De Gruyter (2018) h/b 388pp £65.99 (ISBN 9783110426946)
This book is handsomely produced by de Gruyter with a wealth—sometimes a superfluity—of documentary illustration. Although it contains some useful and intriguing general information about letter-writing, it is chiefly aimed at the specialist papyrologist.
There has been a welcome awakening of interest of late in Graeco-Roman letter-writing, and this study represents a marked change of focus. It concentrates, as the title suggests, on the actual materials of surviving Greek and Roman letters and on the formal characteristics of correspondence including questions of palaeography and the circumstances of discovery; subject-matter and language are strictly subordinate. To a very considerable degree the book is a consequence of the recent explosion of digital material available to papyrologists, including of course many thousands of images. Three databases in particular are relevant: the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens (HGV), the Duke Database of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP), and the ever-expanding Leuven database Trismegistos.
The first chapter gives a general survey of the nature and uses of letter-writing over the whole period covered, and the various delivery systems which are known or can be assumed. The field is quite strictly defined; for instance, there is brief mention of the many letters surviving on inscriptions sent by the Hellenistic kings to their subject cities but these are nowhere sufficiently considered. The sections on ‘literary’ and especially philosophical letters are not entirely satisfactory, and comments on the relationship between the various epistolary manuals and the actual practice of letter-writers are highly debatable beyond the use of simple formulae. The development of the standard letter-pattern is outlined with some detail about the subtle adjustments which indicate the relative status of correspondents; there are also some interesting suggestions that, towards the end of the period studied, some Latin letter-writing conventions may have influenced Greek habits—the influence is so often in the other direction.
The second chapter deals with the actual materials commonly used for letters—lead sheet, papyrus, ostraka, wood and parchment—and there is some useful geographical and statistical detail. Since Ceccharelli’s indispensable collation of surviving documents on small lead sheets, much more attention has been devoted to this peculiar medium, and the evidence seems to be that letters written on lead are mysteriously concentrated in the Black Sea area and the districts around the Gulf of Marseilles. Why? Colonisation, trade? Ostraka seem plausibly to be used for short letters when other materials were too expensive or even unobtainable. The sections on the materials themselves are oddly skimpy, papyrus and parchment of all things getting fairly superficial treatment.
The third chapter deals with the format and layout of letters. Although private letter-writers were obviously not entirely consistent in their practice, certain patterns emerge in the ways in which they used the papyrus sheet. Also, the formulaic parts of the letter become more entrenched, more visually identifiable and even sometimes separate, e.g. the opening address, the farewell greetings and the date. There is much careful and detailed observation here but the definition of a letter is arguably narrow and more attention could have been devoted to public letters and the subtleties of their conventions.
The fourth and final chapter is very much S.’s home ground. It is helpfully and copiously illustrated and is concerned with who physically wrote the letters—or parts of them—that we possess. Many private correspondents obviously wrote their own, but equally some people for various reasons—including illiteracy –employed letter-writers/scribes, and it then became common practice for the authors to add some final ‘signature’ comments or well-wishings in their own hand. Administrative or business letters are likely to be more complicated: different hands in the same document may sometimes give clues to the actual processes of bureaucracy (some readers may be disappointed to learn that the famous P.Bingen 45 was almost certainly not signed off by Cleopatra!). Key questions for this chapter are how far can the identification of particular hands be considered reliable and how much trust can then be placed in editors’ attributions of changes of hand (‘handshifts’ in technical parlance). There is much very technical argument and some fascinating attempts to make use of modern forensic techniques of handwriting analysis (not all of which will be strange to palaeographers). It is clear from the evidence presented that in the past quite a few erroneous assumptions have been made by editors about changes of hand in papyrus letters, and this chapter supplies useful correctives and needful cautionary advice.
There are three Appendices. The first is enormous and is a listing of all the known archives of papyrus letters arranged in date order with details of their provenance, modern discovery and content; this is very heavily indebted to Trismegistos and HGV. The second gives the dimensions of nearly two hundred completely preserved papyrus letters (numbering and a rough hierarchy of sizes would have helped here). The third gives a selection of letters with ‘handshifts’; it has eighteen illustrations.
An immense amount of labour has gone into this book (two research assistants are deservedly thanked); it contains much useful information, the documentary illustration is very generous, and it deserves to be judged by the highest standards. Unfortunately there are faults of both execution and design. There are throughout the book far too many careless errors, many of which could have been eradicated by even a moderately competent proof-reader. These range from annoying misspellings and inconsistencies to more serious mistakes in quotation and reference; they should not have occurred in a work requiring such detailed accuracy. Then there are unaccountable omissions: for instance, in the section on papyrus there is no mention either in the text or the bibliography of Naphthali Lewis’s basic book or of the practical work of Parkinson and Quirke, and, although Pliny’s account of papyrus manufacture is referred to, there is no consideration of the description of various grades of papyrus nor is there any attempt to correlate this with actual surviving examples. The wealth of illustration is very welcome and in some places essential, but some of the images are poor and it was silly to include, for instance, the images of the very early wooden tablets from Daphne which are all but obscured by the unbelieveably clumsy overprinting by the Greek archaeological service. As to design, the fourth chapter is way out of proportion to the other three and should more properly have been a learned article which could have been more succinctly summarized in the book. Of greater concern, however, is Appendix 1, for this is three quarters as long as the four main chapters of the book. It is unquestionably an extremely useful assemblage of data from Trismegistos and gives tantalizing information about the discovery (and the fragmentation) of the letter-archives as well as equally tantalizing summaries of their content, but, as S. herself observes, it will need constant updating. It could and should have been published by the Heidelberg Center 933 (under whose auspices the author did much of her work) as a separate pamphlet capable of being revised at intervals rather than being frozen and fixed in a book. It could then have included useful references to modern editions with commentary and translation which could also have been kept up to date.
All in all, this is an ambitious undertaking with modern credentials but in the end it does not work as well as it should and has not been finished as well as it should either. Specialists will use it and be grateful for it but they will need to read it with caution and with some patience.
John Muir—King’s College London