#epistolography

[latin-literature-tourney]

Latin Literature Tournament - Round 1

Pliny the Younger vs. Juvenal

Pliny the Younger

Juvenal

Voting ended onApr 30, 2024

Propaganda under the cut!

Pliny Propaganda:

His description of Vesuvius is so fucking cool and important, you guys. It's so cool that "Plinian eruptions" are a thing in volcanology

He writes some neat descriptions of gardens and private horticulture, so he's an important source on Roman aesthetics of domestic design

His letters really are bangers. I love his friendship with Tacitus, and the ghost stories are so fucking fun

Juvenal Propaganda:

I love reading and fighting Juvenal. He is such an asshole and so full of shit (and his poems really are a blast)

That said the man sure can turn a phrase. Bread and circuses, anyone?

Is that a farrago in your libellus or are you just happy to see me

[soircieres]

— Vladimir Nabokov in a letter to his wife Véra, 16 July 1926.

[beyond-crusading]

I tried to write a postcard in Latin to a friend, about my holiday in Normandy ! After about two or three hours, here's the result:

Because of my master's thesis I accumulated WAY too much knowledge about Medieval epistolography and I had to use it in some way or another x)

I tried to respect all rhetorical rules of letter-writing (except cursus rules because it's far too complicated), so there frequent references to God, to the saints, to my correspondent's first name and to the medieval ideal of friendship (a common theme in ancient and medieval letters). There's even a captatio benevolentiae after the salutation and a petitio ad the end (really proud of both of those !)

Of course if anyone who actually knows Latin ends up seing this post, feel free to correct me on my mistakes.

[beyond-crusading]

MS Paris, BnF fr. 1584, Voir Dit, f. 227r - Lettre 'A Guillaume'

A man gives out a letter folded in two to a messenger. On top of the letter, you can read "A Guillaume", "For William" in French.

[apenitentialprayer]

If pictures of absent friends give us pleasure, renewing our memories and relieving the pain of separation even if they cheat us with an empty comfort, how much more welcome is a letter which comes to us in the very handwriting of an absent friend?

Seneca, in his Fortieth Moral Letter to Lucilius, trans. Betty Radice. Original Latin below:

Si imagines nobis amicorum absentium iucundae sunt, quae memoriam renovant et desiderium falso atque inani solacio levant, quanto iucundiores sunt litterae, quae vera amici absentis vestigia, veras notas adferunt?

[mjjhoskin]

Loving Horace

Horace’s Odes by William Morris

I recently finished teaching Horace, Epistles, Book 1, to my fourth-year Latin poetry class. One of the things I like about my current position is that I get to teach texts that have no direct bearing on my research. I research late antique Latin prose letters written by bishops of Rome. The fact that they are letters in Latin is the strongest link these texts have…

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[jdavidstark]

Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (2016)

Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (2016) @RickBrannan

Rick Brannan posted a couple tweets recently about 2016 articles from the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (1, 2). The journal had apparently fallen out of my list of RSS subscriptions somehow, so I was grateful for the prompt. The full list of 2016 articles in JGRChJ is: Seth M. Ehorn and Mark Lee, “The Syntactical Function of ἀλλὰ καί in Phil. 2.4” Matthew Oseka, “Attentive to…

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[hyphenatedmess]

my relationship with @marbleflan is such that when i have a short thought that i’d like to share with her, i frequently write it on a postcard and stick it in the mail. after doing that this morning, i realized that i probably could’ve just texted her.