Mikael Papadimitriou (New York University)
The goal of this paper is to show that merit had a prominent place in Libanius’ argumentation to justify hiring a candidate for a position in the Roman imperial administration during the fourth century AD. Despite the vast number of extant letters of recommendation from late antique authors such as Libanius, these texts have received relatively little scholarly attention. As a genre, Roman letters of recommendation can appear quite impenetrable. Several key details about the recommendation, including what was actually being requested, were often left out of the letter by the writer since they could be relayed by the recommendee who would normally be the one carrying the document to its addressee. Some efforts have been made by scholars to read between the lines and show that these letters were more than a mere testimony of the relationship between the writer and the recommendee (Cotton, Cribiore, Matthews). These efforts have recently been taken a step further by Bernadette Cabouret who argued that Libanius convinced his interlocutors to comply with his requests through highly wrought moral arguments.
While Libanius did use a wide variety of strategies to help convince his contacts to award positions to his protégés, such an emphasis on larger moral arguments obscures the fact that these letters were meant to argue for the worth of the candidate, first and foremost. Discussing merit in the Roman world is far from simple, as there was no universal set of criteria on which to judge candidates. Instead, every appointing authority selected men based on their own personal criteria. Therefore, when arguing for the merit of their candidate, men such as Libanius had to tailor their letters to the addressee’s specific sensibilities. This means that the only way to understand the significance of Libanius’ words describing a candidate’s qualities and aptitudes in any given letter is to compare it with other letters sent to the same addressee. This paper focuses on two letters written by Libanius to the head of the department of the notaries (Ep. 359 and 366). These two are quite unique as they appear to be two versions of the same letter, written a few months apart. Both letters address the same issues in the same order. The second one never makes mention of the first one, which indicates that the first letter was either never sent or never arrived at its destination. The two versions aptly contrast Libanius’ strategies for convincing officials. In the first one, Libanius tried to compel the addressee by making him feel guilt for having recently removed his son from the former’s school. Having shed his frustration in the interim, the second version is much more poised and instead emphasizes the recommendee’s worth. Libanius’ decision to remove his moral arguments and rely primarily on the candidate’s aptitudes in the final version demonstrates that this line of argumentation was more powerful. This example not only sheds light onto Libanius’ process of writing recommendations, but also gives us a glimpse of the imperial administration’s hiring practices.