Letters and Communities

Paola Ceccarelli is Lecturer in Classical Greek History at University College London. Before joining UCL in 2015, she held university posts in Switzerland (Lausanne, 1991-93), Italy (L'Aquila, 1994-2006), and England (Durham, 2006-12), as well as research fellowships in France (EHESS, 2009), the United States (Center for Hellenic Studies, 1998-99), Germany (Konstanz, 2009; Heidelberg, 2011), and Cambridge (2013-2015). Her main areas of interest include concepts of space and identity in the ancient world, ancient performance culture, and Greek historiography, and she is currently working on an edition, including translation and commentary, of the Seleukid Royal Correspondence.

Lutz Doering is Professor of New Testament and Ancient Judaism at the University of Münster and heads the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, an institute dedicated to research on Judaism in antiquity and Christian-Jewish relations. Previously, he taught at the University of Jena (1999-2003), King's College London (2004-2009), and Durham University (2009-2014); in 2011/12, he held an AHRC Research Fellowship and in 2014/15 he was a Fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem. Since 2014, he has led a project within the Münster Cluster of Excellence, 'Religion and Politics', on integration and diversification in Palestinian Judaism during the Hellenistic-Roman period, focusing both on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on the early history of the synagogue.

Thorsten Fögen is Associate Professor (Reader) in Classics at Durham University. Previously he taught at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2002-09. He held research fellowships at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. (2005/06), the University of California, Los Angeles (2007/08), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2015/16), and the 'Internationales Kolleg Morphomata' at the University of Cologne (2016/17). His research focuses on Latin literature, especially from the late Republic until the early Empire, with particular interests in ancient technical texts, epistolography, animals in antiquity, and the history of linguistic ideas.

Ingo Gildenhard is Reader in Classics and the Classical Tradition at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King's College. Before taking up his current post he also taught at King's College London (1999-2006) and Durham University (2006-2012), and held research fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge (2006) and the University of Konstanz (2009); from 2009-12, he was the recipient of a major research fellowship of the Leverhulme Trust. His research interests cover the fields of Latin literature (especially Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid), Roman culture, and the classical tradition, on which he has (co-)authored and edited several volumes and articles.

The writing of letters often evokes associations of a single author and a single addressee, who share in the exchange of intimate thoughts across distances of space and time. This model underwrites such iconic notions as the letter representing an 'image of the soul of the author' or constituting 'one half of a dialogue'. However justified this conception of letter-writing may be in particular instances, it tends to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world and have yet to receive sustained and systematic investigation. In particular, it overlooks the fact that letters frequently presuppose and were designed to reinforce communities-or, indeed, to constitute them in the first place.

This volume explores the interrelation of letters and communities in the ancient world, examining how epistolary communication aided in the construction and cultivation of group-identities and communities, whether social, political, religious, ethnic, or philosophical. A theoretically informed Introduction establishes the interface of epistolary discourse and group formation as a vital but hitherto neglected area of research, and is followed by thirteen case studies offering multi-disciplinary perspectives from four key cultural configurations: Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity. The first part opens the volume with two chapters on the theory and practice of epistolary communication that focus on ancient epistolary theory and the unavoidable presence of a letter-carrier who introduces a communal aspect into any correspondence, while the second comprises five chapters that explore configurations of power and epistolary communication in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic age. Five chapters on letters and communities in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity follow in the third, part before the volume concludes with an envoi examining the trans-historical, or indeed timeless, philosophical community Seneca the Younger construes in his Letters to Lucilius.

In the ancient world, letter-writing not only forged connections between individuals, but also helped to construct and cultivate group-identities and communities. This volume explores the interrelation of epistolary communication and socio-political practice across four key cultural configurations: Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity.