Mary Anastasi (UCLA)
Even in antiquity, the philosopher’s letter had become its own genre. But Diogenes of Oenoanda, an Imperial-era Epicurean living in southern Asia Minor, went beyond generic expectations: he published his letters, along with his own Epicurean treatises and maxims, plus the maxims of Epicurus himself, not on papyrus rolls, but on a large public stoa which he himself commissioned. This paper articulates the relationship between epistolarity and monumentality at play in Diogenes’ letters. I argue that Diogenes uses the letters’ medium, monumental in a literal sense, to highlight the metaphorical monumentality of his work, entwining his personal legacy with the legacy of Epicureanism. Letters on stone are not particularly uncommon, but they tend to be from emperors and government officials containing information important to the public (Trapp 2003); publishing personal letters on stone is relatively unheard of. Diogenes’ Epicurean letters may be “orthodox” from a philosophical standpoint (Erler 2009), but, as this paper proposes, they are quite the opposite when considered as epistles.
These letters present Diogenes as a new Epicurus with a community of friends like that of the founder, and Diogenes’ letters give Epicurus’ a new life. There is a direct intertextual relationship; for instance, Diogenes’ Letter to Antipater (fr. 62 Smith) is an adaptation of Epicurus’ Letter to Pythocles (DL 10). The clearest similarity is the subject: celestial phenomena. However, the form of each letter creates a distinctly different reading experience. Diogenes includes more specific detail about the circumstances of his writing, constructing a reality that exists outside the world of the letter. For example, Diogenes mentions an in-person meeting and a letter that Antipater “recently” sent him (ἔναγχος, fr. 62.I.6 Smith). Paradoxically, such details are both concretely specific and, for any reader after Antipater, hopelessly vague; the reader becomes aware of the “impossible task” of bridging the temporal/spatial gap between letter-writer and letter-reader (Altman 1982).
When reading a traditional letter-book, readers feel as though they are being addressed directly. Here, however, the letters’ medium disrupts the process of taking on the addressee's persona; readers must view—or hear—them alongside everybody else, in public. Diogenes’ monumental letters nevertheless cultivate a sense of exclusivity: their spectators find themselves immersed in someone else’s Epicurean community at the same time as the sheer magnitude of the collection involves them as direct participants. Universality was one of Diogenes’ aims (Roskam 2015), yet the letters make every bystander part of a decidedly exclusive Epicurean group.
Diogenes was not immune to the Imperial era’s display-obsessed environment (Gordon 1996), although the letters use the mechanisms of euergetist display to advertise a different, superior form of civic benefit, demonstrating Diogenes’ personal concern for the wellbeing of future readers whose individual identities would never be known to him. The continuity of the Epicurean community does not exist only via one-sided engagement with the texts Epicurus left behind; the stoa is a monument to the permanence of the “life of the gods” (fr. 56.I.4-5 Smith), the golden age of friendship that Diogenes so vividly brings to life.