Most of what survives from ancient Rome is public: speeches written to persuade a crowd, histories that look back on events, and inscriptions carved to impress the people walking past. Letters are a different kind of source. A letter is written for one reader at one moment, often in a hurry, and often without any idea that a stranger will read it two thousand years later. Because of that, the surviving letters of the Romans are some of the most direct evidence we have for how educated Romans thought, worried, joked, did business and talked about power.
This article looks at Roman letter-writing in general: the great literary collections of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Seneca the Younger and Pliny the Younger, and the everyday letters that archaeologists have found, above all the wooden tablets from the fort of Vindolanda in northern Britain. It covers what the letters were written on, how they were carried, how they survived, and what historians have learned from them. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, a separate subject, is not covered here, though the FAQ explains how it relates.
What Counts as a "Roman Epistle"?
The Latin word epistula simply means a letter. In practice Roman letters ranged across a wide spectrum:
- Private, practical letters. Requests for supplies, invitations, news of family and complaints. Most of these were thrown away or rotted, and the few that survive were usually found by archaeologists.
- Personal letters later collected and published. Cicero's letters belong here. He wrote them as real correspondence, and they were gathered and published after his death.
- Letters written with publication in mind. Pliny the Younger shaped his letters as literary pieces and published them in books during his lifetime.
- Letters used as a literary form. Seneca's Moral Letters to Lucilius use the letter format to teach philosophy to a wider readership.
- Official correspondence. Letters between officials and the emperor, such as Pliny's exchanges with the emperor Trajan, which show how provincial government worked day to day.
Keeping these categories apart matters. A letter Cicero dashed off to his closest friend tells us something different from a polished essay Seneca knew would be copied and read by strangers.
Writing Materials: Wax, Wood, Ink and Papyrus
Romans wrote on several different surfaces, and the material they chose shaped both the message and its chances of survival.
Wax tablets
A wax tablet was a wooden board covered with a layer of wax. Writers scratched letters into the wax with a pointed stylus, whose other end was usually flat, like a small spatula, so it could smooth the wax and erase the text. Two tablets were often hinged together into a folding pair called a diptych. Because the wax could be wiped and reused, tablets were cheap to run and easy to carry, and Romans used them for notes, accounts, school exercises and short messages. Cicero's letters mention cerae, the Latin word for wax tablets.
The idea of a hinged wooden tablet is very old. According to Wikipedia's article on the subject, the earliest known example, made of boxwood with an ivory hinge, came from the Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of Turkey and dates to the 14th century BC. The Latin phrase tabula rasa, a "scraped tablet," survives in English as the image of a blank slate. Scholars have also linked hinged tablets to the later development of the codex, the bound book with pages.
Ink on thin wooden leaves
At Vindolanda, the main form of writing was not wax but ink on very thin leaves of local wood: birch, alder and oak. These leaf tablets were roughly the size of a modern postcard, about 20 by 8 centimetres. The ink was carbon-based, made from carbon, gum arabic and water. A letter was often written in two columns and then folded, with the writing on the inside faces.
Papyrus and parchment
Literary texts and many letters around the Mediterranean were written on papyrus, a material made from the Egyptian papyrus plant. Papyrus survives well only in very dry conditions, which is one reason so many ancient papyrus documents come from Egypt. Parchment, made from animal skin, became more important in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and it is on parchment that the great letter collections reached us, copied by later scribes.
The practical result is simple. Almost none of the original letters of Cicero, Seneca or Pliny survive. What we have are copies of copies, made centuries later. The originals that do survive from Roman times are mostly humble ones, preserved by accident in waterlogged soil or desert sand.
How Letters Travelled
Rome had no public postal service for private people. Wealthy Romans sent letters with their own slaves or freedmen, or handed them to friends, travelling merchants or officials going the right way. Cicero's correspondence often mentions waiting for a trustworthy carrier, and a letter's speed depended on who happened to be travelling.
The state did build its own system. The emperor Augustus founded the cursus publicus, a state courier and transport service that carried messages, officials and tax revenue between the provinces and Italy. Along the main roads stood changing stations (mutationes) and fuller stations with lodging (mansiones), and local communities had to supply horses, carts, food and beds. Mansiones were roughly 25 Roman miles apart. Estimates of normal travel speed run from about 38 to 62 miles a day, and a single rider in an emergency could manage 100 miles or more.
The cursus publicus was not open to everyone. By default it served the government and the army, and other travellers needed an official permit called a diploma, which named the traveller, the route, the time period and the transport allowed. Permits were sometimes abused, and forged ones existed. Much later the emperors Diocletian and Constantine split the service into a fast branch (cursus velox) and a slower, ox-drawn branch (cursus clabularis). The historian Procopius says Justinian dismantled most of it in the sixth century, though parts survived in the Byzantine east and in Ostrogothic Italy.
Note that Cicero's letters belong to the late Republic, before Augustus. For most of Cicero's life, the imperial courier service did not yet exist, so his letters moved by private arrangement.
Cicero: The Letters of a Republic in Crisis
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was the most famous orator and one of the leading politicians of the late Roman Republic. He also left the largest body of personal letters to survive from the classical world.
The four collections
Cicero's surviving letters are grouped into four collections:
- Letters to Atticus (Epistulae ad Atticum), written between 68 and 43 BC.
- Letters to his Friends (Epistulae ad Familiares), traditionally sixteen books, covering 62 to 43 BC.
- Letters to his brother Quintus (Epistulae ad Quintum Fratrem), covering about 60/59 to 54 BC.
- Letters to Brutus (Epistulae ad Brutum), from 43 BC.
Together, 37 books of letters survive. Ancient sources knew of about 35 more books that are now lost, including letters to Julius Caesar, Pompey, Octavian (the future Augustus) and Cicero's son Marcus. According to Wikipedia's article on the letters to Atticus, 454 of Cicero's 813 surviving letters are addressed to Atticus. (Different editions count the letters slightly differently, because the Ad Familiares also includes letters written to Cicero by others.)
Atticus, the confidant
Titus Pomponius Atticus was a wealthy Roman knight who mostly stayed out of politics. He was Cicero's closest friend, his banker and his sounding board. The biographer Cornelius Nepos, who knew Atticus, wrote that Cicero loved Atticus more than anyone, even his brother Quintus. Nepos also wrote that the letters contained detail "concerning the inclinations of leading men, the faults of the generals, and the revolutions in the government."
That comment explains why the letters are so valuable. They read in places like a private journal. Cicero writes about his hopes and fears, his money troubles, his family, his anger at rivals and his doubts about his own decisions. Historians treat the letters to Atticus as one of the most reliable sources for the years leading up to the fall of the Republic, precisely because Cicero was not writing for posterity.
What the letters cover
Cicero's correspondence spans some of the most dramatic years in Roman history: the rise of Pompey and Caesar, Cicero's own exile in 58 BC, the civil war between Caesar and Pompey that began in 49 BC, Caesar's dictatorship and assassination in 44 BC, and the struggle afterwards between Mark Antony and the young Octavian. The letters end in 43 BC, the year Cicero was killed in the political proscriptions that followed.
Reading the letters in order, one sees a politician reacting to events as they happen, without knowing how they will turn out. That is something no later history can provide. A historian looking back knows Caesar will win the civil war. Cicero, writing in 49 BC, did not.
Tiro, the secretary
Much of Cicero's writing passed through the hands of Marcus Tullius Tiro, first his slave and later his freedman. Cicero freed him in 53 BC (some sources say 54 BC), and Tiro took Cicero's names, as freed slaves usually took their former owner's. Tiro took dictation, read Cicero's difficult handwriting, managed household finances and proofread manuscripts. Cicero's letters show real affection for him: when Tiro fell seriously ill in 50 BC, Cicero wrote repeatedly to ask about his health, and more than sixty of Cicero's letters mention him.
Tiro had started collecting Cicero's correspondence by about 46 or 45 BC, and after Cicero's death he published some of his speeches and letters, along with a collection of his jokes and a biography. The Ad Familiares was probably first published by Tiro. A shorthand system called "Tironian notes" is traditionally credited to him, though there is no clear evidence that he invented it.
When were the letters published?
The letters to Atticus seem to have been published much later than the Ad Familiares. Early references to them are missing, which suggests they may not have circulated until the middle of the first century AD, well after both Cicero (died 43 BC) and Atticus (died 32 BC) were gone. This is a reminder that "publication" in antiquity meant someone deciding to have copies made and distributed, and that letters could sit privately for decades before that happened.
Seneca: The Letter as a Classroom
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger, was a Stoic philosopher, playwright and statesman who served for more than ten years as an adviser to the emperor Nero. In the last two or three years of his life, after he withdrew from court around AD 62, he wrote the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, the Moral Letters to Lucilius. One letter (letter 91) mentions the fire that destroyed Lugdunum, modern Lyon, in AD 64, which helps date the collection.
A collection built for readers
There are 124 surviving letters, arranged in twenty books. The collection is incomplete: the second-century writer Aulus Gellius quotes from a twenty-second book, though the lost portion is thought to be small. The addressee, Lucilius Junior, was procurator of Sicily, and he is known to us only through Seneca's writings.
Unlike Cicero's letters, Seneca's are not a working correspondence. They are open letters, written for a wider audience, using the letter form to make philosophy feel personal. A typical letter starts from some everyday observation and moves to a broader principle. The early letters often end with a short saying for Lucilius to think about, a habit Seneca drops around letter 30, after which the letters become longer and more theoretical. Seneca quotes freely from poets and thinkers, including Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Lucretius and the writer of maxims Publilius Syrus.
Themes
The letters return again and again to a few Stoic ideas: that virtue is the only true good and vice the only true evil; that a person's inner life matters more than wealth or status; that time is short and easily wasted; and that one should face death calmly. The last theme was not abstract for Seneca. He lived under a dangerous emperor, and in AD 65 in the aftermath of the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero, he was ordered to take his own life.
Famous lines and later influence
Several Latin sayings in common use come from or are adapted from the letters. Vita sine litteris mors ("life without learning is death") is adapted from letter 82 and is used as a school motto. Letter 117 contains ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt ("the fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling"), a line Seneca attributes to the Stoic Cleanthes. The phrase non scholae sed vitae ("not for school but for life") also derives from the work.
The letters had a long afterlife. The oldest manuscripts date from the ninth century, and for a long time letters 1–88 and 89–124 circulated as separate groups. Around 400 manuscripts are known. The letters were first printed in Naples in 1475, and Erasmus produced an improved edition in 1529. Michel de Montaigne read them closely, and they shaped his Essays. In the late sixteenth century Justus Lipsius drew on them in reviving Stoic thought, a movement now called Neostoicism. Modern English readers often know them under the title Letters from a Stoic.
Pliny the Younger: The Polished Letter and the Governor's Mailbag
Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, known as Pliny the Younger, was born around AD 61 at Novum Comum, modern Como in northern Italy. He was the nephew and adopted son of Pliny the Elder, author of the encyclopedic Natural History. He had a successful career as a lawyer and senator and was later sent as the emperor Trajan's governor to Bithynia and Pontus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea in what is now Turkey, around AD 110. He probably died there around AD 113, because no event in his letters dates later.
Ten books of letters
Pliny's letters, the Epistulae, survive in ten books, totalling 247 letters. Books 1 to 9 are carefully crafted personal letters to friends, family and fellow members of the elite. Pliny selected and arranged them himself, and each tends to focus on a single subject: a court case, a literary recital, a villa, a ghost story, the character of a friend. They are polished in a way Cicero's letters are not, and they give a picture of a cultured gentleman's life under a stable emperor.
Book 10 is different. It contains Pliny's official correspondence with Trajan, mostly from his time as governor, together with Trajan's replies. It is generally thought to have been published after Pliny's death.
The eruption of Vesuvius
Pliny's best-known letters are two written to the historian Tacitus, numbered 6.16 and 6.20. Tacitus had asked for information about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pliny, who was a teenager at the time, wrote about 25 years later. The first letter describes how his uncle, Pliny the Elder, launched his galleys across the bay towards Stabiae to rescue people and died there. The second describes Pliny's own experience and his escape with his mother.
These letters are the classic written account of the eruption. Volcanologists today use the term "Plinian eruption" for a type of explosive eruption, and their descriptions of it still draw on Pliny's letter. They show how a letter could serve as raw material for a history: Tacitus asked, Pliny supplied his memories,, and the letters became a lasting source in their own right.
The letter about the Christians
The most discussed letter in Book 10 is number 96, written around AD 112. Pliny had been faced with people accused, sometimes anonymously, of being Christians, and he asked Trajan how to handle them. Should age matter? Should someone who stopped being a Christian be pardoned? Was the name "Christian" itself a crime, or only crimes connected with it?
Pliny described his procedure. He asked the accused whether they were Christians. Those who said yes were asked twice more and warned of the death penalty; those who persisted were executed, except Roman citizens, who were sent to Rome. Those who denied it, or said they had given it up, were released after they worshipped the Roman gods, offered incense and wine before the emperor's image, and cursed Christ. Pliny reported what he learned about the group's practices: they met before dawn, sang hymns to Christ as a god, swore an oath not to commit crimes such as fraud, theft or adultery, and later met again for an ordinary, harmless meal. He questioned two enslaved women, called deaconesses, under torture, and found nothing but what he called a depraved and excessive superstition.
Trajan's reply, letter 10.97, approved Pliny's approach and set out rules: Christians were not to be sought out; those accused and proved guilty were to be punished; those who denied it and proved it by worshipping the gods were to be pardoned; and anonymous accusations were not to be accepted. This exchange is counted among the earliest surviving Roman documents to refer to Christians, and it is a key source for how Roman officials viewed the new religion.
What Book 10 shows about government
Beyond the Christian letter, Book 10 shows a governor writing to his emperor about public building projects, local finances, a proposed fire brigade, legal questions and appointments. It is one of the best surviving windows into how the Roman Empire was actually run: by letters going back and forth across hundreds of miles, with officials asking permission and the emperor answering in short, practical replies.
How Pliny's letters survived
Pliny's letters reached the Renaissance in more than one manuscript tradition. The first printed edition appeared in Italy in 1471. Between 1495 and 1500 the scholar Giovanni Giocondo found a manuscript in Paris containing Book 10, and the first complete edition, including the Trajan letters, was printed by the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius in 1508.
Letters from the Frontier: The Vindolanda Tablets
The great collections were written by senators and philosophers. The Vindolanda tablets let us hear from soldiers, slaves, officers' wives and suppliers on the edge of the empire.
Discovery
Vindolanda was a Roman fort just south of the line of Hadrian's Wall in northern England. In March 1973 an excavation led by the archaeologist Robin Birley turned up thin pieces of wood that were at first taken for wood shavings. When an excavator found two pieces stuck together and peeled them apart, he saw writing inside. Waterlogged, oxygen-poor soil had preserved the wood and ink for nearly two thousand years.
Nearly 500 tablets were excavated in the 1970s and 1980s, and more than 1,700 had been found by 2023. Most date from the late first and early second centuries AD, largely before AD 105, a little before Hadrian's Wall was begun in AD 122. Nearly all of the excavated tablets are now held by the British Museum, which displays a selection.
The birthday invitation
The most famous tablet, number 291, was written around AD 100. In it Claudia Severa invites her friend Sulpicia Lepidina to a birthday celebration. Lepidina was the wife of Flavius Cerialis, commander of the ninth cohort of Batavians at Vindolanda. The main text was written by a scribe, but Severa added her own closing greetings in a different hand. It is one of the earliest known pieces of Latin written by a woman.
The tablet shows something the literary collections rarely capture: ordinary friendship between women on a military frontier, written in a practical, warm style. Other Vindolanda texts deal with requests for supplies, military reports, accounts and personal news. The tablets have been described as the first known surviving examples of ink letters from the Roman period.
Why Vindolanda matters
Before Vindolanda, almost all surviving Roman letters were literary texts passed down by copyists, who chose what to preserve. Vindolanda gives an unfiltered sample. Nobody selected these letters for their style or importance; they survived because they were thrown away in the right kind of mud. That makes them an essential check on the picture painted by the elite collections.
From Monastery to Renaissance: How the Letters Survived
The letters of Cicero, Seneca and Pliny survive because later generations kept copying them. After the collapse of the Western Empire, monasteries and cathedral libraries were the main places where Latin texts were copied and stored.
Cicero's case shows how fragile this chain was. The oldest surviving piece of the Ad Familiares is a single palimpsest leaf from the fifth or sixth century AD, containing parts of letters 6.9 and 6.10. (A palimpsest is a page that was scraped and reused, with the older text still faintly visible.) The key complete manuscript, known to editors as M, dates from the first half of the ninth century. It once belonged to Bishop Leo of Vercelli and appears in a ninth-century catalogue of the abbey of Lorsch. The Florentine humanist and chancellor Coluccio Salutati had it copied in 1392, and it is now in the Laurentian Library in Florence.
The letters to Atticus had an even more dramatic rediscovery. In 1345 the poet and scholar Petrarch found a manuscript containing the letters to Atticus, Quintus and Brutus in the Chapter Library of Verona and had a copy made. Both the manuscript and Petrarch's copy are now lost, but a copy made for Salutati survives in the Laurentian Library. The letters became widely known through the edition of Paolo Manuzio, printed in Venice in 1558.
Petrarch's find has often been described as a spark of the Italian Renaissance, though historians since the 1970s have questioned how far one discovery can carry such a large claim. Either way, the encounter was striking. The letters showed later readers a private, anxious and changeable Cicero quite different from the confident orator of the speeches.
What Historians Learn from Roman Letters
Roman letters are used as evidence in several different ways.
Politics as it happened. Cicero's letters record political events from the inside, often within days. They show alliances forming and breaking, and how a senator weighed risky choices during civil war.
Social relationships. Letters of recommendation, requests for favours and thanks for help reveal the networks of friendship (amicitia) and patronage that held Roman elite society together. Both Cicero and Pliny wrote many letters recommending friends and clients to people with power.
Government at work. Pliny's Book 10 and the military documents from Vindolanda show how decisions were made and how information moved between the centre and the edges of the empire.
Thought and feeling. Seneca's letters show how a Roman tried to live by philosophy. Pliny's Vesuvius letters show fear and courage in a disaster.
Daily life. Vindolanda and other everyday documents reveal food, clothing, supplies, birthdays and complaints, the texture of life that grand histories leave out.
Cautions
Letters are not neutral. Cicero often wrote to persuade, flatter or vent. Pliny chose which letters to publish and polished them, so his collection presents him as he wanted to be seen. Seneca's letters are teaching texts dressed as correspondence. And all the literary collections passed through editors, copyists and centuries of selection. A good historian reads every letter asking who wrote it, for whom, and why it survived.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this article about Paul's Epistle to the Romans? No. This article covers Roman letter-writing in general. Paul's Epistle to the Romans is a letter written in Greek by the apostle Paul to the Christian community in Rome, and it belongs to the New Testament. It shares many conventions of ancient letter-writing, but it is a separate subject.
How many of Cicero's letters survive? Wikipedia's article on the Epistulae ad Atticum gives 813 surviving letters, 454 of them to Atticus, in four collections totalling 37 books. Counts vary slightly between editions, partly because some letters in the collections were written to Cicero rather than by him.
Did Romans have a postal service? The state did. Augustus founded the cursus publicus to carry official messages and travellers, but private people needed a permit to use it. Most private letters went with slaves, friends or travellers.
What is the oldest handwritten Latin letter by a woman? The Vindolanda birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to Sulpicia Lepidina, written around AD 100, is one of the earliest known examples of Latin written by a woman.
Why are Pliny's letters about Vesuvius important? They are the classic written account of the eruption of AD 79 by someone who lived through it, and they describe the death of Pliny the Elder. Pliny wrote them for the historian Tacitus about 25 years after the event.
Where can I read these letters? Seneca's letters are available in complete English translations, including Richard M. Gummere's Loeb edition (1917–1925) and Graver and Long's (2015). Pliny's letters are also widely translated. A selection of Vindolanda tablets is on display at the British Museum. Cicero's letters are available in several modern translations.
Sources and further reading
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_Cicero
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_ad_Atticum
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_ad_Familiares
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Tullius_Tiro
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_Morales_ad_Lucilium
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Younger
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Younger_on_Christians
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindolanda_tablets
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_publicus
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_tablet
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_(message)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plinian_eruption