The Letters of Alciphron have survived the passage of time with exceptional discretion and the author is still practically anonymous today: apart from the reverence shown by Aristaenetus (5/6 AD) in a fictitious exchange of letters between Alciphron and Lucian, Greek scholarship has not quoted this work for nearly a millennium.1
This work is still relatively neglected today and its discredit is due to ‘external’ reasons, which could be described as ideological: it belongs to the late period of ancient literature, corresponds to a minor genre, has a fragmented character, and does not refer to any express ‘authority’, since the discourse is divided into a series of disparate speakers (epistolary impersonations) in letters without continuity, which generally went unanswered. In addition, it does not possess any of the qualities that made Ovid’s Heroïdes prestigious, nor does it belong to the category of the epistolary corpus with a historical value, unlike the personal correspondence of actual writers.
The first critics who took an interest in Alciphron’s Letters considered the ‘author’ a mere imitator, a vehicle of ideas entirely inhabited by others. His work was often regarded as a pedantic patchwork of reminiscences2 and a collection of realistic if not veristic3 portrayals. The situation has partially changed only in the 21st century.
Alciphron’s collection has been approached from different angles, but generally among other compilations of fictitious epistles4 and more as a cultural witness than as a singular work. It is seen as a product of the Second Sophistic or as representative of the epistolary genre; furthermore, from a documentary point of view it is read as a text that bears witness to the Hellenic culture of its time,5 or finally it is viewed from limited perspectives of intertextuality or literary history (Alciphron’s use of sources in some letters, or particular themes such as love or country life, or the debated question of whose writings came first, Alciphron’s or Lucian’s).
Most other compilations of fictitious epistles have been the subject of specific studies highlighting their literariness: not only the collection of Aristaenetus (e.g. in Bing and Höschele 2014) and the twenty farmers’ letters composed by Aelian (e.g. Leone 1974 and 1975), but also more atypical works such as Chion’s novel which reconciles a certain use of the epistolary genre with the imperatives of romantic fiction (Billault 1977). Conversely, not one single publication has analysed Alciphron’s letters specifically from the point of view of their degree of literariness, and very few articles exist highlighting a particular intentionality at work in the collection.6
At first glance, Alciphron’s collection of letters, which is composed of four books, named according to their correspondents (fishermen, farmers, parasites and courtesans), seems like a medley of separate worlds loosely joined into a four-piece collection. This book aims at exploring the coherence of this collection as a whole and the specific intentionality of its author. It is the result of investigations and discussions which culminated in a recent symposium on this very topic (Nice, June 2016). The challenge of each contribution is to discover whether or not all four books possess the unity of a literary project, i.e. do they share aesthetic and stylistic elements and construction processes that render them a single opus? This hypothesis is explored, validated and detailed from several perspectives. A further investigation concerns the individual consistency of the books: is each separately functioning as a well-organised miniature letter-collection? Finally, a third focus has been on the impregnation of tradition and the auctorial originality in the composition likely to reveal a distinctive way of treating cultural heritage that goes beyond its usual reach: has Alciphron succeeded in practicing imitative intertextuality in a coherent way and with the desire to innovate in hybridization by creating a singular work likely to impact on the fictitious epistolography in its later development (in particular the kinds of short and concentrated haiku of Aelian or the erotic letters of Aristaenetus)? Did he revisit the prestigious past of Athens by going beyond clichés? Has he managed to skilfully combine the formal processes of construction and style of several pre-existing genres (sophisticated rhetoric, comedy and poetry)?
The unity of the work is likely to be expressed at these different levels, and this book proposes a methodological combination to illuminate this issue (codicological criticism, stylistic and rhetorical examination, analysis of prosody, the study of thematic treatments, the use of proper names, and the relation to tradition), either at the level of the whole collection, or at book level, or even by focusing on a test sample. This multiscale approach will be developed by aiming at three main targets: the literary program, cultural reappropriation, and generic reorientation.
One of the first steps necessary to this investigation is the description of the variations in the outline and content of each of the four books in the manuscript tradition. The manuscripts transmit the four series of letters under the name of Alciphron in a different composition and order, each series being devoted to a social type of writer and recipient. In principle, this disorder makes the global unity and the particular arrangement of the four books problematic, even if they are attributed to the same author. Nevertheless, the papers of Emeline Marquis and Andrew Morrison on manuscript tradition suggest that each of the four series of letters had a well-defined outline starting from the archetype of our manuscripts, and that in each book the letters were in an almost constant order, despite some divergences and possible shortcomings. Their papers help us to evaluate the implications of such discrepancies, while the authors comment on the choices of reconstruction made by successive editors and propose the probable framework of the genuine text.
This first insight into how far we may rely on manuscript tradition to determine the structure of the work, and into the conditions under which the transmission of letters may be considered as proof of a relative consistency, needs to be supplemented by other investigations.
At the micro-structural level, Emilia Barbiero studies the series of letters 1 to 6 of the third book and concludes that it displays the marks of a deliberate and elaborate sequential ordering on the part of the author, thanks to the game of time adverbs and consequently the parasites’ alternate temporal perspectives on their past or imminent participation in banquets. This temporal structure is accompanied by rich games of antithesis about their situation and their relation to food. This small-scale test shows both the good preservation of the text and how meticulously a sequence can be orchestrated, all of this highlighting the sophistication of the composition.
Prosodic care and rhythmic virtuosity are the objects of the analysis of Book 1 by Michèle Biraud. She reveals its construction in a diptych, based on numerical equalities, onomastic echoes and thematic parallels. Her study also discovers and explores the unexpected rhythmic richness of certain letters once they are read according to the stress-based rhythm (the mode of pronunciation shared by the greater part of the population in Alciphron’s day) and various degrees of this rhythmic elaboration which coincide with intentions either argumentative or lyrical, and also with the search for a more accomplished rhythmic development for the boundaries of each part of the diptych. This search for more or less dense rhythms and a construction concerned with ring-composition and parallels between balanced parts shows the high degree of elaboration of the work in its most formal aspects.
The conclusion which can be drawn at the end of this first investigation is that it is certain that Alciphron had envisaged a concerted order of letters in each book, and that the original order of letters, at least for Book 1 and the beginning of Book 3, is well maintained. There is, moreover, evidence to suggest the preservation of the correct order of letters in the rest of the corpus, with a few exceptions. These four studies also show, each in its own way, that it is best to follow the text of the manuscript (or one of them) as closely as possible, to avoid gap hypotheses, preserve the syntax (unless there is a strong argument linked to another level of interpretation in favour of a modification), and to rely precisely on the graphical evolutions for any hypothesis of restitution in the case of a locus desperatus.7
In order to break new ground within the cultural framework of the Second Sophistic, an author had to reinterpret, above all, the heritage and cultural background in an original way and thus modify the horizon of the external reader’s expectations in order to access new meanings through inter- and intra-textual games. The unity of the choices and the constancy in the interpretations and manipulations of the cultural background in several texts are also, for modern scholarship, clear signs they were written by the same author.
The study of references to mythological characters and narratives leads Sophie Schoess to conclude that even those that are predominantly proverbial nevertheless ensure the unity of theme and trope within each book (e.g. those found in the Fishermen’s letters are mainly marine), and constitute a unifying factor in all books. Furthermore, the cross-reading of mythological references accrues meaningful implicatures between them, particularly in the Letters of Parasites and Letters of Courtesans (e.g. if we read Glycera’s life in parallel with the story of Ariadne, it highlights both the aspirations and fears of her love story with Menander). Sophie Schoess shows that the learned man’s activity of reading this text leads him to construct a new and extremely complex literary universe from these letters.
Onofrio Vox looks at the specificity of women’s voices in the twenty-seven letters from female senders. They continually turn to literary models through female authors (e.g. Sappho) or female speakers (e.g. Theocritus’ Simaetha). If Alciphron was seeking a human truth of the feminine ethos, he did so by means of literary imitation, and this is true not only of educated courtesans, but also of other women. Feminine characters express thoughts that, far from being simple, reproduce and represent the author’s sophistry.
According to Guiseppe Zanetto, Alciphron, in his Letters of Fishermen, is freely inspired by a literary tradition devoted to their difficult existence (from Homer to the epigrams of the Palatine Anthology) and a poetic-mythological tradition linking sea and love, with reference to what he would have regarded as the typical universe of classical Attica (the ports of the coast and other Athenian realia, and the Platonic oppositions of sea vs land, sea vs city and sea vs virtue). Alciphron thus creates his own literary universe centred on the sea.
In the last chapter of this section, Melissa Funke carries out a detailed examination of Alciphron’s references to famous sculptures of the fourth and third centuries. Departing from the ekphrastic model, Alciphron proceeds by allusions woven into the flow of the narration, with a great economy of language. She concludes that the interest of this visual intertext of famous statues is in allowing Alciphron to claim more nostalgic authority for his text than he would have been able to do with literary references alone.
It emerges from this second series of studies that Alciphron is not only an author with a vast cultural knowledge, which was the main prerequisite at that time for writing rhetoric, but that he is also fully and deliberately aware of his own art of writing. On the other hand, if one considers cultural themes and the point of view from which they are treated, there is no significant heterogeneity in the corpus of the four books (except that which results from the themes peculiar to each book and the environment and the ethos of the writers).8 This is an important subconclusion since it does not exclude the possibility of a distinctive intentionality even if the assumption that it is due to the dominant cultural environment of the period cannot be abandoned on the basis of this criterion alone.
Some of these contributions have already shown the importance of the imitation of certain literary genres in the cultural construction of Alciphronian letters. The last four contributions of the collection attempt to clarify the equilibria Alciphron found between the imitation of tradition and personal reconstructions through new hybridizations and the subversion of models.
Rafael J. Gallé Cejudo follows the path already trodden by recently published works on the combination of ethopoeia and other progymnasmatic forms,9 and he seeks to understand how Alciphron hybridized them with the epistolary genre despite generic tensions between epistolary precepts and progymnasmatical rhetorics. Some epistolary elements have been forced by the rhetorical nature of the composition, and a few progymnasmatic patterns have been ‘perverted’ by this generic contamination. These contaminations or even absorptions sometimes alter the original functions in such a way that they can become inverted. Alciphron, interweaving generic characteristics of letter, progymnasmata and epigram, creates a literary sub-genre sometimes very remote from the formal conventions and contents of a ‘true’ letter.
But Alciphron also pursues other goals such as crossing the stylized representations of the countryside in sophistic Greek literature and the tradition of pastoral poetry inherited from Theocritus with the situations of the comedies (particularly the Nea) and their urban and rural characters. The analysis of this original generic synthesis is the subject of the contribution by Tiziana Drago. She underlines the variations produced against the conventional background and shows that the epistolographer’s interest is not in reproducing the events of comedy in miniature, but in working on the characters’ personalities (according to the precepts of epistolary genre and its aims, showing the writer’s ethos) in order to focus on the most significant traits that come to light from the writings to which he alludes.
New Comedy and Pastoral Poetry also share common techniques of naming the characters which are adapted and developed in the speaking-names studied by Owen Hodkinson. Not only are the creative processes identical, but also the ironic distance that these names can create between the expectations of the reader regarding the character’s status (based on the speaking-name which constitutes a sort of mask) and what actually happens to him. By expanding on an earlier study on the first book (Casevitz 2002) to apply to all of the books, Hodkinson shows that characters’ names are not only speaking names but also dramatic constructions.
The letters of Book 4 appear to be the products of a sophist’s bookish erudition and at the same time masterpieces of epistolary fictionality. The fiction lies in a series of motifs borrowed from erotic literature (epigrams or novels), encyclopaedism, pastoral poetry and Menander’s comedies, but woven in an original and picturesque way by the voices of courtesans who were historical celebrities and who make us see the Athenian world from their private point of view. Yvonne Rösch proposes a close reading in terms of a (re)animation of the Hellenic archive located around the classical hetairai and their popular friends. Menander, as a character of this epistolary novel and also Alciphron’s authorial alter ego, harbours a love and longing for Glycera that seems parallel to a sophist’s longing for classical Athens. Alciphron’s hetairai are the object of an erotic and at the same time intellectual attraction. This unusual alliance thus sweetens the act of memorializing the Hellenic past, which is present throughout the four books of letters as longing or nostalgia, as several contributors have noticed.
Through the complex association of genres and the subverted use of the macro-structural genre (in this case, the letter), and also through its formal research, the work of Alciphron fits neatly into the literary productions of the end of the second century, such as Achilles Tatius’ novel or Lucian’s Dialogues, which initiate a phase of reflexivity on the genres and the playfulness of fiction; but Alciphron does it in his own way. The contributions of this publication support the idea that Alciphron created a Book of letters in the same way as we speak of a Book of poems, that is to say a unified work in several volumes, the parts of which are arranged in an elaborate composition, a mixture of rigorous but discrete architectures and a shimmering poikilia. In particular, these contributions help to underline the creative quality of the work, which offers miniatures and prose poems. They are not intended to propose the reconstruction of the profile of the writer, but to allow a better appreciation of the depth and quality of an original, coherent and major work.
Michèle Biraud and Arnaud Zucker
The first author to mention the Letters of Alciphron, fleetingly, is Eustathius, ad Il. 2.756.12 Van der Valk (ὁ Ἀττικιστὴς Ἀλκίφρων).
See Vieillefond [1979: 139].
Alciphronem … quasi imagines ad verum expressisse (Seiler [1856: 4]).
Many books have appeared over the last fifteen years on epistolary literature, notably the pioneering book of P. Rosenmeyer (Ancient Epistolary Fictions, 2001) and the collective works edited by L. Nadjo and É. Gavoille (Epistulae antiquae, le genre épistolaire antique et ses prolongements européens, 2000–2002), R. Morello and A.D. Morrison (Ancient Letters, 2007) and O. Vox (Lettere, mimesi, retorica. Studi sull’epistolografia letteraria greca, 2013), but none is specifically dedicated to the Letters of Alciphron.
There is general agreement that it was composed at the very end of the 2nd cent. AD or during the first half of the 3rd cent. AD.
With the notable exception of the contribution of J. König, ‘Alciphron’s epistolarity’, in Morello—Morrison 2007.
See e.g. Biraud [2010: 334–335].
A recently published study (Perrot 2017), which approaches musical metaphors in a more general discussion of the sound landscape, also leads to the conclusion that there is a fairly even distribution of elements which give sound to the landscape across the four books.
E.g. Amato and Schamp [2005], Schmitz [2004], Vox [2013b].