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Lost Letters, Forbidden Love
By Karen Newell Young
Classics professor Amy Richlin is striding into an area of scholarship where others have only tiptoed.
For reasons lost to history, love letters between two figures of
antiquity have been largely ignored for two centuries. But now a
fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies is allowing
Richlin the time to explore a collection of passionate exchanges
between Cornelius Fronto, a famous Roman orator, and Marcus Aurelius,
who later became emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 A.D.
The letters were discovered in a palimpsest—a manuscript that had been
scraped down in order to use it again. When Roman cardinal and
celebrated philologist Angelo Mai discovered the manuscript in Milan’s
Ambrosian Library in 1815, he republished the letters thinking they
would attract as much attention as the Cicero orations he discovered
had years before.
But the letters drew little attention and, as Richlin puts it, “for almost 200 years they have lain hidden in plain sight.”
The question is, why?
“There are many amazing things about these letters,” Richlin says. “But
one of the most surprising things is that they were illegal. It was
criminal for Fronto and Marcus, a free-born teenager, to have had a
sexual or romantic relationship. And so it’s also amazing that the
letters stirred no comment.”
Sexual relationships occurred, of course, but they were not accepted
between an older teacher and a free-born teenager, Richlin
explains. Relationships between male owner and slave or matches among
the lower classes were ignored, but romantic relationships between
higher classes were not. One would think such a relationship between
two prominent men might be better known.
Part of her studies of the letters will form a chapter in a book, to be
edited by Mathew Kuefler and published by the University of Chicago
Press. The letters cover the years from Fronto’s first tenure as
Marcus’ tutor, in 139 A.D., until his death in 167. When the exchanges
begin, Fronto is 44 and Marcus is 18. Richlin described the letters
dated between 139 and 145 as “pervasively amatory.” Meaning: they’re
hot.
But at the age of 24, Marcus married his cousin Faustina, who bore him
12 children. The love letters became less frequent and eventually
disappeared. Richlin says that Marcus seems to tire of rhetoric (in
favor of philosophy) about the time he tires of Fronto. After Marcus’
marriage, she says, “The fire goes out.”
Richlin, former chair of the classics department, is interested in sex
and gender in Greece and Rome; the culture, oratory and history of
ancient Rome; and feminist theory. Her studies also focus on women in
antiquity and Roman law. She has published numerous works on Roman
sexuality, satire, feminist theory and Roman women’s history.
Her study of Roman women’s religion forms the chapter titled “Carrying
Water in a Sieve” in the book “Women and Goddess Traditions in
Antiquity and Today,” edited by Fortress Press. From one passage we
learn that for centuries free-born women of the citizen class had a
network that enabled them to act as a group on occasions.
However, “such groups were heavily enmeshed in an ideological system
that was always ready to belittle them, that approved of them only
insofar as they ratified the social assessment of them as the property
of individual men for the production of children and that saw them as
always prone to lapses into unchastity,” she writes.
In writing about festivals that were special to women, she notes that
the women played a part in many of the festival days that “were
patterned by carefully performed rituals.” But again, what history
provides is based on men’s accounts.
Richlin is the author of “The Garden of Priapus,” editor of
“Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome,” and co-editor with
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz of “Feminist Theory and the Classics.” Her book
“Plautus and the Mysterious Orient” is forthcoming from University of
California Press.
“When I came to L.A. in 1989 I was euphoric for a long time. I just
drove up and down Hollywood Boulevard playing tunes on the radio and
taking it all in. The light pours down like honey, a beautiful golden
light—this is the best place for writing I’ve ever been to, no wonder
it turned into Hollywood. I’d never lived in a city before I came here,
and I wound up here, the new Alexandria, the jewel of the Pacific Rim.”
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