University of Tasmania, Australia

Letters and Literature in the Roman World

In recent years several influential studies have emerged investigating the epistolary genre in the ancient world, focussing particularly on the development of the ‘literary letter’ such as we find in Ovid’s Heroides and Epistolae ex Ponto. This project will contribute to this growing area of research by examining the many areas of overlap and break-down between writing that self-identifies with personal epistolarity and that which claims public literary status. Cicero’s ostensibly private correspondence, for instance, tends irrevocably towards the status of literature once collated and published; and exactly this tension was of great concern to Pliny the Younger as he introduced his own collection of letters, at once both personal writing and a public response to the Ciceronian publication; at the other end of the spectrum Ovid’s verse from exile simultaneously (re)presents poems-as-letters and letters-as-poems. The project seeks to further understanding not only of the epistolary genre itself, but of many forms of addressed prose and verse.