Letters, Diplomacy, and the Roman Conquest of Greece
Letters, Diplomacy, and the Roman Conquest of Greece
The chapter explores the ways in which the generic expectations of the letter differ from those of the decree, insofar as letters tend to contain discursive explanations of, or background to, the requests or decisions that they convey: the sender of a letter will not simply send instructions but will attempt to enable the recipient to understand why those instructions are being given, or at least to put them into a broader context. More specifically, Osborne argues that the Roman adoption of the convention, established by Hellenistic kings, that they would respond to cities’ embassies by writing letters, led to particular expectations about the Roman political community and about the ways in which authority was constituted at Rome—an important factor in shaping the peculiar and unhappy dynamic of the Roman intervention in the Greek world in the early second century BCE.
Keywords: royal correspondence, city-decrees, generic conventions, Greece and Rome, cross-cultural miscommunication, epistolary rhetoric, persuasion
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