This paper examines a pedagogical method employed by both Isocrates in his Busiris (c.385 BCE) and the anonymous author of the Ancient Egyptian “Satiric Letter” (19th Dynasty). Both authors admonish their addressee, pointing out shortcomings in a written work, and then present their own version as a model. Each work is written in epistolary form, but expresses a distinct writing culture, even as method and form overlap.
The pseudepigraphic “Satiric Letter,” written as a tool to train scribes, is the product of a highly textual society in which writing was intrinsic and scribal training particularly revered. Isocrates’ Busiris is an example of epideictic rhetoric, discourse written for display or entertainment, in this case, a defense of the legendary Egyptian king, Busiris. By using the form of a letter, Isocrates inserts the work into a broader debate about the role of writing in Classical Greece, at a time when oral composition and performance is losing its supremacy (Livingstone 8). Isocrates is indeed the author of this letter, but it contains an element of deception, for it is a public display of Isocrates’ rhetorical talent rather than the private correspondence it claims to be.
In Ancient Egypt, pseudepigraphy was frequently employed to lend authority to texts, linking works to famous authors of the past. This is particularly important for texts used for teaching, like the “Satiric Letter.” Isocrates also employs the authority of the past, but in a different way: he grounds his defense of Busiris in his praise of Ancient Egypt.
Works Cited
Livingstone, N. (2001) A commentary on Isocrates’ Busiris. Leiden, Brill.
This paper will explore the genre of heroic pseudepistolography and its use in an Ancient Near Eastern context. While letters are not uncommon in situations of diplomacy, trade, and international relations in the Ancient Near East, we only have a few examples of more literary letters, particularly in the royal sphere. Even more unusual was the fictive letter, often addressed in the name of a hero-king and including obviously outrageous or counterfactual material. Using two case studies, I will illuminate the development of the genre in first-millennium Akkadian literature, suggesting that, using creative riffs on traditional literature, these letters reveal an active counterdiscourse on Assyrian kingship in a particularly tumultuous period. A third Neo-Babylonian case study will demonstrate that the text type becomes so malleable in later periods such that it may evoke an anti-hero as a deliberate subversion of earlier examples. A conclusion will suggest affinity to Ovid’s Heroides, another example of heroic epistolography activated in service of providing a critical voice in an autocratic environment.
The fabricated Persian correspondence cited in Ezra 4 has long been considered a historiographical embarrassment. The letters in this chapter are disorienting both in terms of their fragmentary form and their content: the emperors listed in these letters do not correspond to the attested succession of Achaemenid kings. In this paper, I argue that reading Ezra 4 in light of the Hellenistic story of Judith invites us to take the historiographical absurdity of Ezra’s cited letters at face value and to chart its satirical implications. The story of Judith memorably begins with Nebuchadnezzar “the Assyrian” attacking the fictional Arphaxad of Media. All of these events take place, we are told, after the return from exile. Caryn Tamber-Rosenau has argued that Judith’s historiographical “kaleidoscope” is of a piece with the story’s larger point: poking fun at the absurdity of a hyper-masculinized imperial authority and its temporal horizons. Cued by Judith’s “kaleidoscopic” history, I consider how the lens of satire might transform our understanding of Ezra 4’s letters—and Ezra-Nehemiah as a whole. I argue that reading Ezra 4 alongside Judith helps us see the correspondence as performing a parody of a disordered Persian bureaucracy, its documents’ erratic affordances, and of imperial time itself.
The heavenly writing found in the Book of Revelation has a deep history with roots stretching back to Mesopotamia. At the same time, Revelation engages more mundane—“this worldly”—writing practices in its depiction of scrolls and letters in John’s visions and in generic combinations of epistolary forms and apocalyptic revelation. For example, Bernard Levinson (2009) connects the canon formula in Revelation 22:18–19 to a wider tradition of similar formulae that goes back as far as Deuteronomy and the neo-Assyrian oath text called Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty. Elsewhere, I have tracked Deuteronomy’s adaptation of the media aesthetics of ancient treaties and monuments to an ancient Israelite narrative. Noting the Book of Revelation’s use and reuse of Deuteronomy, this study examines a history of paratextual elements in Revelation that may reflect wider writing practices in the ancient Near East that are refracted into Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic literature. It examines how Revelation imagines ancient scrolls as epistolary media and prophetic objects through 1) its depiction of ancient text-artifacts, 2) its invocation of seals and sealing practices, and 3) the central role of blessings and curses. It argues that paratextual elements with a long media history engage what I have called the “poetics of proximity” to produce presence and generate an aura of authenticity in documents, letters, and pseudepigraphic literature. Moreover, these paratextual elements help bind up a generically diffuse document and transform Revelation from letter to literature.
Inspired by Patricia Rosenmeyer's work on the self-referentiality of letters in antiquity, this paper argues for the presence of poetics of epistolarity in 2 Thess. The poetics of epistolarity, inaugurated by 2 Thess’s opening greeting to its audience and conveyed through repeated references to letters in 2:2, 2:15, 3:14, and 3:17, overcome absence to locate the audience in a close relationship with the apostle Paul mediated through letters. These references are in part about authenticity and forgery, but while I do take 2 Thess to be a forgery, these discussions of writing are about much more than pseudepigraphic authorship. The poetics of epistolarity construct an ongoing relationship between writer and audience within a universe populated with letters, not all of which are to be trusted. They assert immediacy and authority by creating an ongoing correspondence, a relationship between the writer and audience over time realized through letters.
This paper contributes to our discussion of epistolary pseudepigraphy by considering the (often blurry) margins of that genre. The idea that 1 John may be a pseudepigraphal text modeled on the Gospel of John has experienced a recent revival (Méndez 2020; 2024; Crosar 2024). In this paper, I connect this thesis to the thorny question of whether 1 John qualifies as a letter. Although classed among the Johannine “epistles,” not all scholars categorize 1 John as such since it does not observe a standard epistolary form. In this paper, I conclude that 1 John is modeled on ancient letters, but it deliberately bends the generic parameters and expectations of epistles to position itself as a supplement to the Gospel of John—a gospel-like or gospel-adjacent record of other teachings of Jesus not contained within that larger text. First John, then, invites us to think more critically about the value of writing a pseudepigraphical text as an epistle (or not).
Ignatius of Antioch, the martyr-bishop who lived in the early to mid-second century, left behind a series of letters penned along his route. The precise number and textual form of those letters is disputed, but it is clear that someone interpolated, expanded, and added to their number during the fourth century. The resulting ‘long recension’ (so called to distinguish it from the conventionally-termed short and middle recensions) has enjoyed a curious fate in scholarship. Most often it has been treated as a doctrinally-motivated forgery, an act of deception with the express purpose of intervening in post-Nicene Trinitarian debates, with scholars disagreeing about the precise ideological provenance of the Long Recensionist and his place in the theological landscape of the later fourth century. Without denying elements of deception or theological motivation, in this paper I follow a recent turn in scholarship (T. Glaser, J. Given, et al.) and broaden the scope of inquiry to include the poetics and fictionalization techniques of the Long Recension. Productive parallels to the late ancient novel have been noted in recent scholarship. I also call attention to broader fictional resonances, including with the emerging hagiographic literature of the fourth century, and consider the ‘world-building’ technique of the Long Recensionist in constructing a dense epistolary network of actors that expand the imaginative potential of the Ignatian letters and enable them to function as a form of “edutainment”.