CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LETTER-WRITING

Stratis Papaioannou

I, your Laconian man, speak with brevity but, for you, I speak in a penetrating, sweet voice – I feel confident in doing so, because I find in you a well-disposed listener. How could it be otherwise? I preferred you above all others on earth – and you are worthy of this. May you remain as such for me and for those who care for such a fine man. Please do not accuse my brevity of speech. As you know, I am not a man of many words, just as I am not a man of many gifts. In my view, it is appropriate that the man of small stature and few means sends small and few gifts and writes brief and few letters. In this way, everything will be in agreement with itself and the whole will shine forth because of its similarity to its parts. This present letter, therefore, bears witness to the character of me, your friend, since I did not hesitate to be small in word and gift even toward you who are great in both word and gift-giving.

This is one of the seventy-seven letters that John Mauropous included in a collection of his rhetorical work – poems, letters and speeches – sometime in the last quarter of the eleventh century.¹ Mauropous (c. 990–1092?) was a well-established Constantinopolitan intellectual figure: he was a teacher and court rhetorician in his early career, then for about twenty years bishop of Euchaita, a city in the eastern parts of the southern shore of the Black Sea, and, toward the end of his life, he retired to a Constantinopolitan monastery.² The letter, cited here in its entirety, is perhaps not the most spectacular of Byzantine communications. Still, it is quite representative of medieval Greek epistolography and can serve well as a site upon which to map this most common Byzantine discursive practice: letter-writing.

Mauropous’ text is called a “letter,” in Greek epistole. It is notoriously difficult to offer a definition of what exactly a “letter” might be, and no new definition will be attempted here. Instead, based on the cited text, certain parameters of the phenomenology, rather than the essence, of Byzantine letters might be deduced.³ First of all, letter-writing comes about within a specific context. The writer/sender needs to communicate with another person, the reader/recipient, who is physically absent. This situation demands a certain discursive form: the letter is written from the first-person singular perspective always addressing another, a “you.” This very basic letter-form was adopted in Byzantium in order to communicate a variety of messages, information or ideas. As such, the letter-form is ubiquitous in Byzantine discourse; it is most conspicuous, for instance, in many of the imperial or ecclesiastic documents that a somewhat bureaucratic culture such as that of Byzantium produced in high volume (even if only a small fraction of these documents survives today).⁴ Furthermore, Mauropous’ letter (included as this text is in a manuscript collection of an author’s rhetorical production) is also indicative of a genre, the epistolary genre, epistolimaios/epistolikos typos or charakter. What genre means here is a set of expectations that pertain primarily to style (this is the meaning of the Greek words typos and charakter). The author uses a certain linguistic register: higher than everyday speech, but lower than other types of writing such as speech-making. He also employs rhetorical techniques, such as puns and allusions that he would have learned at school and practiced in other contexts of rhetorical performance (and there were many such contexts in Byzantium). These stylistic features combined with the basic letter situation justify Mauropous’ generic, and not merely formal, description of his text as “letter.”

But situation, form and genre are only half of what makes this a Byzantine letter; social setting comprises the other half. The written text, as transmitted in the manuscript, is only a small trace of a larger ritual of communication that would have linked Mauropous to his unnamed addressee. For instance, as is apparent, the letter originally accompanied some kind of gift; indeed the gift itself was most likely Mauropous’ main “message.” For it was a gift or, in other cases, a favor that linked Mauropous in a bonding relationship with his correspondents; the letter was meant to escort and affirm that relationship. After all, a letter is “a conversation of a friend to a friend,” as a late Byzantine rhetorical manual puts it.⁵ Friendship is a key concept here, for building bonds, alliances and networks constituted the social function for which most Byzantine letters were produced. There were certain features that characterized Byzantine friendship. For instance, friendship is not a private matter; there is often a wider circle implied (note how Mauropous alludes to “others” twice). Letter-communication in Byzantium was usually between two male friends, as is most likely the case here. What also links the author with his reader(s) and affirms their shared social status is a certain aesthetics. That Mauropous speaks of his “sweet” voice is not coincidental; the letter is meant to be pleasant, to convey aesthetic beauty, to function even as an object of art. For this reason, Mauropous speaks his elevated Greek, employs his puns and makes his literary allusions. By appealing to certain aesthetics, Mauropous claims social distinction – hence why he may become important in the eyes of his friend, the great gift-giver. Letters play a fundamental role in achieving this distinction.

If seen in this perspective, Byzantine letters should be placed somewhere at the intersection of politics and literature. The following brief survey will offer some thoughts on Byzantine epistolography along these two converging fields.⁶

THE POLITICS OF COMMUNICATION

It would not be an exaggeration to say that, as has been said of pre-modern Islamic society and Arabic literature, letter-writing was “the most prominent type of writing” in medieval Byzantium.⁷ A recent inventory of late antique, medieval and early Renaissance Greek letters detailed a list of approximately 280 letter-writers and some 15,480 letters that have survived from the fourth through to the fifteenth century.⁸ This is apparently only a small fraction of the letters produced in Greek during the Byzantine millennium. Those that survive are letters that for one reason or another entered a manuscript collection that itself survived. The extant letters are also usually only a portion of an author’s actual letter-production; indeed, of the 280 or so letter-writers only 70 are represented with more than fifteen letters.⁹ Furthermore, there are only a few cases in which the correspondence between two writers survives. In the sources, we read of letters or, even, letter collections which we no longer possess.¹⁰ All in all, we can safely assume that Byzantine letter-writing was a remarkably voluminous discursive production.¹¹

A closer look at the extant letters and letter collections allows us to deduce some provisional conclusions regarding the social fabric behind this production. Take for example periodization. From late antiquity, it is the second half of the fourth and the early fifth centuries that represent the first notable rise in Greek letter-writing. Most of the largest, widely circulating and influential collections come from this period. A small rise is evident again in the sixth century, followed by a steady decline – the lowest point being the eighth century from which we have virtually no letter collections. Indeed, it is only in the tenth century that the genre begins to really flourish, continuing until around 1204, the year of the Fourth Crusade. About eighty letter-writers with several large collections come from just these three centuries. Then there is a slight interruption, and Greek letter-writing resumes its pace in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries which represent the last minor bloom of Byzantine epistolography (about ten collections).¹²

To some extent, these statistics may be due to coincidences in the survival of texts (a reflection, for example, of changes in the technology of books or of the choices of later readers and scribes). Yet combined with other evidence they corroborate known trajectories in the history of Byzantine urban culture. The late fourth, the sixth, the tenth through the twelfth and, then briefly, the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries are the periods when elaborate and flourishing urban settings exist in Byzantium interrupted by several smaller or larger periods of crisis. The spatial distribution of the surviving letter-writing production is also telling of where these settings are to be found. While during the late antique period Greek letter-writing is distributed throughout the eastern Mediterranean (with an emphasis indeed in the south-eastern parts of this region), after the ninth century almost all Greek letter-collections are associated with exclusively one center, Constantinople.¹³

What about the who’s who of Byzantine letters? As already noted, almost the entirety of surviving letters stems from the hands of men; we have to wait until the fourteenth century for the single example of the letters of a Byzantine woman, Eirene Choumnaina (1291–c. 1355).¹⁴ Men also comprise the overwhelming majority of the addressees.¹⁵ As is the case with Byzantine discourse in general, letter-writing is a predominantly male and indeed androcentric production. Social class is also at stake. The extant epistolography represents almost exclusively only a minor part of Byzantine society: the educated members of its upper echelons that are associated with large urban centers. The only significant exception to this pertains to late antique Egypt, from which a significant number of private letters survive among the papyri.¹⁶ As far as we can tell, none of these letters ever became part of any letter collection; that is, they never entered the Byzantine book culture and may thus not qualify as “letters” in the Byzantine generic sense of the term. Yet, they might be representative of a socially wider and quantitively larger practice of written communication that might have existed throughout the history of Byzantium but simply did not leave any trace.¹⁷ As the current evidence shows, Byzantine epistolography represents the socially, economically and politically privileged of Byzantium.

Still, at least one further distinction can be made here. Among Byzantine letter-writers, two social types may be discerned. On the one hand, we find those who are already insiders of Byzantine aristocracy through family lineage, wealth or high administrative office, whether imperial, ecclesiastic or monastic. Writers like Gregory of Nazianzus, Theodoros of Stoudios or Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos use letter-writing in order to primarily strengthen or sustain their high social status. On the other hand, there are those who aspire to enter this insiders’ group and rise up the social ladder. Primarily from the mid-tenth century onwards we find teachers and rhetors, that is, intellectuals and discursive performers, who use their letter-writing skills in order to achieve social (and, as a result, financial) prominence; I am referring to authors like the so-called Anonymous Professor in the tenth century or Theodoros Prodromos in the twelfth. The point of this distinction is not to assert rigid boundaries between the two groups; not at all. For example, John Mauropous and his student Michael Psellos, one of the most significant Byzantine letter-writers, were intellectuals and performers who early in their career would belong to the former, while later to the latter group. Rather, the point of the distinction is to emphasize the politics that are inherent in Byzantine epistolography.

An essential part of this politics is, first of all, the Byzantine ritual of communication. As noted above, the edited letter is only a minor trace of a larger process. This process involved much more than writing. The exchange, for instance, of gifts of all sorts (from books to food) was a recurrent incentive for the writing of letters.¹⁸ Oral communication was also significant. In a world that lacked any sort of regular mail service, messages were delivered by friends, casual acquaintances, servants or slaves; these intermediaries were often the ones who delivered in person the actual message. Orality further determined the reading of a letter; as with most rhetorical Byzantine texts, letters were often meant to be read aloud, sometimes in front of a small group of friends, the so-called theatron. This is Michael Psellos in the eleventh century describing the reception of the letters of his addressee: “as if in a Pan-Hellenic theater (theatron), we gather together showing your letters to each other. We read them to each other, we compete. The one who can show the most beautiful letter is the one to come out as the victor in friendship, while the rest follow with their heads down.”¹⁹

A further step in the process was the “publication” of the letter, that is to say its likely inclusion in a manuscript collection. Mauropous’ self-made collection is a case in point, and we can assume that many letter-writers created their own collections, editing, revising and arranging their letters.²⁰ We possess few examples, the most notable ones being the collections of Libanius and, especially, Gregory of Nazianzus in the late fourth century.²¹ (Indeed, for the first time in the history of Greek writing, these two late antique writers invent – at least this is what the evidence suggests – the tradition of including letters as important examples of one’s own literary output; poems, narratives, treatises or dialogues had dominated the landscape until then.²²) Once in a collection, letters were destined, indeed designed, to reach a larger audience.

Byzantine letters were thus anything but a matter of intimate private correspondence, in its modern conception. Rather, Byzantine letters were “socio-texts,” texts “designed, understood, and expected to circulate within designated epistolary circles.”²³ Between and beyond the two correspondents, the content of Byzantine letters could be shared by the scribe (often other than the author), the carrier, a circle of friends to whom the letter might be read aloud or to whom the same letter might be sent separately, and, if the letter was destined to enter a collection, a wider readership. These were socio-texts also in another sense. The primary function of letters in their immediate context was to create or sustain a social network, personal ties and allegiances, and to secure or grant the letter-writer a position within this network. Letters were thus means for social networking and self-positioning and the Byzantines knew this well. Let us look at these two features separately.

One of the recurring ideas in Byzantine epistolography is that the letter is and must be an “image of the soul”; as Mauropous puts it in letter 42, “this letter bears witness to the character of me, your friend.”²⁴ It is then part of the Byzantine epistolary expectation that the letter manifests the self, indeed the inner self, soul or character, of its writer (psyche, ethos, charakter, typos, gnome are the most common Greek terms). As Mauropous makes clear, however, character does not refer merely to the interiority of the author, to qualities that are essential to him. Rather, the self in question is also a result of social relations, a matter of social positioning. As Mauropous explains, the “character” that is witnessed in the letter pertains to the fact that he “did not hesitate to be small in word and gift” toward his addressee who is “great in both word and gift-giving.” Immediately, that is, Mauropous places his character under an intimate yet also hierarchical relation with his friend – Mauropous’ good character is associated with the fact that he knows, or so he tells us, what his appropriate place in the social context is.²⁵

The role of letters and even more so letter collections is thus primarily self-representation, not, as the Byzantines might claim – though as we shall see not unjustifiably – self-revelation.²⁶ This is the case because, in a competitive environment such as that of Byzantine urban societies, social authority was defined by achieving honor and avoiding shame. Therefore, it behooved men who wrote letters, regardless of their place in the social hierarchy, to advertise themselves, constantly present, or, in effect, make a name for themselves.

Social authority was also defined by constantly shifting personal relations. Thus those who wrote letters were further obliged to build allegiances, to create what were usually called “friends.”²⁷ We might be inclined to associate friendship (in Greek philia) with an emotion that links two individuals in a mutual, reciprocal and symmetrical relationship. But what the Greek word philia signified in a Byzantine context was often both more and less than that. It was more than a mutual relationship in the sense that friendship was imagined to involve a kind of ontological unity between persons. In the dominant Christian version, friends were united by divine grace that allowed for them to be what Gregory of Nazianzus memorably called “one soul in two bodies.”²⁸ By being more than a simple amicable relationship, friendship was an ideology. This was an ideology most eloquently summarized for Byzantine letter-writers by Gregory who Christianized, that is, further spiritualized, classical Greek notions of male–male philia now contrasted in stronger terms to bodily, heterosexual or homosexual, relations.²⁹

But friendship was also less than a reciprocal relationship. In actuality, in Byzantium friendship more often referred to the rather fragile, asymmetrical and non-reciprocal relations of patronage and clientelism (this might be the case in Mauropous’ letter 42).³⁰ By being related to patronage, friendship was a social necessity: the necessity of entering, building and enforcing social circles and hierarchies.³¹ It required of Byzantine letter-writers to learn and obey certain rules of etiquette, comportment and ceremony.³² Operating within this dual framework of friendship, Byzantine letters always navigated between ideology and social necessity, between idealism and pragmatism.

TOWARD LITERATURE

Thus far we have been preoccupied with Byzantine epistolography in the immediate context of its production. Yet letters, especially when they entered a manuscript collection, were also conceived and treated as texts, somewhat removed from their synchrony. In the rest of this contribution, I will focus on this textual dimension of Byzantine letters.

Let us turn again to some statistics. While 15,480 letters is an impressive number, and while many more letters were certainly produced in Byzantium, the manuscript transmission and history of letters and letter collection shows a somewhat different picture. Apart from a few exceptions, most letter-writers and their letters or collections survive in only a small number of manuscripts, sometimes in only one manuscript. This means that despite the popularity of the practice in virtually every moment of Byzantine history, letters as texts did not fare particularly well in the diachronical context of Byzantine book culture. Even those letter collections with large distribution could not compare with those texts that were particularly popular in Byzantium such as the Scriptures, patristic public rhetoric (especially the orations, homilies and sermons of John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nazianzus), patristic anthologies and encyclopedias (such as John of Damascus’ Fountain of Knowledge), or a certain kind of hagiography, the Metaphrastean Lives.³³ There are approximately 1,500 manuscripts of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Orations. Yet there exist only 160 manuscripts of his Letters. And, while there are nearly 850 manuscripts of the Lives by Symeon Metaphrastes, some of the most significant Byzantine letter collections, such as those from the tenth century, survive only in one or two manuscripts.³⁴

Unlike other texts, letters and letter collections did not reach a wider readership beyond that of their immediate context. This is especially true with regard to the collections of middle and late Byzantine writers. For, as the manuscript evidence suggests, medieval Byzantine readers preferred to commission the copying of the letters of the late antique past, primarily the epistolary production of the fourth and early fifth centuries, rather than the letters of any later periods. This explains why the four largest collections are of a late antique date or why the medieval manuscripts of the letters of, say, Gregory of Nazianzus or Synesius of Cyrene are significantly more than those of any letter-writer after the middle of the fifth century. Late antique letter collections are those that did reach a somewhat larger readership. They are those which Byzantine intellectuals of all periods wished to own, read and imitate.³⁵

This brings me to yet another feature of Byzantine letter-writing: the presence and function of preset authoritative models. A notable characteristic of comparable contemporary letter-writing cultures (in the Arabic south-east and the Latin west) was the development of detailed theories of letter-writing, along with practical manuals, models and guides. And though Byzantine epistolography shared many features with the practices of neighboring cultures, we will find nothing in Byzantium that would equal the kinds of epistolary manuals, formularies and theoretical treatises that supported Arabic letter-writing (the insh’ literature) or were stylized in the western ars dictaminis.³⁶ This is not because Byzantine rhetoricians were not inclined toward stylizing theories of discourse; quite the contrary, Byzantium had inherited and further elaborated on detailed theories of rhetoric, namely public performative discourse.³⁷ Rather, it seems that, in the case of epistolary discourse – written and semi-private – Byzantine authors were content with the usage of a few authoritative late antique letter collections and the stylistic protocols promoted in them.

This author- rather than rule-oriented attitude might have contributed to the apparent exclusivity of Byzantine letter-writing. Since there existed no widespread easy rules that would help one become a good letter-writer, access to sophisticated education and reading practices was the necessary prerequisite; and this was available to a relatively limited number of people.³⁸ Simultaneously, however, the emphasis on model authors rather than preset rules might have also afforded Byzantine writers a certain creative freedom, playfulness and proclivity toward variety that are found in medieval Greek letter collections. Tradition and protocol, while certainly present in Byzantine epistolography, are filtered primarily through subjective choices rather than objective imperatives, and thus operate in a rather ambiguous fashion.³⁹

Exclusivity as well as playfulness, for instance, were simultaneously promoted by the elaborate use of literary allusion in Byzantine letters. From direct copying of entire earlier letters and acknowledged quotations of well-known maxims to playful references to multiple texts or secretive allusions to obscure information, wording or turn of phrase, Byzantine letters thrive in what has been termed intertextuality, which is basically an author’s use of the texts of others in order to convey meaning.⁴⁰ Take, for instance, Mauropous’ letter. The phrases “with brevity but … in a penetrating, sweet voice” and, a few lines later, “not a man of many words” are a quotation of a single verse from the third book of Homer’s Iliad, where Menelaus is described as a concise but clear speaker juxtaposed to the more verbose, yet incomparably eloquent Odysseus (Iliad 3.214). Mauropous is not simply citing the Iliad here, a text that remained a schoolbook throughout Byzantine history. Associated with the proverbial idea of laconic speech (Menelaus is a Spartan, a Laconian), this verse also summarized an epistolographic topos, the notion that letters must be concise.⁴¹ Furthermore, in Byzantine rhetorical theory, this well-known Homeric description of Menelaus signified the antiquity and thus legitimacy and value of rhetorical discourse and its various types (personified by Menelaus, Odysseus and, another famous Homeric speaker, Nestor).⁴² There is, that is, much more packed in Mauropous’ citation than simply a reference to a Homeric verse. Mauropous displays here his knowledge of epistolary decorum and, more significantly, his proper rhetorical training. His aim is to show his participation in an exclusive traditional aesthetic that would link him with equally knowledgeable, highly educated, readers.⁴³

Mauropous is constrained by the Homeric quotation to belong to a certain tradition, to follow a prescribed frame of mind. At the same time, however, he uses the quotation in a somewhat playful and creative fashion. After citing the Homeric adjective “not of many words (ou polymythos)” he resurrects another rare, ancient and rhyming word – in effect his own neologism: “not of many gifts (ou polydoros).”⁴⁴ This is not a mere play on words: Mauropous has used the Homeric maxim in order to justify his trivial and poor gift to his friend. In effect, Mauropous has created here what may be seen as an intellectual’s joke. Tradition demands that I write only few words, why should I then be expected to give generous gifts?

Witty humor is a regular feature of Byzantine epistolography.⁴⁵ Humor is a way in which Byzantine letter-writers explore and test boundaries. For letter-writing is not merely a discursive site where social norms, expectations and hierarchies are confirmed and perpetually replicated; rather, this is a discursive world where such norms can also be negotiated, and often transgressed.⁴⁶

Let us look at two examples of such transgression. Above, I wrote of the emphasis on self-representation that marks Byzantine letter-writing. The self-portraits that Byzantine writers put forth in their letters are often generic social types fixed by the expectations of epistolary decorum of educated and aristocratic circles. Yet they are not just that. Byzantine letter-writers often test the limits of such generic types by adopting what are inferior rather than socially dominant personae.⁴⁷ Furthermore, Byzantine authors routinely express personal feelings, intense emotions, satisfied or unfulfilled desires, private pleasures or sufferings, in a word pathos (a recurrent letter-writing term). The language that the Byzantines employ may often seem stylized or even overwritten to us, yet we should not read this stylization as fakery. Sometimes, Byzantine letters are read as if they disclose no feeling. However, the Byzantines were quite capable of expressing personal emotion; that the communicative codes by which such emotions are expressed have changed is not the Byzantines’ fault.⁴⁸ Indeed, if one were to search for autobiographical discourse in Byzantium, Byzantine letters would be the primary place to discover the mechanics and liberties, veils and revelations, of Byzantine discourse in the first-person singular.

Another contested field in Byzantine epistolography is the understanding of friendship itself. As noted above, the Byzantine ideology of friendship is founded upon the suppression of erotic, bodily desire for the sake of (primarily male-male) spiritualized relationships. But this is not unequivocally the case. We will encounter several Byzantine letter-writers who either contest the spiritual notion of philia altogether or who employ an intensely eroticized language in order to describe their relationship to various addressees.⁴⁹ At first glance, Byzantium may appear to be a world without love-letters, a world without its Abelard and Heloise. Yet at a closer look, one might discover eros at many turns and corners of Byzantine letters.⁵⁰ Indeed, it is medieval Greek eroticized letter-writing that first explores the kind of erotic discourse that will be adopted by those rhetors who revive erotic fiction in the middle of the twelfth century in Byzantium.⁵¹

The presence of autobiographical and erotic discourse in Byzantine epistolography leads to one concluding remark. Of all genres of Byzantine writing, epistolography most consistently came closest to what we now call literature. Exegetical works, sermons, biographies, hagiographies and histories – in other words those texts that dominate the Byzantine discursive production and book culture – were primarily (though not exclusively) types of writing that aimed at communicating information, ideas, ideology and doctrine. These were writings preoccupied with promoting Byzantine truth and morality; texts meant to be didactic, useful. Byzantine letters were often also like that. Yet, simultaneously at their foreground occasionally lay an attentiveness to the limits of writing, and to whether writing itself can convey truth and presence. This attentiveness encouraged an otherwise unique appreciation of imagination, phantasia, and the pleasures that imagination afforded.⁵² Of all Byzantine genres, it was letter-writing that kept the desire to navigate the imagination most alive. Or, to put it differently, what letter-writing kept alive was the desire for fiction, for literature.⁵³ The first letter in Mauropous’ self-made collection conveys this desire eloquently, and it is only appropriate to end this survey with his words:⁵⁴

I thought that it was already Autumn; not Spring. From where has this nightingale of Spring come to me now? Not from some grove or far-off forest … but it has flown into my own hands and from there it sings in the mood of spring-time, casting from nigh a spell over my ears … In its voice, this bird is a nightingale, but in its appearance, a swallow. For it sings in a penetrating, sweet voice, yet its image mixes two opposite colors. The black color of the letters is made vivid by the whiteness of the paper, just like lavish purple embroidery by a material that is glossy and translucent. Whether a nightingale or a swallow, this marvelous writing has filled my soul with perfect pleasure. It has convinced me to think that the season is truly a second Spring.

NOTES

1 Ioannes, the most holy metropolitan of Euchaita, Letter 42: Karpozilos 1990: 137, see also 233. This and later translations are my own.

2 On Mauropous’ biography see Karpozilos 1990: 9–27; the monastery where Mauropous retired was the monastery of Petra, in the north-western part of Constantinople, with a significant library as well as a scriptorium.

3 For a recent attempt to define “letters” see Gibson and Morrison 2006; the authors focus primarily on ancient material, but many of their suggestions would apply to Byzantine letters as well. For a Byzantine definition see e.g. Ps.-Libanius, Epistolimaioi Charakteres, 2, in Foerster 1927, where we read the following: “Letter (epistole) is a conversation in writing between two persons absent to each other”; this definition is posited only as provisional, as the author first points out: “the epistolary style is varied and manifold” (paragraph 1).

4 For Byzantine documents see e.g. Dölger and Karayannopulos 1968; Oikonomides 1979 and 1985; for Byzantine imperial diplomacy see Mullett 1992 (reprinted as 2007: III); on Byzantine communication patterns see Moschonas 1993.

5 Joseph Rhakendytes, Synopsis of Rhetoric 14, in Walz 1834: 3, 559.4–5.

6 The focus of this chapter are thus letters in the somewhat narrow Byzantine sense of the term; I will not examine texts that simply adopt the letter-form (such as treatises or narratives), official written communications or letters embedded in other texts. For general comprehensive surveys of Byzantine epistolography see Hunger 1978: 199–239 = Hunger 1991: 301–57 and Tomadakis 1993. See also Sykutris 1932; Garzya 1985; Hatlie 1996; Mullett 1997: passim; Grünbart 2001: esp. 7–43; Hörandner and Grünbart 2003; and Grünbart 2005; for further bibliography see http://www.univie.ac.at/byzneo/BBESecondarySources1.htm. For surveys of comparable medieval traditions see Haseldine 1996 (medieval Latin) and Gully 2008 (Arabic); see also Kobler 1954 (Jewish).

7 Gully 2008: 5.

8 Grünbart 2001.

9 Of these, twenty-four authors with more than 100 letters (numbers based on Grünbart 2001, biographical dates from the ODB): Isidoros of Pelousion c. 360/70–† after 433 (2,022 letters), Libanios 314–c. 393 (1,544 letters), Neilos of Ankyra † c. 430 (1,051 letters), Barsanouphios † c. 545 (616 letters), Theodoros of Stoudios 759–826 (554 letters), Demetrios Kydones c. 1324–c. 1398 (540 letters), Michael Psellos 1018–78 (521 letters), Michael Gabras c. 1290–† after 1350 (462 letters), Basil of Caesarea c. 329–79 (350 letters), Patriarch Photios c. 810–† after 893 (329 letters), Gregory of Nazianzus (249 letters), John Chrysostom (237 letters), Theodoretos of Cyrrhus c. 393–c. 466 (203 letters), Gregorios Kyprios c. 1241–90 (197 letters), Konstantinos Akropolites †1324 (196 letters), Patriarch Nikolaos I Mystikos 852–925 (193 letters), Michael Choniates c. 1138–c. 1222 (181 letters), Michael Apostoles c. 1420–† after 1474 (175 letters), Prokopios of Gaza c. 465–c. 528 (167 letters), Nikephoros Gregoras c. 1290/1 or 1293/4–† between 1358 and 1361 (159 letters), Synesios of Cyrene c. 370–c. 413 (156 letters), Theophylaktos of Ochrid c. 1050–† after 1126 (135 letters), Maximos Planoudes c. 1255–c. 1305 (121 letters), Ioannes Tzetzes c. 1110–† between 1180 and 1185 (107 letters). It should be noted that only a few Byzantine collections are available in English translation: those of Basil of Caesarea (Deferrari 1926–34), Gregory of Nazianzus (Browne and Swallow 1894), John Mauropous (Karpozilos 1990), Libanius (Norman 1992), Nikolaos I Mystikos (Jenkins and Westerink 1973) and Synesios of Cyrene (Fitzgerald 1926).

10 Mauropous’ seventy-seven letters are only a selection, while, of his about sixty-five addressees, no one else’s letters survive except those of Mauropous’ famous student Michael Psellos.

11 Of course, letter-writing was remarkably voluminous only in the context of pre-modern societies with low levels of literacy (an average of 10 per cent or less of the population) and the limited availability of writing material and technologies. Indeed, before nineteenth-century Europe and the arrival of postal services, extensive letter-exchange was usually the privilege of only the social elite; cf. Gay 1995: 311–29.

12 Medieval Latin letter-writing followed a similar trajectory with three primary peaks: late fourth to early fifth century, then in the ninth and twelfth centuries.

13 The letters in this period are written by Constantinopolitans who either reside in Constantinople and correspond primarily with other fellow citizens who often temporarily reside outside Constantinople, or by Constantinopolitans who have been forced to move away from the City which nevertheless remains their emotional and notional center; for a mapping of the latter case see Mullett 1997: xvi–xvii and 180–1 on Theophylaktos of Ochrid.

14 Twenty-two letters; Hero 1986.

15 Cf. Grünbart 2005: 180–7; Gouillard 1982; Talbot and Kazhdan 1991/2; Nikolaou 1993.

16 Cf. Hutchinson 2007; or Bagnall and Cribiore 2006. See also Goitein 1973 on similar letters from various societal strata circulating in medieval Jewish communities.

17 As far as I know, there exists no survey of the likely evidence for letter-exchange in the lower strata of Byzantine society; for an example of someone who, despite his minimal education, is said to have written many letters (that, as one might expect, did not survive) see Greenfield 2000: 21.

18 Cf. Karpozilos 1984 and 1995. In Letter 42 (lines 6–7), Mauropous alerts to the direct association of letters with gifts by playing with the etymology of “epi-stellein” (to write letters) which only accompanies (epi) gift-sending, “stellein.” For the anthropology of gifts in Byzantium and beyond see Cutler 2001.

19 Letter 223, ed. Kurtz and Drexl 1941: 265.23–7. For all these aspects of letter-writing cf. Mullett 1990 (repr. 2007: VI) and Mullett 1997: 31–43. On theatra see also Hunger 1991: 316–19.

20 We are fortunate to possess the very manuscript in which Mauropous published his collection; the manuscript is now in the Vatican library, Vaticanus gr. 676. There exists no study of Byzantine letter collections; for some discussion see Papaioannou forthcoming a; see also Constable 1976, whose remarks on the western medieval practices largely apply to Byzantium as well.

21 Cf. Trapp 2003: 16–17 on Libanius; and Gallay 1957 on Gregory.

22 There are Latin precedents to that (Cicero, for example), but we do not possess the letters, edited in a collection by the author himself, by any Greek writer before Gregory and Libanius. The earlier tradition is dominated by fictitious or fictional letter-writing. See Trapp 2003 with Hodkinson 2007: esp. 283–8 and Rosenmeyer 2006.

23 Schneider 2005: 22f.

24 For this topos see Karlsson 1962: 94–6 and Thraede 1970: 157f.; cf. Koskenniemi 1956: 40–2; and also Littlewood 1976.

25 There is a clear sense of order here; cf. Mauropous’ “in this way, everything will be in agreement with itself and the whole will shine forth because of its similarity to its parts.”

26 That self-representation, i.e., self-fashioning, was at stake in letter-writing was known to those theorists of epistolary form (in the Roman Greek period), who associated letter-writing with the rhetorical mode of ethopoiia, namely personification or character-presentation as well as character-making; cf. Theon, Progymnasmata, in Spengel 1854: 115.11f. See further Leach 1990; McLynn 1998; Conybeare 2000 (esp. pp. 131f. on the “relational” self); and Whitmarsh 2001, on various cases of pre-modern Greek and Latin self-fashioning, often through letter-writing.

27 Cf. Konstan 1997: 89.

28 Or. 43.18–22; the maxim, very popular in Byzantium, at paragraph 20.2 (ed. Bernardi 1992). Gregory is actually evoking earlier thought; cf. Plato’s Symposium 189c2–193d5 with Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum 5.20 (on Aristotle); see also Michael of Ephesus (first half of the twelfth century), In ethica Nicomachea ix–x commentaria, in Heylbut 1892: 478.28–479.20.

29 Konstan 1996. Gregory’s theory-in-practice of friendship along with other later antique epistolary corpora filled the absence of a more systematic theoretical treatment of friendship; unlike the West, Byzantium did not possess something equivalent to Cicero’s treatment of amicitia (Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics play only a very minor role in Byzantine writing).

30 Cf. Mullett 1988, 1999a and 2003a. See also Limousin 1999 and, recently Messis 2008.

31 With a few exceptions (see e.g. Pouchet 1992; Mullett 1997; Schor 2007) we lack sociological or anthropological studies of the social make-up of these networks.

32 The most conspicuous such etiquette are Byzantine forms of address; for an extensive survey of 5,419 instances of such forms from the middle Byzantine period see Grünbart 2005. Another aspect of this etiquette is the ostensive humility of letter-writers who consistently avoid using the first-person singular (e.g. in the original Greek of Letter 42, Mauropous uses repeatedly the third-, rather than the first-, person singular). For moral, ceremonial and social expectations as manifested in epistolary topoi see Karlsson 1962 and Thraede 1970 with Koskenniemi 1956.

33 See Talbot and Munitiz in this volume.

34 See Gallay 1957 on the mss of Gregory’s letters with Somers 1997 on the mss of his orations. For Symeon Metaphrastes see Sevcenko 1990. For tenth-century epistolography see e.g. Darrouzès 1960; Westerink 1973; Darrouzès and Westerink 1978.

35 To give one of numerous examples: in his encomium of Mauropous, Michael Psellos comments on his teacher’s imitation of Gregory of Nazianzus; Orat. pan. 17.287f., in Dennis 1994.

36 Cf. Gully 2008 (on Arabic letter-writing) and Witt 2005 (on Latin ars dictaminis) with Mullett 1997: 133f. (on the Byzantine tradition); see also Boureau 1997. The first Byzantine manual to discuss (briefly) letter-writing is that of Joseph Rhakendytes in the early fourteenth century (see above, n. 5); for some rare Byzantine chancery handbooks see Ferrari 1913 and Darrouzès 1969.

37 On these see Kustas 1973.

38 See Cavallo 2006 on Byzantine reading culture.

39 For instance, in his encomium of Mauropous, Michael Psellos cannot decide whether to praise Mauropous’ knowledge of the epistolary genre or his unique and inimitable individual style; Orat. pan. 17.256–64, in Dennis 1994.

40 The phenomenon is so common that one of the most educated of Byzantine letter-writers, Ioannes Tzetzes, produced a quite extensive verse commentary explaining the various literary allusions included in his letters (ed. Leone 1968); a Byzantine anticipation of T. S. Eliot supplying footnotes to his Waste Land! On quotations in letter-writing see Mullett 1981 (repr. 2007: II); Littlewood 1988; and, especially, Kolovou 2006: 25–75.

41 Cf. Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 51 (on conciseness, clarity and grace) and 54 (on being “laconic”) (ed. Gallay) with Ioannes Tzetzes, Letter 87 (ed. Leone 1972) on laconic speech, citing among other things the same line from the Iliad, further explained in his verse commentary (Chiliades 12.523–6 and 5.317–37; ed. Leone 1968); see also Niketas Magistros, Letter 4.11–13 (also a citation of Iliad 3.214).

42 See e.g. Troilos (first half of the fifth century), Prolegomena to Hermogenes’ Art of Rhetoric, ed. Walz 1834: 6, 47.29–48.20 and Eustathios of Thessalonike, Commentary on the Iliad 1.639.15–640.31, ed. van der Valk 1971.

43 On aesthetics as a means for social distinction see further Bourdieu 1984.

44 This rare adjective too is Homeric yet with the meaning of “richly dowered”; Mauropous is the first in Byzantium to use the word in the meaning “of many gifts.”

45 For a notorious example see Michael Psellos’ description of the monk Elias: Dennis 2003.

46 In this, epistolography is much like the ancient symposia; cf. Whitmarsh 2004: 52–67 for a useful discussion.

47 Synesius of Cyrene and, even more so, Michael Psellos’ self-presentations as being, rather than manly, feminine and, rather than stable and strong, soft and changeable are a case in point; see Papaioannou 2000. On the association of letter-writing with femininity in pre-modern literature see Lindheim 2003.

48 For some attempts to map the personal in Byzantine letter-writing and literature in general see Littlewood 1999; Galatariotou 1993; Agapitos 2008.

49 For an example of the former see Papaioannou 2007; for the latter see Papaioannou forthcoming b.

50 See Mullett 1999b and Messis 2008.

51 A similar case has been made for the birth of courtly love in twelfth-century medieval western Europe; cf. Jaeger 1999. For the revival of erotic fiction in Byzantium see Roilos 2005 and Agapitos forthcoming.

52 Phantasia, a usually negative term in Byzantium (associated with demonic influences and immorality), is often discussed and elaborated in positive terms in Byzantine letters. For a preliminary discussion of the Byzantine appreciation of (letter-)writing in relation to fiction see Papaioannou 2004.

53 There is a precedent for this in pre-modern Greek writing; cf. Rosenmeyer 2001.

54 Karpozilos 1990: 43–5, lines 1–14.