Abstract

As a literary genre and practice, philosophical and political epistolography seems to have been alive and well in the fourth-century Roman empire. We have fragments of twenty letters of the late third- and early fourth-centuryc.e. Platonist philosopher Iamblichus of Chalcis to former students and other contemporaries, some of whom appear to have been imperial officeholders ; theEpistle to Himeriusof Sopater the Younger to his brother Himerius on the latter's assumption of an unknown governorship in the East, probably sometime in the 340s or 350s ; the Emperor Julian'sEpistle to Themistius, which was likely written and publishedc.December 361/early 362; and theEpistle to Julianof the Aristotelian philosopher Themistius on proper rule, which seems to have been a response, in part, to Julian'sEpistle to Themistiusand perhaps was written to the emperor when both men likely resided in Constantinople at the same time. These philosophical and political letters are but a few examples from this period. All four authors mentioned above, who are representative of intellectual life in the East during the fourth century, produced epistles which reflect Greek political theory in a Roman imperial context.