Past event

Friendship, Philosophy, Forgery: Greek letter collections 400 BC to AD 400 Andrew Morrison (Glasgow)

The letter collections of Greco-Roman antiquity dwarf in total size all of ancient drama or ancient epic put together, but have not received anything like as much attention in classical scholarship. The AHRC Ancient Letter Collections Project (now Durham and Glasgow, previously Manchester) focuses on extant Greek and Latin letter collections from the period between 400 BC and roughly AD 400, excluding all letters which have not descended as part of a circulating collection.

Even within these parameters, the resulting corpus features just under 6,600 letters and in excess of 2.2 million words. To give some sense of scale, this total of words is around half the size of the entire pre-AD 100 corpus of classical Latin. Andrew Morrison, of Glasgow University, will present on his paper, which focuses on the project's Greek collections and surveys broad patterns which can be discerned across the collections as well as some of their most important characteristics and features, examining what the different manuscript arrangements of the collections might tell us about how and why they were read.

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