Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.

Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.

An integrated collection of essays examining the politics, social networks, law, historiography, and literature of the later Roman world. The volume treats three central themes: the first section looks at political and social developments across the period and argues that, in spite of the stress placed upon traditional social structures, many elements of Roman life remained only slightly changed. The second section focuses upon biographical texts and shows how late-antique authors adapted traditional modes of discourse to new conditions. The final section explores the first years of the reign of Theodosius I and shows how he built upon historical foundations while unfurling new methods for utilising, presenting, and commemorating imperial power. These papers analyse specific events and local developments to highlight examples of both change and continuity in the Roman world from 284-450.