To the Letter. Simon Garfield

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ as part of an ongoing correspondence, and the visible hiccups in these exchanges (the chiding for failing to reply) are as much a part of letters in the first and second century as they are of our own.

Solemnis to Paris, his brother, very many greetings.* I want you to know that I am in very good health, as I hope you are in turn, you neglectful man, who have sent me not even one letter. But I think I am behaving in a more considerate fashion in writing to you . . . to you, brother . . . my messmate. Greet from me Diligens and Cogitatus and Corinthus . . . Farewell, dearest brother.

Chrauttius to Veldeius his brother and old messmate, very many greetings. And I ask you, brother Veldeius, – I am surprised that you have written nothing back to me for such a long time – whether you have heard anything from our elders or about . . . in which unit he is; and greet him from me in my words and Virilis the veterinary doctor. Ask him [Virilis] whether you may send me through one of our friends the pair of shears which he promised me in exchange for money. And I ask you, brother Virilis, to greet from me our [?] sister Thuttena. Write back to us [?] how Velbutena is [?]. It is my wish that you enjoy the best of fortune. Farewell. [The back of the letter carried instructions to deliver it to London.]*

      The letters at Vindolanda – so valuable to us now – were not written with an eye on posterity, and no one handling them in, say, AD 105, would have thought for a moment about their future value. Their brevity, immediacy and mundanity may appear to us closer to mobile phone texts or tweets than full letters. And no one would claim they were beautiful pieces of writing, or instructive beyond their specific historical details. They are often charming, but they rarely convey anything of a philosophical nature. For that we need to go back to other excavations, to letters written on papyrus and rediscovered in the last three centuries, and to the undisputed first masters of the form.

* Octavius was an import-exporter; the sinew he mentions is believed to have been an important element in the building of catapults. The word ‘brother’ in these greetings should often be read as ‘comrade’.

* See Chapter Fourteen.

* Both Solemnis and Paris are believed to be slaves in a cohort of Batavians, one of the two principal units at Vindolanda in the period AD 85–130. The other was the Tungrian cohort.

* The number of question marks in this passage exposes the translator’s dilemma. But the word ‘translator’ is in itself inadequate: a phalanx of historians, palaeographers and linguistic experts have pored over these texts in the past decades, analysing the smallest curvature on the faintest letterform, cross-referencing indistinct names and locations, and piecing together logical textual and physical combinations – the ultimate lexicologist’s jigsaw. And then there is the problem of wider contextual interpretation, a task akin to reconstructing a forest from scattered bracken. It is scholarship for which the inexpert modern enthusiast can only be inestimably grateful.

      Chapter Three

      The Consolations of Cicero, Seneca and Pliny the Younger

      Perhaps we should begin with the oldest letter that we have, fictional as it is. Homer’s Iliad, probably written in the eighth century BC, contains a stirring passage in the sixth book in which a letter almost kills its bearer. King Proteus has been entertaining a new visitor, the handsome and virile warrior Bellerophon, and it is the fatal nature of these things that the king’s wife Anteia falls in love with him. Bellerophon, however, is less than keen, and his virtue leads almost to his downfall. Anteia, livid at his rejection, informs her husband Proteus that he has tried to rape her, and Proteus leaps into action immediately by deciding that rather than killing Bellerophon himself, he should get Anteia’s father to do it. So he writes bad things about Bellephron in a letter written on sealed tablets (‘things that would destroy a man’s soul’, according to Homer), and commands Bellerophon to deliver the tablets to Anteia’s father himself, the original turkey voting for Christmas.

      Mythological madness follows, in which Anteia’s father Iobates, king of Lycia, decides not to kill Bellerophon, but to send him on a seemingly impossible mission to kill the fire-snorting Chimera, which he does with the aid of winged Pegasus, after which he must defeat two armies singlehandedly. He lives to tell the tale to Poseidon, who sends a flood. The story goes on.

      In the real world, Greek letters were generally of less consequence. Often, we find a simple thing: that many letters adopt a formality and mode of expression that we find instantly recognisable. Papyrus fragments and scrolls from 350 BC unearthed at a Herculaneum villa in 1752, at Arsinoe from 1877 and from rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus from 1897 (and at least 20 other locations close to the Nile) point to the sort of uniformity of style that we have come to expect from PowerPoint presentations. There is the regular opening – ‘From A to B, greetings’ – that we have seen employed by the Romans at Vindolanda, frequently extended according to circumstance. When writing to a person of seniority, perhaps a king, a writer would respectfully reverse the order to ‘Demetrius the Fair, King of Cyrene, from Hippopapos, greetings.’ There may be further information to aid identification and location: ‘Antogonus, brother of Capedonus, horse breeder in Olympia, to Leodonus, teacher at Delphi, greetings.’ The sign-off would usually be simple: ‘Farewell’ (usually abbreviated from ‘I trust/pray that you fare well) or, too modern though it sounds, ‘Best wishes’. (Although it is now used only informally, ‘Best wishes’ was primarily reserved for business letters.) Only those in the highest positions tended to ignore these pleasantries, a public declaration that they had more important things on their mind. Alexander the Great, for example, purposely only used them for his most trusted generals and statesmen, including Antipater and Phocion.

Where did the ‘greetings’ element come from? One explanation suggests it became popular in Athens after 425 BC, when the statesman Cleon used the word at the start of his account of an unexpected victory against the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. The report was an official council document, but its celebratory tone was soon deemed suitable for the common letter, initially perhaps as a reminder of the victory. Before this – and this is the case of the earliest Greek letter that survives, an indistinct fifth-century inscription on lead from the Black Sea – there was no greeting at all, as if a piece of papyrus that had been delivered by fleet-footed messenger after a journey of many days was somehow part of an ongoing and open conversation, like an email.* But once it was established, the hello-goodbye template would barely alter in style through the centuries (though it wouldn’t be until the sixteenth century that the spacious layout of a modern letter took shape; certainly papyrus was far too precious to experiment with attractive blank space).

      The contents of the letters, composed in black carbon ink with reed pen, are also familiar. There are enquiries about the recipient’s health, usually optimistic, followed with news of the sender’s health, which is almost always buoyant. The ancient history scholar John Muir observes that when this practice was later adopted by letter-writers in Latin it was so commonplace that it was sometimes abbreviated as SVBEEQV: si vales bene est, ego quidem valeo.** The receipt of previous letters was then acknowledged, or perhaps a rebuke for the lack of them. Good wishes were sent to all members of the family, each by name, and often including pets.

      The practice of letter-writing was itself the subject of study as early as the fourth century BC, or at least the subject of criticism. Theophrastus, categorising the character traits of the ‘arrogant man’, observes that ‘when sending instructions by letter, he does not write “you would oblige me” СКАЧАТЬ