The fictitious, highly literary Letters of Alciphron (second century CE) are mostly to invented characters. Letters of Farmers by Aelian (c. 170-235 CE) portray the country ways of their imagined writers. The Erotic Epistles of Philostratus (perhaps born c. 170 CE) resemble and may have been influenced by those of Alciphron. The Letters of Alciphron (second century CE) constitute one of the most attractive products of the Second Sophistic. They are fictitious compositions based on an astonishingly wide variety of circumstances, though the theme of erotic love is constantly sounded. The imagination shown by the author and his convincing realism win him a place of distinction in the early development of romantic prose. The letters, which are highly literary, owing much to the New Comedy of Menander, purport to give us a sketch of the social life of Athens in the fourth century BCE. The collection is arranged in four divisions: Letters of Fishermen; Farmers; Parasites; Courtesans. Senders and addressees are mostly invented characters, but in the last section Alciphron presents us with several attempts at historical fiction, the most engaging being an exchange of letters between Menander and Glycera. This volume also includes twenty Letters of Farmers ascribed to Aelian (c.170-235 CE) and a collection of seventy-three Erotic Epistles of Philostratus (probably Flavius of that name, also born c. 170 CE). In style and subject matter these resemble those of Alciphron, by whom they may have been influenced.

In ‘The Letters of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?’, Michèle Biraud and Arnaud Zucker have gathered a dozen international contributions about the collection of letters of Alciphron, hitherto mainly studied as part of the epistolary genre at the time of the Second Sophistic or as testimony of a nostalgia for the Athens of Menander's time. The aim is to show the unity of a literary project through studies on the careful arrangement of each book (overall organization, coherent reappropriation of a culture, innovations in generic hybridization) and various elements of cohesion between the four books. For this purpose, were used as tools codicological criticism, stylistic and rhetorical examination, analysis of prosody, study of thematic treatments, uses of onomastics.

Once nearly as ubiquitous as dictionaries and cookbooks are today, letter-writing manuals and their predecessors served to instruct individuals not only on the art of letter composition but also, in effect, on personal conduct. Poster and Mitchell contend that the study of letter-writing theory, which bridges rhetorical theory and grammatical studies, represents an emerging discipline in need of definition. In this volume, they gather the contributions of eleven experts to sketch the contours of epistolary theory and collect the historic and bibliographic materials - from Isocrates to email - that form the basis for its study.

"This volume places the New Testament letters squarely in the middle of all the important letter corpora of antiquity. Chapters cover the basic letter formula, papyrus and postal delivery, non-literary and diplomatic correspondence, Greek and Latin literary letters, epistolary theory, letters in early Judaism, and all the letters of the New Testament. Part I of each chapter surveys each corpus, followed by detailed exegetical examples in Part II. Comprehensive bibliographies and 54 exercises with answers suit this guide to student and scholar alike."--Publisher's website.

Der Philologus, eine der ältesten und angesehensten Zeitschriften auf dem Gebiet der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, versteht sich als Forum für den Austausch unterschiedlicher methodischer Ansätze, die einer weiterführenden Interpretation der antiken Texte und ihrer Rezeption dienen. Dazu gehören philologische, literaturwissenschaftliche und mit interdisziplinären Perspektiven arbeitende Beiträge. Besonderer Wert wird auf die internationale Ausrichtung der Zeitschrift gelegt. Publikationssprachen sind Deutsch, Englisch, Italienisch, Französisch. Neben der Zeitschrift erscheinen ab 2014 Supplementbände. In der Reihe Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes werden Monographien und Sammelbände zu allen Themen der Klassischen Philologie und ihrer Rezeption veröffentlicht. Der Fokus soll hier insbesondere auf neueren Ansätzen der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft in einer interdisziplinären Perspektive liegen. Geschäftsführender Herausgeber: Christoph Schubert (Erlangen-Nürnberg)

A comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature, first published in 2001.

The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative newcomer to the Anglophone field of classics, and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. This Handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define the state of this developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g., gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the classical traditions and early Christianity).

'The Letters of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?' (Michèle Biraud and Arnaud Zucker editors) offer a dozen papers on an misknown author of the Second Sophistic, Alciphron, aiming to show the unity of his literary project.

Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.