To the Letter. Simon Garfield
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grateful.
Chapter Three
The Consolations of Cicero, Seneca and Pliny the Younger
Perhaps we should begin with the oldest letter that we have, fictional as it is. Homer’s Iliad, probably written in the eighth century BC, contains a stirring passage in the sixth book in which a letter almost kills its bearer. King Proteus has been entertaining a new visitor, the handsome and virile warrior Bellerophon, and it is the fatal nature of these things that the king’s wife Anteia falls in love with him. Bellerophon, however, is less than keen, and his virtue leads almost to his downfall. Anteia, livid at his rejection, informs her husband Proteus that he has tried to rape her, and Proteus leaps into action immediately by deciding that rather than killing Bellerophon himself, he should get Anteia’s father to do it. So he writes bad things about Bellephron in a letter written on sealed tablets (‘things that would destroy a man’s soul’, according to Homer), and commands Bellerophon to deliver the tablets to Anteia’s father himself, the original turkey voting for Christmas.
Mythological madness follows, in which Anteia’s father Iobates, king of Lycia, decides not to kill Bellerophon, but to send him on a seemingly impossible mission to kill the fire-snorting Chimera, which he does with the aid of winged Pegasus, after which he must defeat two armies singlehandedly. He lives to tell the tale to Poseidon, who sends a flood. The story goes on.
In the real world, Greek letters were generally of less consequence. Often, we find a simple thing: that many letters adopt a formality and mode of expression that we find instantly recognisable. Papyrus fragments and scrolls from 350 BC unearthed at a Herculaneum villa in 1752, at Arsinoe from 1877 and from rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus from 1897 (and at least 20 other locations close to the Nile) point to the sort of uniformity of style that we have come to expect from PowerPoint presentations. There is the regular opening – ‘From A to B, greetings’ – that we have seen employed by the Romans at Vindolanda, frequently extended according to circumstance. When writing to a person of seniority, perhaps a king, a writer would respectfully reverse the order to ‘Demetrius the Fair, King of Cyrene, from Hippopapos, greetings.’ There may be further information to aid identification and location: ‘Antogonus, brother of Capedonus, horse breeder in Olympia, to Leodonus, teacher at Delphi, greetings.’ The sign-off would usually be simple: ‘Farewell’ (usually abbreviated from ‘I trust/pray that you fare well) or, too modern though it sounds, ‘Best wishes’. (Although it is now used only informally, ‘Best wishes’ was primarily reserved for business letters.) Only those in the highest positions tended to ignore these pleasantries, a public declaration that they had more important things on their mind. Alexander the Great, for example, purposely only used them for his most trusted generals and statesmen, including Antipater and Phocion.
Where did the ‘greetings’ element come from? One explanation suggests it became popular in Athens after 425 BC, when the statesman Cleon used the word at the start of his account of an unexpected victory against the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. The report was an official council document, but its celebratory tone was soon deemed suitable for the common letter, initially perhaps as a reminder of the victory. Before this – and this is the case of the earliest Greek letter that survives, an indistinct fifth-century inscription on lead from the Black Sea – there was no greeting at all, as if a piece of papyrus that had been delivered by fleet-footed messenger after a journey of many days was somehow part of an ongoing and open conversation, like an email.* But once it was established, the hello-goodbye template would barely alter in style through the centuries (though it wouldn’t be until the sixteenth century that the spacious layout of a modern letter took shape; certainly papyrus was far too precious to experiment with attractive blank space).
The contents of the letters, composed in black carbon ink with reed pen, are also familiar. There are enquiries about the recipient’s health, usually optimistic, followed with news of the sender’s health, which is almost always buoyant. The ancient history scholar John Muir observes that when this practice was later adopted by letter-writers in Latin it was so commonplace that it was sometimes abbreviated as SVBEEQV: si vales bene est, ego quidem valeo.** The receipt of previous letters was then acknowledged, or perhaps a rebuke for the lack of them. Good wishes were sent to all members of the family, each by name, and often including pets.
The practice of letter-writing was itself the subject of study as early as the fourth century BC, or at least the subject of criticism. Theophrastus, categorising the character traits of the ‘arrogant man’, observes that ‘when sending instructions by letter, he does not write “you would oblige me” but “I want this to happen” . . . and “make sure it is exactly as I said”.’ In the third century, the philosopher Ariston found another definition: ‘When he has bought a slave, he does not bother to ask his name but just addresses him as “slave” . . . and writing a letter, he neither writes “Greetings” nor “Farewell” at the end.’
The Greek letters that survive – some 2,000 examples scattered around the world’s great museums – have value beyond their immediate content. They shed some light on the prominent role played by educated women, and certainly refute the notion that all were invisible in public debate. (The literacy rate in Greek cities is believed to have been less than 50 per cent, and the figure was lower for women, but the illiterate often hired scribes to communicate for them.) The letters have also enabled scholars to track developments in Greek language and grammar.
Predictably, the letters we find most intriguing are not the commonplace (the majority) but the quirky, the ones that make us gasp at their audacity or absurdity. In the first century BC a letter from a man working away from his wife (whom he calls sister, a common convention), is both caring and nonchalantly heartless.
Hilarion to his sister Alis, very many greetings – and to my respected Berous and Appolonarion. Know that we are still at this moment in Alexandria . . . I ask you and urge you, look after the child, and as soon as I receive my pay I will send it up to you. If by any chance you give birth and it is male, let it live; if it is female, get rid of it. You said to Aphrodisias, ‘Don’t forget me’. How can I forget you? I ask you therefore not to be anxious.
A letter from older to younger sisters carries a hectoring air:
Apollonia and Eupous to their sisters Rasion and Demarion, greetings. If you are in good health, that is well. We ourselves are in good health too. You would do us a favour by lighting the lamp in the shrine and shaking out the cushions. Keep studying and do not worry about mother. For she is already enjoying good health. Expect our arrival. Farewell. And don’t play in the courtyard but behave yourselves inside. Take care of Titoas and Shairos.
A testy letter from the third century AD, from an eager son at school to an unresponsive father, smothers its frustrations as best it can:
To my respected father Arion, Thonis sends greetings. Most of all I say a prayer every day, praying to the ancestral gods of this land in which I am staying that I find you and all our family flourishing. Look, this is the fifth letter I have written and, except for one, you have not written to me, even about your being well, nor have you come to see me. Having promised me, ‘I am coming’, you didn’t come so that you could find out whether the teacher was attending me or not . . . So make the effort to come to me quickly so he can teach me – as he is keen to do . . . Come quickly to me before he leaves for the upper territories. I send many greetings to all our family by name and to my friends. Goodbye my respected father, and I pray that you may fare well for many years along with my brothers (safe from the evil eye).
Remember my pigeons.
But for all their attractions, and for all their familiar templates, most Greek letters fall short of the key attribute we expect from letters in the modern world: they do not greatly enrich the personal experience. They may be fascinating, but the personal letters are rarely of consequence. Public letters – many purposely artificial, using the letter form as a new way of performing elaborate flights of philosophy and reaching a wider audience – are often just unperformed speeches, the equivalent of the ‘open letter’ in our modern media; many New Testament epistles would clearly model themselves on this practice.
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