track the rise and fall of a courtship from about AD 139, when Aurelius was in his late teens and his teacher in his late thirties, until about AD 148. The heart of their correspondence is ablaze with passion. ‘I am dying so for love of you,’ Aurelius writes, eliciting the response from his tutor, ‘You have made me dazed and thunderstruck by your burning love.’
We do not know how often they met for tutelage, although it is clear that the intervals were, for both of them, rather too long. Perhaps it was merely their minds that coalesced so fruitfully and willingly – Aurelius enraptured by his master’s grasp on rhetoric, Fronto ensnared by his pupil’s sparkling potential – but their letters speak of more than just deep intellectual mingling: the mind of the solitary writer wanders to other, sometimes unattainable, possibilities. It could also be that the letters were a form of erotic rhetorical art in themselves, a seductive bit of homework:
How can I suffer when you’re in pain, especially when you’re in pain on account of me? Shouldn’t I want to beat myself up and subject myself to all kinds of unpleasant experiences? After all, who else gave you that pain in your knee, which you write got worse last night . . . So what am I supposed to do, when I don’t see you and I’m tormented by such anguish?
This kissing and thunderstriking aside, letters of longing are not much to be found in late antiquity, nor in the origins of the Christian or Byzantine worlds, nor indeed during the whole of the European Dark Ages, something we may blame on a collapse in literacy and the rise of the Church with more doctrinal and domineering affairs on its mind. The heart could freeze in such a period. There is devotion in Paul’s letters in the New Testament, of course, and personal messages scattered through 1,000 years of official communications, but a search for intimacy and passion will not be fruitful until one reaches what can only be described as the reinvention of romantic love in the twelfth century, when we encounter the epistolary delights of one of the greatest true-love romances of any age.
That the desperate story of Abelard and Heloise still smoulders more than 800 years after its enactment is due entirely to the existence of letters and the interpretation one places upon them – be it celebratory humanist or condemnatory moralist. The saga provides the fullest and earliest example of what happens when unbridled sexual desire meets a suffocating religious society not altogether keen on such things, a raw and rare combination of doctrinal pedagoguery and cassock-ripping salaciousness.
Chaste as angels: Abelard and Heloise keep their secrets at Père Lachaise.
The story begins around 1132, when Pierre Abelard, early fifties, a philosopher-monk in exile in Brittany, writes the story of his life. Abelard’s autobiography is in the form of a letter to an unnamed friend, and takes on what will become a familiar form, a consolation letter – Historia Calamitatum – designed to make the recipient feel better about his own plight by learning of the far worse fate of another. Within it, as part of a full and grander Latin narrative about his life’s travails, we learn of his involvement with a highly literate and intellectually attractive woman he once used to tutor, another weighted master-pupil relationship that, for all its pledges of lifelong devotion, has embedded within it the seeds of its own demise.
Abelard was one of medieval Europe’s great iconoclasts. Famous for his originality of thought and quick-witted argument, and never doubting his own abilities or convictions, he was as sure of his appeal to women as he was of his skills