Routledge EPISTOLARY POETRY IN BYZANTIUM AND BEYOND: An Anthology with Critical Essays

Letters were an important medium of everyday communication in the ancient Mediterranean. Soon after its emergence, the epistolary form was adopted by educated elites and transformed into a literary genre, which developed distinctive markers and was used, for instance, to give political advice, to convey philosophical ideas, or to establish and foster ties with peers. A particular type of this genre is the letter cast in verse, or epistolary poem, which merges the form and function of the letter with stylistic elements of poetry. In Greek literature, epistolary poetry is first safely attested in the fourth century AD and would enjoy a lasting presence throughout the Byzantine and early modern periods.The present volume introduces the reader to this hitherto unexplored chapter of post-classical Greek literature through an anthology of exemplary epistolary poems in the original Greek with facing English translation. This collection, which covers a broad chronological range from late antique epigrams of the Greek Anthology to the poetry of western humanists, is accompanied by exegetical commentaries on the anthologized texts and by critical essays discussing questions of genre, literary composition, and historical and social contexts of selected epistolary poems.Chapters 3 and 4 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/10.4324/9780429288296 About the Author Krystina Kubina is a research associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She specializes in late Byzantine poetry and has published a monograph on the fourteenth century poet Manuel Philes (Die enkomiastische Dichtung des Manuel Philes. Form und Funktion des literarischen Lobes in der frühen Palaiologenzeit, Berlin 2020).Alexander Riehle is Assistant Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. He specializes in the rhetorical and epistolary literature of late Byzantium. He is the editor of A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography (Leiden 2020) and is currently preparing an edition and translation of the letter-collections of Nikephoros Choumnos (anticipated 2021).