CL2323 Roman Letters
Module Organiser: Prof. Monica Gale
Duration of Course: One term (Jan-April)
Contact Hours: 19 (16 lectures and 3 seminars)
Weighting: 5 ECTS
Description: To write a letter – whether a formal, public composition or a private letter to a friend – is to create an image, consciously or unconsciously, of oneself as writer and of one’s relationship with the letter’s recipient. This was just as true for Roman letter-writers as it is for us today. This course will explore a selection of the wide range of letters that have survived from Roman antiquity, from the highly personal correspondence of Cicero to the self-consciously artful letters of Pliny the Younger. We will also look at the fictional letters of Ovid, the Heroides (Letters of Heroines), which take the form of first-person compositions sent by the heroines of myth to their lovers. Taken together, these varied texts offer a fascinating window onto the thought-world of writers and readers from the first century BC to the second century AD, and prompt reflexion on such issues as self-representation and political ‘spin’; on the relationship between the public and private spheres; and on male and female ‘voices’ in Roman literature.
Introductory Reading
- M. Trapp, ‘Introduction’, in Greek and Latin Letters: An Anthology with Translation (Cambridge, 2003), 1–47
- G.O. Hutchinson, Cicero’s Correspondence: A Literary Study (Oxford, 1998)
- S. Lindheim, Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (Madison, Wisconsin, 2003), ch. 1
- A.N. Sherwin-White, ‘Pliny: the Man and his Letters’, Greece and Rome 16 (1969), 76–90 [also available through JSTOR]