| In the present work, I address the topic of travel writing in ancient epistolography, principally through a case study of Cicero's correspondence. This choice is due to the fact that, in the panorama of ancient epistolography, Cicero's wide epistolary corpus---no matter how much it may have been revised before publication---remains the best and largest example of a 'real' correspondence kept among people educated enough to be able to elaborate on their experiences. Thus, at present I aim to define how travels were typically described in ancient letters actually meant for an exchange of information, and thereby to establish a few clear categories that could define the typical and original features of ancient 'epistolary travel writing'. However, I am here also providing, for each of the categories that I have identified, a few selected examples, both from documentary material and from other epistolary collections, in order to offer a preliminary contextualization of the assets obtained through a close analysis of Cicero's letters. In particular, by this, I aim, on one hand, to confirm the presence of certain structures in documentary letters, and, on the other, to illustrate how, in more literary or fictional epistolary collections, some features get exploited, and therefore recognized as typical, while some others get variously abandoned or surpassed. |
