Alciphron and the Sympotic Letter Tradition

The author's argument in this chapter is that Alciphron's Letters (especially Book 3, his Letters of Parasites ) engages closely with a long-standing tradition of writing in letter form about symposia and dinner parties. One strand in that tradition is the letter of invitation. The other is the retrospective banquet letter, in other words the kind of letter which offers a report of a dinner party for the benefit of someone who was not present. A great deal of scholarly attention has been given to Alciphron's relationship with New Comedy and a number of other genres, but his relationship with sympotic letter traditions has to his knowledge barely even been mentioned in earlier studies, let alone analysed at length. The category of the sympotic report letter has rarely been discussed at length within modern scholarship, despite the fact that it occurs so frequently within both Greek and Latin literature. Keywords:Alciphron; Greek literature; Latin literature; letters of invitation; letters of report; sympotic letter tradition

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