Chapter 1 - Introduction to Late Antique Letters

Summary

Here we convey the variety and complexity of late-antique Greek and Latin correspondences, tracing their antecedents from Classical times, their indebtedness to the apostle Paul, and subsequently to the post-apostolic writers. In the course of this overview we consider the considerable influence which Adolf Deissmann wielded in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and subsequently, on the question of what exactly a letter is. Now we are more cautious about writing and speaking about ‘letters’ and the ‘letter-genre’. Our next step in this chapter was to attempt a taxonomy of the more than 9,000 literary letters from Christian Late Antiquity, beginning with the category of dissenting voices.