Epistulae ad exercitationem accommodatae: Notes on some fictional epistles by John Tzetzes.

John Tzetzes’ epistolary was conceived as a reasoned corpus, extensively commented upon by himself in the Chiliads. Out of the one hundred and seven epistles it comprises, fifteen have been singled out as fictional. Their analysis reveals that they are not a homogeneous group: whereas six of them are fictional epistolary models, the other nine are rather real letters. The six fictional letters (Ep. 7, 9, 11, 15, 30, 52) function as progymnasmata: they explore the topoi of Byzantine epistolography and constitute a model for epistolary composition that, by building up communicative occasions and staging typical characters (the monk, the bishop, the patriarch, the eunuch, the doux, the foreigner) acting in a bureaucratical and ecclesiastical milieu, show how to interact with authority in specific occasions. Their fictionality is underlined in their titles themselves, where the sender is identified with the formulation ‘ὡς ἀπό τινος’. The remaining nine epistles (Ep. 12, 16, 17, 20, 35, 41, 62, 63, 64) are, on the contrary, letters relating to concrete episodes of Tzetzes’ life and career: they often echo literary and teaching disputes and their addressees, although remaining obscure for us, must have been well recognizable in the learned circle in which Tzetzes’ works circulated and in which the querelle was disputed; there is thus no reason to seclude them from the remaining ninety-two epistles of the corpus.