At its peak, the Roman Empire It covered three continents: from Great Britain to the Carpathians in Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor, an immense terrain under the umbrella of the same civilization. The Romans They had more roads than we thoughtbut to govern, negotiate and maintain power at a distance they used cards.
Precisely these epistles have served to document how that civilization faded away, but also how they lived and thought. The problem is that these letters were scattered, in Latin and in academic editions, which in practice distances them from most mortals. So a dev has thought of changing it with a website that collects more than 7,000 letters from the late Roman world: Roman Letters.
What is Roman Letters. It is a website that brings together 7,049 letters from 100 to 800 AD and constitutes the largest corpus of late Roman correspondence in English, with 54 collections of epistles by individual authors. In reality, the project tells a story in eight chapters, from the fervent connection of the 11th-century Empire to the silence that falls on the West after the year 600.
And it does so precisely with those letters translated and accompanied by a map of the correspondence, a graph of networks between characters, an academic thesis and the source code on GitHub. The good thing is that the same can be used for academic research, to analyze networks or specific periods, since the project is registered in the CERN academic repository and can be cited, but also as complementary material in teaching or mere curiosity.
Letter 1001, from Pliny the Younger to Septitius
Who has done it. The project is carried out by Craig Vander Galiena software developer who was inspired by Patrick Wyman’s doctoral research on the fall of Rome to develop it. The dev signs both the data corpus and the academic thesis that supports it. There is no university behind it or institutional funding, but rather it is an individual work. The result is impressive, but the effort is even more so: it has 3,123 translations into English made for the first time, which means bringing some of this material closer to the Anglo-Saxon world.
Why is it important. Because the decline of Rome can be seen graphically: in the period of greatest correspondence activity (the years 350 and 390) 2,112 letters survive per generation. In the year 600, that number drops to 182. When the roads deteriorate, the postal system disappears and literacy is concentrated in the monasteries, then it is the end of letters. This project demonstrates it with testimonies, maps and graphs. On the other hand, it shows that historians such as Peter Brown They are right: the Eastern Roman Empire did not collapse in the 5th century, since thousands of letters continued to be sent. It came to an end two centuries later, with the Arab conquests.
Roman roads and communication flows. Roman Letters
How to use it. If you enter out of curiosity, the easiest thing is to access the main page, scroll down and let the eight chapters tell the story from ‘The connected world’ to ‘After the letters stopped’. Each letter takes you to the author’s collection, where you can see the complete available letters and their context.
If you prefer something more visual, you can use the ‘Maps’ sections to view the cartographies with Roman roads and the flow of superimposed charts, being able to filter or move the timeline. For more advanced use, the network graph in ‘Network’ shows who was writing to whom and who were the central nodes of the system. And a recommendation to contextualize everything better: take a look at Vander Galien’s methodological thesis.
The fall of Rome, in letters
The decline of the Empire, in letters. Among the very interesting topics in which the correspondence is classified, there are some such as plagues and famine or women, but there is a common event that marks a before and after in the perception of the Romans about their destiny: the sacking of Rome in 410. An example: Epistle 127 of Jerome of Strydon. One of the voices that best captures the end of the West is Sidonius ApolinarGallo-Roman aristocrat and bishop of Auvergne who, with more than 100 letters, constitutes a first-hand source for knowing the history of the 5th century in Gaul.
Yes, but. It is worth remembering that despite the effort and size of the project, this corpus only includes what has survived and what remains is a biased sample: a good part are from ecclesiastical figures or from the high aristocracy, so there is a lack of voices that are not from the upper class (whether they knew how to write or not) to better understand what their society was like. The decrease in the number of letters shows the collapse of the elite’s communication networks, which can be extrapolated to the entire society. On the other hand, those unpublished translations are valuable, but the peer review process is missing. Not that they are incorrect, but they should be taken with caution like any other unreviewed source.
Cover | János Szüdi and
Cover | Valentin de Boulogne and Tataryn
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings