Abstract
Aristaenetus’ two (5th – 6th century CE?) books of fictional letters defiantly hark back to the pre-Constantine literary milieu of the Second Sophistic, even including fictionalised versions of its authors (Philostratus, Lucian, Alciphron, and Aelian) among the ‘writers’ of these epistles. As the translators point out, these are not so much ‘love letters’ as letters about love in all its forms, requited or not, consummated or not. Many are essentially stand-alone short stories on erotic themes in epistolary form. If their intertexts, and therefore their themes and mores are, on the surface at least, anachronistically and squarely rooted in the period before Constantine and before so-called ‘Late Antiquity’, their deliberate anachronism, their very silence concerning the time that produced them, must surely tell us something about the persistently classicising literary culture and rhetorical education of that time. Their rootedness in a rapidly expanding tradition of Greek epistolary literature in the first centuries CE, noted in the introduction, might also be contextualised alongside the Late Antique and Christian tradition of Greek epistolary narratives and the letters’ engagement with them, or lack thereof. These contextualising opportunities are not taken—a surprising fact in a contribution to SBL’s ‘Writings from the Greco-Roman World’ series, of which this volume is surely among the shortest, even relative to the length of the text translated. The explanatory notes are very brief—popular classics translation series, such as Penguin or Oxford World’s Classics, now offer as much, often more. The introduction, too, is on the short side, even on those themes that it does cover: the transmission of the text, the identity of the author (unknown) and date of the text, its use of the epistolary tradition and epistolary form, and its intertextuality. The value, then, lies primarily in the lively and modern-sounding translation, and in its being the first complete one into English in nearly 300 years. The emphasis of the translators is very much on the desire to bring Aristaenetus (back?) to a wider readership. Whether or not such a marginal text is destined to receive that, the aim is a very good one, as is the translation. For fuller contextualisation and annotation, readers of English must continue to wait; those with Italian can consult A. T. Drago’s 650-page Aristeneto: Lettere d’amore (Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 2007).