To the Letter. Simon Garfield
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the letter and its high ambitions; they loved its epistolarity. But what of its private role as a conveyance of intimacy? Almost all letters were written to be read aloud; even private letters were primarily dictated to a scribe, and read in a low voice when received. There are rare snippets of private idiosyncrasy in Socrates and Plato, but the majority of correspondences are free of private emotion, and their oratorical heritage lends them a showy formality.
So what is lacking that we might expect to find? The historian John Muir notes that of the 2,000 or so papyrus letters we have, there are very few – he counts twelve or thirteen – that concern themselves with bereavement. Of these only six have sympathy as their main purpose, and a disproportionate three were written by women. Thus one of the few reliable mainstays of letter-writing in an age of email – the condolence letter – is almost entirely absent, and there is no logical explanation. And why were there no love letters? One possibility is that almost all were destroyed by the parties involved. Another, more plausible, is that letters were not yet regarded as the proper medium for such things. Because so many Greek letters were those of effect (or carried violent or dramatic instruction, such as that brought by Bellerophon), they may not have been considered appropriate for authentic outpourings from the heart. Muir also sounds a word of caution – their world was not as much like ours as we might imagine. The greetings and farewells were one thing, but ‘there may be a salutary warning against assuming that the many undoubtedly recognisable feelings and situations in the letters imply that we are meeting people . . . who had notions of individuality very like our own. The “otherness” of the ancient world is sometimes easy to forget.’
Individuality and authenticity – a letter that was both personal and informative – begins properly with the Romans, the first true letter-writers, and the first to establish the tradition of letters both as biographical source material and a literature to be gathered and enjoyed in its own right. The classical scholar Betty Radice has compared the ancient history of letters to a trip round a marble-floored museum, ‘the Greek statue stands aloof with his stylized enigmatic smile, while the Roman portrait bust is recognisably someone like ourselves, and its regular features speak for a single individual at a point of time’. To the modern reader, Latin letters tend to have another beneficial attribute over their Greek counterparts – their straightforwardness. They are intelligent without being flashy, direct rather than imaginative, unpretentious rather than conceited. If Greek letters are rooted in the theatre, Roman ones are rooted in the tavern.
The trail begins in the second half of the first century BC with more than 900 letters from Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero was the consummate statesman on a world stage at a time when the Roman Republic was in significant decline. His oratory – as a lawyer in court and in the senate – was allegedly stupendous, but it is his surviving letters that confirm his talents. His lifelong correspondence with his friend Atticus is boastful, playful and varied like no other correspondence before it, and its prolific and sequential nature enables us to build an unusually intimate biographical picture of a politician. In other letters he is compelling particularly because he is spontaneous, vulnerable and prone to hyperbolic excitement, and because his political success is fuelled by ambition, vanity and weakness. Cicero does not emerge as a particularly likeable character, but his letters have made him a valuable one: there were few figures with whom he did not communicate as Rome suffered paroxysms of decline in the decades before 45 BC, and no other collection of writing so illuminates this world. But Cicero performs another trick too, a grand epistolary deflection. His is the oldest substantive collection to show how the consummate politician flatters to deceive; his apparent confidences invariably advance his own ends and enhance his reputation.
Cicero at work: pompous perhaps, but never dull.
The survival and popularity of Cicero’s correspondence is due largely to the discovery of a long-lost collection by Petrarch in the cathedral in Verona in 1345, while a second haul almost 50 years later at Vercelli boosted the supply. Together, the letters made an immeasurable literary contribution to the formative years of the Renaissance; Cicero had laid bare the values of classical antiquity with enough detail to inspire its artistic and cultural reconstruction.
We empathise with his domestic travails (two divorces, the untimely death of his daughter Tullia), almost enough to forgive his pomposity. Virginia Woolf once noted that ‘there is a bareness about an age that has neither letter-writers nor biographers’, and it is Cicero who proves the point first. There is no doubt that Cicero knew the value of his correspondence: it was carefully edited before being copied, with an aim to present a man in firm control of grand public events; Tiro, his secretary, played at least some role in this. The worth of his letters to subsequent centuries has changed over time, but as a late-Victorian translator of Cicero’s writing claims in an introduction to his letters, ‘In every one of them he will doubtless rouse different feelings in different minds. But though he will still, as he did in his lifetime, excite vehement disapproval as well as strong admiration, he will never, I think, appear to anyone dull or uninteresting.’
In 2011, the Princeton classics professor Denis Feeney noted that while Cicero has always been popular, the last decade and a half has seen an even greater scholarly interest in his letters, ‘as if our own scurrying e-communications have created a nostalgia for a time when busy people could write pages of well-turned prose as part of their regular intercourse’.*
Two examples provide vivid snapshots of his times and a glimpse of his mischievous style (Cicero claimed he was no more able to keep a witticism in his mouth than a hot coal). The first, to his friend M. Marius at Cumae, a city near Naples, was written in 55 BC from Rome. His friend had missed the opening of the new theatre named after the leader Pompey, and with it a nice display of animal-baiting and other revelry.
If some bodily pain or weakness of health has prevented your coming to the games, I put it down to fortune rather than your own wisdom: but if you have made up your mind that these things which the rest of the world admires are only worthy of contempt, and, though your health would have allowed of it, you yet were unwilling to come, then I rejoice at both facts – that you were free from bodily pain, and that you had the sound sense to disdain what others causelessly admire.
. . . On the whole, if you care to know, the games were most splendid, but not to your taste. I judge from my own . . . For what is the pleasure of a train of six hundred mules in the ‘Clytemnestra’, or three thousand bowls in the ‘Trojan Horse’, or gaycoloured armour of infantry and cavalry in some battle? These things roused the admiration of the vulgar; to you they would have brought no delight . . . Why, again, should I suppose you to care about missing the athletes, since you disdained the gladiators? in which even Pompey himself confesses that he lost his trouble and his pains. There remain the two wild-beast hunts, lasting five days, magnificent – nobody denies it – and yet, what pleasure can it be to a man of refinement, when either a weak man is torn by an extremely powerful animal, or a splendid animal is transfixed by a hunting spear? . . . The last day was that of the elephants, on which there was a great deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it, and a kind of belief created that that animal has something in common with mankind.
At the same theatre, just over a decade later, in 44 BC, the murder of Julius Caesar would take place by its entrance. But shortly before that, Caesar came to dinner at Cicero’s house in the Bay of Naples, and Cicero wrote of the experience to Atticus in Rome in much the same way we might refer to overpowering visitors today.
Well, I have no reason after all to repent my formidable guest! For he made himself exceedingly pleasant . . . He stayed with Philippus on the third day of the Saturnalia till one o’clock, without admitting anyone. He was engaged on his accounts, I think, with Balbus. Then he took a walk on the beach. After two he went to the bath . . . He was anointed: took his place