ABSTRACT
My brief is love-letters, and this paper will be concerned, by nature of the subject, with pothos rather than with porneia,1 and, by nature of my own interests, with the middle rather than the early Byzantine period. It will concentrate on what went on in the mind, or at least on the page, rather than the body, with what people felt and wrote rather than what they did or were, and with dyads rather than individuals. We shall see that if 'letters mingle soûles', their potential is not always exploited or appreciated,2 and that what constituted pothos in the period packs some surprises. I shall not deal with the issue of spiritual love in asceticism. There are three sections: fiction, damned lies, and statistics.
