umm...it did not seem to post my actual post, only my title. Let's try this again!
I really enjoyed the article by John Nicholson concerning the many difficulties and nuances that went along with epistolary communication during the Late Republic. What I found most helpful about the article was that it explained all those random questions that I would think about while translating the letters, but forget to ask about in class. It’s rather impressive that Cicero was able to harbor his almost obsessive love of letters when no organized postal service existed in the Republic. This article even enhanced the importance of Atticus. The sheer volume of letters that are written to Atticus show that Atticus was a vital familiar, but he also functioned almost as a spell check or editor for Cicero’s other letters. Then there’s the extreme length that authors would go through to insure that if their letters arrived that they’d only be readable by the indented person. Switching to Greek or using nicknames for people is understandable. But I was really impressed that some men went as far as to develop a code language to write in.
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umm...it did not seem to post my actual post, only my title. Let's try this again!
I really enjoyed the article by John Nicholson concerning the many difficulties and nuances that went along with epistolary communication during the Late Republic. What I found most helpful about the article was that it explained all those random questions that I would think about while translating the letters, but forget to ask about in class. It’s rather impressive that Cicero was able to harbor his almost obsessive love of letters when no organized postal service existed in the Republic. This article even enhanced the importance of Atticus. The sheer volume of letters that are written to Atticus show that Atticus was a vital familiar, but he also functioned almost as a spell check or editor for Cicero’s other letters. Then there’s the extreme length that authors would go through to insure that if their letters arrived that they’d only be readable by the indented person. Switching to Greek or using nicknames for people is understandable. But I was really impressed that some men went as far as to develop a code language to write in.
Shannon
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