Letters as Literature

I'm Chris Whitten. I teach classics here at Cambridge University.

This first lecture on Chinese epistles is

an opportunity to introduce plenty very briefly,

but more interestingly, I think, more importantly,

to introduce the epistles as a literary work and indeed,

the idea of having letters as literature.

I think that's a relatively unfamiliar idea.

We're all used to the idea of the novel in modern literature or poetry.

In ancient literature, you probably come across oratory history.

Maybe philosophy letters are not so well known as a genre,

which is a bit paradoxical because actually,

there are lots of lots of letter collections from antiquity.

They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes,

but plenty is is a very particular one, a very innovative one.

He created something very distinct and very new,

and I'd like to try and sketch out how and the

ways in which he does that in this first lecture,

So plenty the younger we call him that to distinguish him from his

uncle Pliny the elder, who wrote the natural history and famously died

in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 a d.

Pity the younger. His full name is God's plan use calculus. Second does.

He was born as an equestrian, which is to say he was from the elite,

not the absolute top political elite, the senators,

but still the wealthy elite of Rome.

And he came from Komen in the very far north of Italy.

Um, now he became a senator at a fairly good age and had a good senatorial career.

He became consul in 100 having been born in the early sixties,

and that actually was about as young as you could hope

to become consul for a person from that kind of background.

And after that, he went on to a good consular career because console,

Although we tend to talk about as the high point of the career,

it's actually you hit it when you maybe 40 you've got to do things after that.

And he did. Indeed, he became

got a special governorship of the province of both India and Pontus,

which is modern in modern Turkey, so he basically had a really good career.

It shows that he was a successful

in our terms politician that he was in favour with a series of emperors.

What is most famous for now are his two major works of literature,

the Epistles and the panegyric Asse Panegyric won't be talking about today,

but I'll just point out that in antiquity,

especially later antiquity around the fourth century it was

actually his most famous and most influential work.

It's a speech of praise to the Emperor Trajan,

which he delivered when he was consul in 100

it becomes the founding model in a whole genre of speeches, of praise to emperors,

so called panegyric

that flourishes through antiquity.

Anyway, that's to the side. For now, we're concentrating on the epistles.

Now,

if you could take an addition to the epistles like this slightly battered one here,

you'll find their 10 books.

I'm actually going to talk about the epistles as a nine book collection,

and the reason I'm going to do that is because, actually,

when you get this book the set of 10 books,

it's actually two different works that have been put together by modern editors.

Pliny wrote what he called the epistolary the epistles in nine books.

It's very clear it was planned as a set of nine.

The ninth book, Lots of Ways completes the series,

nine muses, but perhaps part of the story here

as a separate thing after his death was added.

1/10 book and the difference is that the first nine

books are a series of letters from Pliny to Friends,

family acquaintances, about 100 of them,

and some people received more than one letter.

Often, people just received a single letter altogether.

There's 247 letters in these nine books,

and I'll come back to their nature in just a second.

The difference with Book 10 is that they

are only between Thinni and the Emperor Trajan,

and they include replies from tradition.

So this was It's likely that this book,

it's almost certain that he didn't put that book together himself.

It's mainly dates from his time

as governor of both India and Pontus, around 112 113 and most probably,

it was edited later on.

Some people have suspected that Sweet Tony as he did that that's just a theory

and then added, maybe even several 100 years later to make a book of 10.

So that's why I'm talking about the nine book collection of Epistles.

So the epistles, as plenty wrote them as I say, It's a varied collection it covers.

It presents itself as a selection of Penny's everyday letters.

Now letter writing in antiquity and indeed write up to, Let's Say,

the middle of the 20th century was a major occupation for any person of letters.

Anyone in a in an elite position. People might be writing

dozens hundreds of letters a day.

You know, you might spend several hours a day on your correspondents each day,

so plenty would have written thousands and received thousands of letters per year.

In fact, that is now comparable with email for people in some jobs.

But what he's offering here is purportedly a

selection of them just brushed up for publication.

They include a whole series of different topics.

So there might be things about some real estate land purchases.

Plan is making or contemplating about some people who has been dealing with.

He does sort of portraits of people.

Often, if someone's died, he'll do a little obituary,

all sorts of things.

Oh, he'll he'll report on events in the Senate,

especially things he's been involved with on major trials

and and he'll depict natural beauty.

We'll come to that in a little while or his own villas.

He'll give you introductions to his house is so all sorts of different things,

and it's presented as a complete mish, mash and variety.

Some of the most famous letters

the letter on the death of his uncle.

Clearly the elder I mentioned, he dies at Vesuvius.

That's 6 16, and it has a follow up in 6 20 which describes in his own

participation in those events witnessing the eruption

of the serious from a distance.

And in Book 10, this is the last time I mentioned about 10,

probably his most famous and notorious letters of all letter of all

is a letter about the Christians when he was governor of Pontus,

and within a year he found this weird religious sect called Christians.

He tried torturing a few to see what happened,

and then he writes to trade and say, What should I do?

Should I let them go if they repent? And trader says yes.

And this is 10, 96 97

it's It's basically the first major account of

the Christian religion from a pagan perspective.

So it's very interesting and has obviously been very interesting

to scholars of early Christianity, anyway,

Uh, as I say, it's a miscellany, Uh, and in that in that measure,

it invites and mythologising that is taking a selection.

So taking 5, 10, 20 letters and often that's how they're presented,

especially for students.

You get given a selection and they get published in books,

but something I want emphasis is that they're not just bits and bobs.

They do actually add up to something.

And what I would say they add up to is a portrait of Pliny as a man

and of plenty as a man in his own society.

So that measure there, also a portrait of his society.

I'll talk more about that in the next lecture.

It's a very particular kind of portrait. It's not through written.

It's not a biography, it's not systematic. It's fractured.

It's some people compared it to a mosaic in that you've got lots of little pieces,

and when you put them together, it makes a picture

that's perhaps a little bit misleading because the mosaic,

actually the pieces are all perfectly arranged.

Another metaphor one scholar is used is a kaleidoscope.

Imagine all those little bits in a kaleidoscope that move around all the time,

and they combine all sort of different ways.

And if you come in and out of these letters,

you get lots of different ways of putting together this jumbled picture.

But it does add up to a coherent whole,

in a sense, what's grand about the epistles?

It seeks to incorporate everything, all aspects of all sorts of aspects,

of Chinese life and all sorts of aspects of earlier literature.

And that's something I'll make a bit of a theme

of this course.

The other interesting thing about it is an oblique portrait

clean. He's writing about himself to us, but of course, he's not writing to us.

The effect is that were eavesdropping on a series of letters. So there's a fiction.

Here

is a bit like a theatrical fiction when you watch something on stage.

Two characters talk to each other,

and the actors pretend most of the time that they don't know the audience is there.

You have this kind of fourth war. Now Flynn is doing exactly that.

He's writing to various addressees,

and, as I said earlier, books 1 to 9. All the letters are from him.

There's nothing back to him,

but because he's actually published and edited this collection.

He's also writing for us as a kind of third level, him as writer,

the addressee of the letter and then us as a kind of secondary audience.

So it's a very interesting effect that we are looking in eavesdropping or to keep the

theatre metaphor were kind of peeking backstage into

the workshop of a famous statesman and orator.

Now, please, Primary model, for this was a very great one. Cicero

Cicero, the great statesman of the late republic.

In Clinton's age, too, he was a major celebrity.

He was the defining orator in Latin,

and he was also famous for his political efforts and for his philosophy.

Now we have amazing number of Cicero's letters,

which in his case were not edited for publication.

Cicero wrote them, and then, later on they were gathered and published.

Um, we have about 1000.

Plenty had maybe two or three times as many as that available

to him because we know lots of sister's letters are lost.

Now,

Katherine Steel has given has put together a metallic course on Cicero's letters,

and I recommend that to you very highly.

If you want to find out a bit more about them,

um,

they to add up to a fragmented portrait of a statesman.

And if you read them as they're presented,

the manuscripts there partly chronological and partly

thematic or arranged by addresses so they,

too, have a slightly kaleidoscopic nature.

But I've already mentioned in passing. There's a crucial difference here.

Cicero did not publish his letters, so they're not curated by him.

It's not his planned presentation of his life for his private life,

as it were for the public gaze.

It's one of the reasons people find them so fascinating,

because they give this kind of unmediated a view into

what Sister was doing and saying to people around him,

not necessarily quite into his thoughts,

because obviously you never quite express all your thoughts,

even in private but certainly a strikingly unmediated picture.

What Planet does is something very different, is a carefully planned,

curated and presented an image of a statesman.

So Sister is a major model, but not one that

directly imitates. But he does something very different with his collection.

I should say there's a clear degree of ambition here that plane is presenting

himself as a new Cicero as a great statesman of his own age.

Now, plenty did have a model for self published letters as literature again,

a very different model.

But this is important to this is Seneca

Seneca, the philosopher and statesman. In the period of Claudius and Nero,

he published one of his latest works was a set of what he called a pistol I Morales.

People usually call it the moral epistles.

I might call them the Ethical Epistles or the Ethical Letters.

Now this is a set of we have 124 of them, but we know that's not complete.

That were more.

It's a set of letters, all from Seneca to a friend, loose ideas.

So it dates from the end of his career. So mid sixties 80

and they start quite short to get longer and longer and effectively.

It's a correspondence course in philosophy.

It's a whole series of letters exploring elements of philosophy,

particularly historic question of how suicide is definitely a really good plan.

If you're always ready to commit suicide,

every day is a good day because you're always in

control of how your life is going to go.

That's a slightly reductive account of what Seneca says now.

They work a bit like sermons. He often does that thing that Vickers do of saying

I was in test at the other day and I bumped

into someone This happened and that reminded me of Jesus Christ.

Seneca does a version of that.

He tells a little story about something he did,

and then he goes into some philosophy.

Now, as I say, this was self published. They're arranged in books.

So you get Book one is letters 1 to 12 and so on.

And I will come in a couple of segments time to the

question of how Pliny actually specifically relates to and uses Senecas letters,

which he definitely did.

But broadly speaking, I want to say, just at the outset.

If Cicero is the model for a varied collection of a statesman letters,

Seneca provides a model for using letters as a form of literature,

actually planning letters in prose.

I should say, like pennies and Cicero's

as literature,

and one way you could see the epistles is

as a combination of those two very different things.

And indeed, Seneca explicitly distanced his letters from Cicero's.

He says, I'm not going to waste my time talking about politics.

I'm interested in the soul. What matters

Plenty takes those two things and joins them together.

But there's one more important ingredient I want to mention,

and that is letters in poetry.

Um, if you go back to the late Republic,

then you you get developing in Latin the idea of poems that are presented as letters.

A couple of catalysis poems do that famously 65

68.

But it's particularly Horace

and Ovid.

The letter as poem becomes a well established form of art in Latin literature.

Horace wrote many different kinds of works.

He perhaps no, including the odes and the oppose. But he wrote satires,

and he also wrote what he called epistles.

They're very like the satires, actually, their hex amateur poems,

in which he reflects in a quite low key,

relaxed kind of way on various ethical questions.

So ethical means thinking about how you behave in life,

so they are kind of teaching you things,

but they're also presented in letter form

of it a little bit later.

Did two different but related things with letters, both of them important to us.

First of all, he wrote, the heroic dis you probably come across them.

It's a famous collection of mythical heroines writing imaginary letters.

So, for instance, Medea rights to Jason or died right? Souvenirs and

imagine puts himself in the mind of the woman.

And she's writing to her lover

or a man with whom she had a relationship,

their physical distance. And he is playing with the stories.

So, for instance, he'll mess about with you Neared or the Odyssey or whatever.

But he's also playing with the letter form to see

what happens when you turn a letter into a poem.

And these are another track couplets. Like nearly all of his poetry

and then at the end of of its life, when he's in exile himself,

he does something new again.

He turns the letter form

into a form of poetry that's autobiographical.

So there's two collections from his exile the Trista the Sorrows

and the epistolary X pronto epistles from the Pontus that is the Black Sea,

and they again they are offered as letters addressed to real people at Rome.

One of them is Augustus himself. Trista, too,

But this time he's writing not in the guise of mythical people but as himself.

So he's bringing the idea of poetic letters

to,

let's say autobiography but blending them in a very interesting way

because he then puts himself in kind of mythical situations.

So, for instance, he compares himself leaving Rome into exile.

You get images of veneers leaving Troy and the need to, for instance. So

with this whole genre developing in this period the late Republican early Augustus

and into late Augustus with Ovid's exile poetry we've got

this idea of letters as an art form in poetry.

So not just as kind of the record of correspondence or as pros philosophy.

Now what I'd like to suggest is that please Epistles blends all three of those

Cicero real man

Seneca

letters as literature in prose and poetic books of letters.

And what it creates, then, is a completely new form,

this highly stylised,

and I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute in the next lecture, highly stylised,

highly aesthetic sized collection of what you can read

as kind of the letters of a statesman.

But what are all also I might like to say poems in prose

incredibly manicured, carefully put together miniatures,

and they're also very carefully arranged these books,

although they appear to be just varied,

there are all sorts of elaborate patterns and shapes

that define the book as an aesthetic hole.

So that is my introductory view of plenty.

I'm going to acknowledge something, which is that this is still controversial.

Um, if you're using commentaries on Planet, it's quite likely you'll come across.

The commentary by Nicholas Show in White, A n Show in White.

He wrote a great big commentary in the 19 sixties,

called a historical and social commentary on Chinese Letters,

which is to say it is not a literary commentary.

He was a historian. He was interested in them as a historical source.

He was not interested in the literature,

and he's had an amazing influence since then.

So in the last 60 something years, in suppressing the idea,

we should read it as literature

That's changed a lot in the last 20 or 30 years,

and from my own work along with other people working on today,

has been about sort of helping us to think about how we should read

the epistles as a work of literature and why it's worth doing that.

So,

as I say, someone like showing why, it would say These are real letters.

Please just touch them up a bit.

But it would be silly to talk about them as as, let's say, literary fiction hard.

Other alternative would be to say plenty, never, never sent any of these letters.

They are all written for publication.

Consider Horace's odes Another. Another comparison.

You can argue about whether any ode of Horace was ever really

written to its addressee or whether it was just written for publication.

You can treat them the addresses as kind of dedicate ease,

rather literal addresses.

So you've got to quite strong alternatives there,

real letters versus pure literature.

I'd quite like to suggest it's worth trying to

float in between because the great distinctive thing about your

pistols one of its great achievements is the way plenty

managed to suspend what he presents between real life.

Because there's lots of elements of real life in these letters

and literature between the ephemeral that is something that's just written for

one day only and is going to go away in the night

and the eternal. That is a work of literature that you want to survive forever.

And I think that play between the simple

and the grand, the short term

and the hopefully everlasting is one of the

really interesting things that makes the epistles tick.

And it's worth thinking about finally, in this section who were the epistles for?

Not a question that's often explicitly asked.

Quite a lot of people assume Chinese fellow senatorial elite.

It's an easy and, in my view,

quite lazy assumption to think that Roman literature saying People

say the same about Tacitus was written for fellow senators.

That seems an unduly small constituency to me.

Obviously, literacy was very reduced in the ancient world,

only a small proportion of the population.

But it went well beyond the Senate.

And in fact, I think what

he's trying to do is to impress a rather broader constituency.

Some of his fellow senators would have been able to see through some of the let's say,

boasting that goes on in these letters,

and indeed we know biplanes, period.

There is actually a market in literature,

Pliny mentions in one of his letters,

9 11 how his own speeches which has been publishing,

are for sale in a bookshop in Leon.

So in Gaul, modern Southern France.

And we know from Marshall, the contemporary Chinese again,

that you've got this idea of a book trade that goes around the whole empire.

So actually, I think you've got a reading public. That

middle class wouldn't be quite right,

because it's not as wide and broad as the modern middle class.

But it's a lot bigger than the Roman elite.

And my guess is that that's a big part of Chinese target audience people who can read

and are therefore going to be reasonably wealthy and reasonably

fortunate in life, but are not senators. Perhaps not even the questions.

And the second constituency I should say is I think

Lenny was writing with a very long view to posterity,

and by that I mean, as