Call for Papers: Letters & Letter Writing

Appel à contributions - Letters et Letter writing. Signed, sealed, delivered

Tuesday 18th March – Thursday 20th March 2014

Prague, Czech Republic

The letter has been one of the most important forms of communication over thousands of years across many cultures and continents. Whether personal, professional or an open statement of intent it can covey the most intimate messages or declare the most inflammatory of declarations. It can be delivered by hand, by postman, by pigeon, by bottle, by smartphone, by internet connection or even by space ship. It can be cherished, collected, published, censored, blogged, stolen, steamed open, torn up, buried, displayed. It can be written on paper, papyrus, skin, in the sand, in wax, on sweet wrappers and on computer screens. It can be written with quills, pens, keyboards, chalk and in ink, in blood, in lemon juice, in light, with love, with hate, with desperation, with pride, with humiliation and with satisfaction. Correspondingly, it can take seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks or even years to reach its destination, whether sent to someone in the next room, or via a time capsule to people 50 years in the future. A letter is not just the means to communicate to others, but a way in which we communicate who, what and where we are and the times that we live in, consequently, being as much about the interconnectedness of identity, place and culture through time as it is about the immediate connection to those around us.

A striking example of such interconnectedness and entanglement survives from ancient Rome in the Letters to Atticus of Marcus Tullius Cicero written between 68-44 BCE. Originally hand written on papyri using a reed pen, they were delivered using a network of slaves often taking up to 4 weeks to reach their destination. Intended only to be read by his friend, this private correspondence was published by an unknown editor sometime after Cicero’s death and enjoyed as a literary work. Now available as both book and hypertext, its rich contents provide valuable information on many aspects of Roman life, not to mention the history of his times.

This timely consideration of the forms, materials and methods used to connect to ourselves and to others in and through time invites abstracts on the following themes for any historical period or geographical location: 

• The beginnings (archaeology and early human writings) 
• The death of the letter (and its reincarnation through technology, email) 
• Role in important events (private, public, real, imagined or literary) 
• Cultural significance of 
• As diary 
• As historical source 
• As literature or within a literary work 
• As biography 
• As art or visual significance of 
• The physical form (baked clay, waxed wooden tablets, parchment) 
• The writing materials (reed pen, quill, ink, biro, typewriter) 
• Contents of letters (love, politics, friendship, business, philosophy, consolation) 
• Forms of delivery (couriers, private or public postal services) 
• Intended readers (individual, family, group) and confidentiality issues 
• Letters lost and letters found 
• Letters as texts or texts as letters 
• Published versus unpublished 
• Handwriting and letter writing conventions: construction, syntax, language, spelling and symbols 
• Letter-writers: male and female 
• Authorship: anonymity or identity statement 
• Queering the letter? 
• Weaponising the letter? 
• Intercepted or “leaked” letters 
• The future of letter writing 

What to Send ?

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 11th October 2013. All submissions are minimally double blind peer reviewed where appropriate. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 17th January 2014. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words.

Emails should be entitled: Letters1 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Linda McGuire: ue.nojidcse@eriugcm.adnil

Rob Fisher : ten.yranilpicsid-retni@1srettel

The conference is part of the At the Interface programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

(HT: http://blogdurmblf.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/appel-contributions-letters-et-letter.html)

 

Lutz Doering's new book

Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography

Ancient Jewish letter writing is a neglected topic of research. Lutz Doering’s new monograph seeks to redress this situation. The author pursues two major tasks: first, to provide a comprehensive discussion of Jewish letter writing in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods and, second, to assess the importance of ancient Jewish letter writing for the emergence and early development of Christian epistolography. Although individual groups of Jewish letters have been studied before, the present monograph is the first one to look at Jewish letters comprehensively across the languages in which they were written and/or handed down (chiefly Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek). It operates with a broad concept of "letter” and deals with documentary as well as literary and embedded letters. The author highlights cross-linguistic developments, such as the influence of the Greek epistolary form on Aramaic and Hebrew letters or the non-idiomatic retention of Semitic "peace” greetings in some letters translated into Greek, which allowed for these greetings to be charged with new meaning. Doering argues that such processes were also important for early Christian epistolography. Thus, Paul engaged creatively with Jewish epistolary formulae. Frequent address of communities rather than individuals and the quasi-official setting of many Jewish letters would have provided relevant models when Paul developed his own epistolary praxis. In addition, the author shows that the concept of communication with the "Diaspora”, in both halakhic-administrative and prophetic-apocalyptic Jewish letters, is adapted by a number of early Christian letters, such as 1 Peter, James, Acts 15:23-29, and 1 Clement . Ancient Jewish and early Christian letters also share a concern with group identity and cohesion that is often supported by salvation-historical motifs. In sum, Lutz Doering addresses the previously under-researched text-pragmatic similarities between Jewish and Christian letters.

More on Phoebe from my SBL paper

Ian Paul (over at Psephizo) summarises some aspects of my SBL presentation on Phoebe and Romans 16.1-2:

 Peter Head, of Tyndale House in Cambridge, takes issue with some of the claims Wright makes here. Peter is something of the ‘go to’ man on the question of letter carriers, and his critique arises from the paper he gave at the annual Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) conference two weeks ago in Chicago. (Peter is also a very entertaining conference room-mate, but that is another story.)

Peter makes a number of important points in his paper, a copy of which he kindly sent me. Firstly, he points out that it is now assumed that the language of commendation means Phoebe was both carrier and lector (reader) of Romans, and therefore a key interpreter of it (he cites Wagner and Campbell)—but without real evidence to back this up. So, secondly, he looks at the role of letter-carriers in the ancient world, drawing on 836 letters of Cicero, around 400 letters from Oxyrhynchus, and a collection of around 90 Jewish letters. These collections are diverse, controlled (in that they have not been selected out for this purpose), and yield a consistent picture.
Around 10% of the letters name a letter carrier, and the language used parallels Paul’s language about Phoebe. It is also clear that the letter carrier has some sort of key role in communication of the letter contents, and this is often in a situation where there has been or is some danger of miscommunication. But there is no evidence that the carrier was the lector, which is surprising. Peter does, however, emphasise that the carrier did have an important role in communication, in that they had been in the presence of the writer, and understood the context, thought the exact details of this are not specified.
...
Peter also makes some other facscinating observations about Phoebe’s role. The language of Rom 16.1–2 has the ‘clearest cluster of recommendatory language in any of Paul’s letters.’ In turn, we can see that the ‘welcome’ and ‘reception’ of Phoebe resonates with a key theme in the body of the letter—the need for the Christians in Rome to welcome one another. So Phoebe, by her presence, in effect embodies the message of the letter. In addressing the Christians in Rome as one, Paul is by a speech act constituting them as church, and in their response to Phoebe giving them the chance to act out his invitation to live in unity in Christ.

.

N.T. Wright on Phoebe

I was interested to see Tom Wright's piece in the Times (of London) concerned with the Church of England's vote on Women Bishops: Women Bishops: It’s about the Bible, not fake ideas of progress (here from Fulcrum since the Times is behind a paywall). Even my kids were at least mildy impressed that letter carriers could be mentioned in the Times and perhaps be relevant to a contemporary debate. Here is what he said there about Phoebe:

He [i.e. Paul] entrusted that letter [i.e. Romans] to a “deacon” called Phoebe whose work was taking her to Rome. The letter-bearer would normally be the one to read it out to the recipients and explain its contents. The first expositor of Paul’s greatest letter was an ordained travelling businesswoman.

I think this gets some things right and others not.

Firstly on the "right" side: I agree that Phoebe carried Romans; I agree that she was a "deacon" (I could almost envisage this as arising from some sort of "ordination", as it does look like an office of some sort - although not perhaps as formal as this sounds today); I agree that this shows an exceptional level of trust on Paul's part (both practically and pastorally); and I agree that she would have had a role in explaining the contents of Romans (although I'm not sure that "expositor" is a good word for this).
On the negative side it is not the case that letter carriers read letters to recipients. There is no evidence for this in antiquity and there is a load of evidence against it. I think that is plain wrong and argued so in Chicago at SBL last week. (I know it is repeated a lot by NT scholars, but that doesn't mean there is any evidence for it). Further the notion of Phoebe as a "travelling businesswoman" who is going to Rome for her work has only the slenderest basis in the text of Rom 16.1f, which has the typical and deliberate vagueness characteristic of letters of recommendation.

I also agree that the figure of Phoebe, her (imagined) role as "deacon" and her (anticipated) role as letter carrier, are of importance (among a load of other evidence) for considering Paul's view of female Christian leaders (although I don't agree that one can so easily side-step the more negative passages).

BGU 1079

Σαραπίων Ἡρακλείδῃ τῷ
ἡμετέρῳ χα(ίρειν). ἔπεμψά σοι
ἄλλας δύο ἐπιστολάς,
διὰ Νηδύμου μίαν , διὰ
Κρονίου μαχαιροφόρου
μίαν · λοιπὸν οὖν ἔλα-
βον παρὰ το(ῦ) Ἄραβος τὴν
ἐπιστολὴν καὶ ἀνέ-
γνων καὶ ἐλυπήθην.

 This is a much discussed letter BGU IV. 1079 (= CPJ II 152; White, LAL, No. 87; Sel. Pap. I 107; W.Chr. 60) because of the later reference to 'the Jews'. But the opening is interesting for a number of reasons:

1. reference to earlier correspondence often (as here) identifies the letters by their respective carriers: 'I sent two other letters to you, one through Nedymos, one through Kronios the swordsman'.
2. here we find explicit, what I think is implicit in the use of  ἔπεμψά σοι ... διὰ, that is that it refers to the letter carrier.
3. παρὰ is used for receipt of a letter by the agency of a letter carrier: 'Finally, then, I received your letter from the Arab ...' 
4. the received letter is read by the recipient (not by the letter carrier, this never happens!)
5. the author uses  λοιπὸν very early in a much longer letter (cf. 1 Cor 1.16; 7.29; Phil 3.1 - also late in letters: 2 Cor 13.11; Phil 4.8; 2 Thess 3.1; 2 Tim 4.8).

Epistolary security problem.

In Suetonius' life of Augustus he describes how Augustus could be on occasion forgiving, and on other occasions severe. Among the examples of severity we read the following:

he broke the legs of his secretary Thallus for having betrayed the contents of a letter for 500 denarii

(Suetonius, Augustus, 67)

Interesting comment on interpreting potentially ambiguous expressions in written documents:

In the first place it should be shown, if possible, that there is no ambiguity in the statement, because in ordinary conversation everyone is accustomed to use this single word or phrase in the sense in which the speaker will prove that it should be taken. In the second place it must be shown that from what precedes or follows in the document the doubtful point becomes plain. Therefore if words are to be considered separately by themselves, every word, or at least many words, would seem ambiguous; but it is not right to regard as ambiguous what becomes plain on consideration of the whole context. In the next place, one ought to estimate what the writer meant from his other writings, acts, words, disposition and in fact his whole life, and to examine the whole document which contains the ambiguity in question in all its parts, to see if any thing is apposite to our interpretation or opposed to the sense in which our opponent understands it. For it is easy to estimate what it is likely that the writer intended from the complete context and from the character of the writer, and from the qualities which are associated with certain characters. Cicero, De Inventione, II.116-117 (ET: H.M. Hubbell, Loeb, 1949).

Very sensible advice for the interpretation of written texts: ordinary usage, documentary context, authorial setting. I am interested in this last aspect especially, that the interpretation of a text (or a difficulty in a text) ought to take account of "what the writer meant from his other writings, acts, words, disposition and in fact his whole life", since this is precisely what a letter carrier could contribute to the reception and interpretation of a Pauline letter (cf. esp. Col 4.7-9).

SBL 2012 Phoebe the Letter Carrier

Looks like I'm going to be busy in Chicago:

Dear Peter,

Congratulations, your paper, Phoebe the letter carrier and the delivery and initial reception of Romans, was accepted for the 2012 Annual Meeting program unit Pauline Epistles. The meeting will be held in Chicago, IL from 11/17/2012 to 11/20/2012.

Please note that, by submitting a paper proposal or accepting a role in any affiliate organization or program unit session at the Annual or International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, you agree to participate in an open academic discussion guided by a common standard of scholarly discourse that engages your subject through critical inquiry and investigation.

Should your proposal be accepted, please also note that all meeting participants must be registered by June 1.

Please ensure that you familiarize yourself with the Requirements for Participation.

Opening Paul's Letters

Over at Crux Sola Nigay Gupta has a review of Patrick Gray's new book, Opening Paul's Letters, which he quite likes except for the fact that he has "very little discussion of letter-carriers and their roles (see only short discussion ~p. 136)".

Gray's comment was:
‘Paul’s coworkers who delivered his letters did not drop them in the mailbox and then go on their way but, rather, would likely have read them aloud to the recipients and been available to explain the significance of the references they contained.’ Opening Paul’s Letters: A Reader’s Guide to Genre and Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 136.

This comes in the context of a discussion about Paul's use of the Old Testament in his letters (hence 'explain the significance of the references', i.e. to the Old Testament).

Three main ideas here, and I would score this at 1.5 out of 3.

The idea that letter carriers don't drop the letter and move right on is a good idea. Hence the introduction and request for help in relation to Phoebe. The introduction helps to initiate a relationship. Not necessary to think of a long stay in Rome of course.

The idea that the letter carrier is the reader/performer of a Pauline letter is becoming more widespread even as it becomes clearer (to me anyway) that there is no evidence for such a practice in antiquity. Nor does Gray offer any evidence. Of course, the fact that none of the advocates of such a theory do offer any evidence in its support ought to be enough of a warning to careful readers. And it hardly fits with waiting until chapter 16 before actually introducing Phoebe.

The idea that the letter carrier is on hand to be available to aid the reception and understanding of a letter is a good one. The further idea that someone like Phoebe (or any of the other Pauline letter carriers) would have been equipped to explain all the details of Paul's use of the Old Testament is probably, in my view, taking a reasonable idea a bit too far.

SBL 2012 Paper accepted

Dear Peter,

Congratulations, your paper, The Role of Tychicus in Col 4.7-9 (with an old approach to the text of 4.8), was accepted for the 2012 Annual Meeting program unit Disputed Paulines. The meeting will be held in Chicago, IL from 11/17/2012 to 11/20/2012.

Please note that, by submitting a paper proposal or accepting a role in any affiliate organization or program unit session at the Annual or International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, you agree to participate in an open academic discussion guided by a common standard of scholarly discourse that engages your subject through critical inquiry and investigation.

Paul to Seneca (II)

I was happy to receive your letter yesterday. I could have answered it at once if I had had the young man at hand whom I intended to send to you. You well know when and through whom, at what time and to whom something ought to be given for transmission. I beg you therefore not to think yourself neglected, while I have regard to the trustworthiness of the person. ...

So I was wondering whether I could use this as one aspect of the reception historical evidence for Paul as a user of letter carriers. My caution would be that these letters (4th cent. AD pseudonymous collection) exhibit several other epistolary commonplaces, so it might not offer evidence of anything other than an author sprinkling his compositions with authentic sounding epistolary themes.

Mike Bird posted a comment on Cicero and Letter Carriers, reflecting (a little too superficially) on a single quote from Atticus 1.13:

In these letters, indeed, I am urgently pressed by you to send answers, but what renders me rather dilatory in this respect the difficulty of finding a trustworthy carrier. How few of these gentry are able to convey a letter rather weightier than usual without lightening it by skimming its contents! (Letter XVIII).

Mike said:

This would suggest that some letter carriers were not just Roman fedex delivery boys, but were responsible for reading the letters on delivery. Interesting implications for the role of Phoebe in Romans and Tychicus in Colossae!

My comments (from his blog - where there are obviously intervening comments which I haven't posted here):

1. Mike, nothing in that comment suggests your conclusion that Ciceronian letter carriers "were responsible for reading the letters on delivery". That does not follow.
2. Ah. No that is not what Cicero meant. His primary issue is confidentiality, not skim reading at the destination. 'Convey a letter' means simply deliver the letter to its recipient. The reference to lightening the letter is a humorous figure of speech referring to reading the letter. Later in this same letter (Att. I 13) he refers to the risk that a letter might be lost, opened or intercepted. He adds, 'I dare not intrust a letter on such weighty matters to such a casual nobody’s son as this messenger.'
3. I don't recall any incident where Cicero refers to including money inside a letter. I don't think that is relevant here. He is worried that the letter carrier might read a fullsome and confidential letter. In fact he is so concerned by this possibility that he won't actually write the letter he would like to write (which would have included full answers to Atticus' questions). So it is an interesting situation where the presence/absence of a letter carrier impacts the composition and the contents of the letter. Lacking a trust-worthy letter carrier Cicero has to write a shorter, less detailed letter. The implication, in this situation, would be that Cicero did not want such a letter carrier to do any more than simply deliver the letter.
   
   Cicero has another delivery problem which he mentions here and in some other letters of the period, that he is not sure where Atticus is, so can't give detailed instructions to a letter carrier.
   

Letter Carriers in Marburg

Just got back from attending the Facharbeitsgruppe Neues Testament in Marburg. This is a research seminar/conference associated with the Arbeitskreis für evangelikale Theologie (seems basically like an equivalent to the Tyndale Fellowship Study Groups). Anyway I presented a paper on: The Ancient Letter Carriers and their Relevance for the Study of the New Testament. This seemed to be well received and provoked some interesting questions and discussion. In this paper I offered a general overview of the evidence as I see it, and some reflections on the relevance for Romans, Philippians, and Colossians (with briefer comments on some other texts). The trip was too quick, I don't really cope with one hour lectures in German (except with a full script - that was really helpful), and my travel arrangements meant I didn't get to do much sightseeing. But I met up with some good people (old friends and new), and have plenty to think about.

Doering on 'Paul and Ancient Jewish Letter Writing'

Justin Mihoc at RBECS provides a helpful summary of Doering's presentation at Durham on 29.11.2010. Broadly focusing on form and content.

Olson on Embedded Letters in Josephus

Ryan S. Olson, Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery: The Poetics of Embedded Letters in Josephus. Hellenic Studies 42. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2010.

Helpful review (by L. Zollschan) at BMCR.

Durham Conference on Letters and Communities (July 2011)

Configuring Communities: The Socio-Political Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography

An international conference, jointly organised by the departments of Classics & Ancient History and Theology & Religion (Durham), 14-16 July 2011.

A provisional list of speakers includes John Barclay (Durham); Pierre Briant (Paris); Hannah Cotton (Jerusalem); Anya Dolganov (Princeton); Catharine Edwards (London); Roy Gibson (Manchester); Ulrich Gotter (Konstanz); Sebastian Grätz (Mainz); Peter Head (Cambridge); Manuela Mari (Cassino); Judith Lieu (Cambridge); Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr (Jena); Robin Osborne (Cambridge).

Symposium in Sydney on Epistolary Conversations

Letters are among our most important types of sources for understanding ancient societies, and one that can seem to offer a rare immediacy, catching individuals dealing with specific issues of business or friendship in particular moments of time. Letters offer us access to a level of daily life and language missing from more forensic literary genres or more monumental artefacts. But letters are also amongst the most heterogenous of ancient sources. The modern printed edition may inadvertently conceal vast differences in form: texts preserved as monumental inscriptions on city walls, in multiple medieval manuscripts, or as unique originals on the workaday materials of papyri and wood or deluxe ivory – all may be ‘letters.’ The content of letters is no less Protean: we are used to thinking of letters in manuscript collections as ‘literary’ and those on original materials as ‘documentary,’ but papyri originals may demonstrate the same rhetorical conceits as those in manuscript, while among the most numerous letters bequeathed by the manuscript tradition are thousands of governmental memoranda repackaged as the great Roman imperial law codes. Letters were ephemera – but both the careful archiving of original papyri documents and the gathering of letter-collections consciously overrode that transience. Letters were cultural markers of classical Greek and Roman societies – but the vast bulk of extant originals come from Egypt, carrying forward both Hellenistic and Near Eastern epistolary traditions. The Augustan age produced the great models that shaped later epistolary practice, of the aristocratic érudites Cicero, Pliny, and Horace – as well as St. Paul and others later canonised in the New Testament – but the largest and most numerous letter-collections are overwhelmingly those of Late Antiquity, especially the often data-rich letter-collections of Christian bishops. Letters were the written products of highly literate societies – but often depended on a human bearer to deliver an oral message constituting the essential communiqué. Letters chart for us physical and social networks throughout ancient societies – but only occasionally do we have before us two sides of any conversation. Letters could be intimate and personal – but with personae constructed from venerable literary topoi.

Please join a symposium of historians, papyrologists and linguists for a day of discussing these and other issues shaping our understanding of the ancient letter.

Speakers include: Professor Pauline Allen, Dr Malcolm Choat, Dr Geoffrey Dunn, Dr Trevor Evans, Assoc. Prof. Andrew Gillett, Dr Stephen Lake and Dr Bronwen Neil.

Date: Monday 15 November 2010. 9.30am to 5.30pm

Venue: Macquarie University Ancient History Documentary Research Centre, Building W6A, Floor 3, Western End.

All welcome. There is no charge for attendance, but please RSVP for catering purposes.

Enquiries and RSVP to: andrew.gillett@mq.edu.au

Letter Carriers in the Correspondence of Cicero



Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC) was not only a great rhetorician he was also a great letter writer (general orientation and on-line literature). He wrote so many letters (more than 800), and refers so often to letter-carriers that it is a bit tricky deciding how to organise a presentation of his statements and assumptions on the subject. One place to begin is when the delivery by letter carrier goes amiss. Consider the following from Cicero's reply to Servius Sulpicius Rufus (in 49 BC)

‘I received your letter on the 28^th of April, while at my Cuman villa. As soon as I had read it I perceived that Philotimus, considering that he had, as you say, received verbal instructions from you on every point, had made a great mistake in not having come to me personally, but sending your letter, which I understood to have been shorter because you had imagined that he would deliver it.’

This is an interesting statement of assumptions (in Cicero's circle at least) of the role of letter carriers (which emerges with more clarity precisely when those assumptions are not met):

1. the letter carrier is assumed to be present during the composition/writing of the letter
2. a letter can be brief if an authorised letter carrier is present to expand on its contents
3. the author gave verbal instructions to the letter carrier (so that they could be communicated in person to the recipient)
4. the letter carrier is supposed to help the recipient receive/understand the letter.

Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c. 345-402 CE) was a Roman senator and orator, and a leading pagan critic of Christian emperors (see further in Wikipedia). He was also a noted letter writer, and after his death a collection of around 900 of his letters was edited by his son, Q. Fabius Memmius Symmachus, in nine books of private letters and a tenth book of imperial correspondence (following the pattern of Pliny).[1] Quite a few of Symmachus' letters are quite brief, very often the letter carrier would bring the real news:

Although written as private correspondence to specific individuals, each of Symmachus' letters, when received, was read aloud to the members of the household and to friends; typically, the confidential bits of information or controversial views on public affairs would be conveyed by the letter carrier in private, oral conversation.[2]

Salzman adds in a note: 'Symmachus mentions information being delivered orally by letter carriers often; see for example, Ep. 1.11, 1.46, 1.87.2, 1.90.1, 2.11, 2.21, 3.30, 4.44, 6.13, 8.31, 9.37. Ep. 6.18, notes that Symmachus gave oral information about a grain shortage to his letter carrier, so that the recipient of the letter will learn more by listening than by reading.' [3]



[1] J.F. Matthews, ‘The Letters of Symmachus’ in Latin Literature of the Fourth Century (ed. J.W. Binns; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 58–99.
[2] M. R. Salzman, ‘Travel and Communication in The Letters of Symmachus’, in Travel, Communication and Geography in Late Antiquity: Sacred and Profane (eds: L. Ellis & F. L. Kidner; Aldershot & Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004), 81-94 (citation from p. 81).
[3] Salzman, ‘Travel and Communication in The Letters of Symmachus’, n. 1, pp. 81-82.