Introduction

The field of Byzantine Studies has been vexed by the issue that “Byzantium” does not exist as a historical entity. For the “Byzantines,” who considered and called themselves Romans, there existed no Byzantine Empire, but only the Roman Empire, which came to end when the Ottomans conquered the “New Rome” Constantinople in 1453. Byzantine poetry is fundamentally based on the regulation of two linguistic parameters: rhythm and meter. While both played a pivotal role from the archaic period onwards, their specific form changed radically in late antiquity, leading to a new aesthetic in Byzantium. Fictional epistolography flourished in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods in the form of collections attributed to historical personages, sometimes assuming the form of epistolary novels; letters of farmers and fishermen; and erotic letters. In the Greek tradition, the first traces of epistolary poetry can be found in the Greek Anthology, which includes the most important collection of ancient epigrams.