ABSTRACT
John Milton’s Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus presents an invigorating portrait of an artist as a young man: his growth into maturity, his networking with foreign correspondents and, later, his continued scholarship and diplomacy despite the onset of blindness and old age. Milton employs the language of ancient Rome only to showcase its potential for achieving transformations whereby the words of classical writers are now recast as something very new. This chapter focuses on one case in point: his four Latin Letters to his former pupil, Richard Jones. Here, it is argued, the kaleidoscopic nature of authorial self-fashioning is matched by a didacticism that is wide-ranging in its engagement with classical intertexts, and in its verbal ingenuity. This correlation between Latinitas, ‘letters’, and latent wordplay invites the reader to scrutinize text and context, to unravel intertextual links, to seek out linguistic nuances, and to become an interpreter of epistolographic meaning.
