Letters in the Ancient World

Although concerns over digital privacy and government surveillance may seem to be a modern phenomenon related to age of wikileaks and cyber warfare, this paper demonstrates that anxieties about personal privacy and government overreach can be detected as early as the Early and Late Roman Empire. As this paper notes, while rulers like Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius publically burned the unread letters of their rivals as a gesture of clemency (Dowling), these occasions were the exception rather than the rule.

This presentation argues that Senecan prose both evokes and enacts the physical transformation of his audience as they read his texts aloud, a common practice in ancient Rome (Valette-Cagnac 1997). While scholars have attended to Seneca’s didactic technique, particularly its combination of moral exhortation and exposition of philosophical doctrine (Schafer 2009), I argue that Senecan philosophy does more than instruct; it immediately molds the material soul through the physical act of voiced reading.

The Clementia of Burning Letters

The Erotic Letters of Philostratus (c.170s-late 240s C.E.) consist of seventy-three letters, the majority addressed to anonymous boys and women and seventeen to named sophists and Roman authorities. Many of the letters by displaying more “classicizing” elements appear to distance Philostratus from his contemporary world (Patricia Rosenmeyer). Yet scholars have used the letter addressed to Julia Domna (no. 73) to situate Philostratus as part of the empress’s literary circle (Graham Anderson; Simon Goldhill; Robert Penella).