The Letter Collection of Barsanuphius and John

The voluminous letter collection of Barsanuphius and John of Gaza contains 850 letters written by the two sixth-century anchorites who lived in cells near the monastery of Abbot Seridos in Tawatha a village a few miles southwest of Gaza. Barsanuphius and John, referred to as the Old Men of Gaza, were ascetic colleagues who wrote letters of spiritual direction to a wide group of disciples. The earliest manuscripts containing this correspondence date to the eleventh century; however, the collection was originally compiled by a member of Barsanuphius and John’s own monastic community (perhaps Dorotheos of Gaza) shortly after the death of John and the complete seclusion of Barsanuphius. The monk who compiled the collection followed a traditional practice among ancient editors, grouping the letters according to addressees, rather than chronologically. The collection begins with letters to individually named monks and continues with letters addressed to unidentified monks or the brothers of community collectively. The collection contains a series of letters to Aelianos, a layman newly elected as abbot of the monastery, and a large group of letters to lay Christians who sought spiritual guidance from the anchorites. The collection concludes with letters concerning episcopal elections in Gaza and Jerusalem and correspondence to civic officials and bishops in the region.

The Letter Collection of Avitus of Vienne

Avitus of Vienne was one of the leading Gallo-Roman aristocrats in the Burgundian kingdom and his letter collection reflects a network of correspondents that included Gallic bishops, Burgundian kings, and the Eastern Roman emperor. Avitus’s collection survives in only 3 manuscripts, but it works effectively to portray him as a learned inheritor of the classical literary traditions of the past and a mediator between the Roman past and the Burgundian present.

The Letter Collection of Ruricius of Limoges

The letters of Ruricius survive only in the Codex Sangallensis 190, written in the late eighth or early ninth century. They cover the period from ca.470 until ca. 507, the crucial transitional phase between imperial and barbarian Gaul, and are divided into two books, the first with eighteen letters and the second with sixty-five. The collection also contains 13 letters written to Ruricius. The collection therefore provides a rare opportunity to see sequences of letters in an exchange. These letters present a picture of life in late Roman Gaul that significantly complements that provided by Ruricius’ better-known confrères, such as Sidonius, Avitus, and Ennodius. The Ruricius collection has a very local flavor and, in an intimate and domestic way, describes everyday life in Visigothic Aquitania. The first book of letters was carefully organized as a unit in its own right. The second book is more difficult to assess. Even though there are no indications of divisions in the manuscript, there are suggestions of attempts to organize some of the letters into internally consistent "dossiers." The second book also seems rather to preserve, at the beginning, traces of plans to create two additional books, and, toward the end, elements of a rudimentary filing system.

The Letter Collection of Theodoret of Cyrrhus

Of the 233 letters directly attributed to Theodoret and the 22 that he likely co-wrote, 61 are preserved amid various records, whereas the rest survive in two single-author texts: Sirmondiana and Patmensis. How Theodoret’s letters were first gathered remains opaque. Theodoret never mentions assembling his letters, but it is likely that his office archived the letters he received and sent. Our ignorance about Theodoret’s letter archive extends to its early transmission, and no manuscripts of his letters predate 1000 CE. It is reasonable to assume that medieval collators and collectors crafted Theodoret’s two surviving collections, which were drawn from a larger archive that may have coalesced in Constantinople. These manuscripts supplied rhetorical models to medieval epistolographers, but they also constructed Theodoret as a sympathetic figure worthy of memory.

The Letter Collection of Procopius of Gaza

The Christian sophist Procopius of Gaza (c. 465–after 526) is connected to a collection of 174 letters that includes 169 letters by Procopius’s hand are preserved together with an additional five to him from his addressee Megethius. The recipients and contents of the letters are diverse. The letters are addressed to a large number of friends, relatives and colleagues, to fellow students, other sophists, and pupils. They contain advice, requests for favors and recommendations. Taken together, Procopius’s letters offer a rich image of sophistic self-fashioning amidst a redistribution of spiritual and earthly power between the traditional aristocratic elite and an up-and-coming class of church authorities. In other words, the letters of this Christian sophist reflect a historical moment in the transition from Late Antiquity to Byzantium.

The Letter Collection of Libanius of Antioch

Libanius’s letter collection is the largest to survive from antiquity, and indeed it is one of the most important sources on the socio-cultural history of late antiquity. Nevertheless, it has been only partially translated and selectively studied; this chapter, by contrast, focuses on the collection as a whole. First, it analyzes the three most important manuscripts, which shows 300 roughly identical letters in varying order. Second, it examines the collection’s design and its effects on interpretation. Finally, it dives into the question of editorial origins: did Libanius or some posthumous admirer compile the collection? Thus this chapter will show that reading Libanius’ letters in their original order—not in the chronological order first proposed by Otto Seeck and adopted by most editors and translators—not only enriches our understanding of the individual letters, but also shows the value of the letter collection as a unified literary composition.

The Letter Collection of Basil of Caesarea

In a recent article, Roy Gibson has underscored the differences between ancient letter collections and their modern presentations. The latter, Gibson shows, tend to arrange letters in chronological order, subordinating the question of the collection’s original form and purpose to the interests of the modern biographer. The corpus of letters of Basil of Caesarea exemplifies Gibson’s theme well. When, in 1730, the Benedictine editors of St. Maur imposed order on the seeming incoherence of the arrangement in the manuscripts available to him, they did so by placing the letters in a putative chronological order. All subsequent editions and translations have followed suit, and thus the study of Basil’s letters has served a largely biographical purpose. This chapter disentangles, as much as possible, the original collection or collections of Basil’s letters from the modern reception of them. There is evidence for the circulation of small collections of Basil’s letters during his lifetime, collections arranged by addressee for purposes ranging from apologetic to polemical. This chapter examines the history of the collection’s formation, arrangement, and content.

Introduction Greek and Latin Epistolography and Epistolary Collections in Late Antiquity

This chapter introduces the reader to the book as a whole. The volume establishes a few basic starting points for interpreting late antique letters and letter collections. First, it rejects the letter/epistle dichotomy established by Adolf Deissmann in the early 20th century in favor of a much broader conception of the epistolary genre. Second, it insists that readers conceive of authorship, complete with generic design and self-presentational concerns, in relation to the editorial activity of compiling late antique letter collections. Third, it suggests that the engine driving the popularity of letter collections was the dramatic increase in civil and military bureaucracy beginning in the 4th century. Social competition was in full force, and letter collections offered new tools with which elites could construct novel self-presentations.

Papal Letters and Letter Collections

Several significant papal letter collections have been preserved from Late Antiquity: the largest are those of Popes Leo I and Gregory I, but other, lesser-known yet sizeable collections have survived from Innocent I, Gelasius I, and Pelagius I. This chapter will analyze the common themes of these collections; the ways in which the authors and collators sought to enhance the bishop of Rome's authority; the rationale(s) behind selection processes, and changing preservation practices in the Roman scrinium from the fourth to sixth centuries.

The Letter Collection of Aeneas of Gaza

The 25 short letters of Aeneas of Gaza form one of late antiquity’s smallest and most idiosyncratic epistolary collections. The addressees of the letters and their epistolary personalities are mostly obscure. The collection instead seems to consist of a series of distinctive epistolary moments in which Aeneas shows his wit, irony, and penchant for baroque metaphors across a range of epistolary types. Its first letter, however, suggests that the collection was likely once much larger and well-developed, with the personalities of the addresses more vivid and Aeneas’s rhetorical flourishes more steadily paced. This suggests that we may now have an example of a truncated collection that offers insight into the ways that later Byzantines may have interacted with a late antique letter collection.