Note: This letter was originally written to run on Dec 5, but our birthday greetings replaced it. We're posting this as Dec 12.
December 5, 2008
Dear Colleague:
Today is my birthday, and I've been receiving birthday greetings from my young friends, which I find most gratifying. That they remember me at all is a pleasant surprise; that they go to the trouble of actually sending me a greeting is a miracle of considerateness. Their greeting and letter usually end with, "Best," "Take care," or "Regards." In general, this is as far as they wish or dare go in expressing a feeling. I understand. After all, their manner of speech and epistolary style have a tradition of their own, pioneered by the laconic John Wayne in the open spaces of buffalo and tumbleweed.
Now, dear colleague, you may be interested in the epistolary style of an earlier time—say, the 2nd century CE, preserved in the correspondence between a famous Roman rhetorician, Cornelius Fronto, and his pupil, the future Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Fronto was then forty-four years old and Marcus a teenager of seventeen. On the occasion of Fronto's birthday, Marcus sent the following letter:
Hi, my very best teacher,
I know that on each man's birthday his friends offer good wishes for the man whose birthday it is: but because I love you next to my own self, I want to make a wish for myself on this day, your birthday. And so I climb the citadel of Pergamum and pray to Aesculapius to steer the health of my teacher straight and watch over it awfully well. From here I go to Athens, and on bended knee I beseech and beg Minerva that whatever I may ever learn about letters should above all journey from your mouth to my heart...In the end I ask all the guardian gods of all nations, and Jupiter himself, to grant us that I should celebrate this day, on which you were born for me, along with you, and a happy, strong you.
Good-bye, my sweetest and dearest teacher. Please take care of your body so that when I come I'll see you. My mother says hello (Amy Richlin, transl., Marcus Aurelius in Love).
Surprisingly slangy, isn't it? But then Marcus Aurelius was still a kid, decades away from being the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher who composed the austere Meditations. As I read this and other glowing letters, I can't help thinking of my own time and of the youngsters I have known. Won't they be astonished by the warmth of Marcus's feeling for his teacher? And won't they be even more astonished that a rambunctious teenager could be so uninhibited in expressing his feeling? Too bad I am not a teacher in ancient Rome. Despite Freud and the sexual liberation he initiated, we live in a verbally constipated age. On the other hand, was all this emotion just rhetoric in the negative sense of the word? Was Marcus sincere, as we moderns like to say? Just what was Marcus's real opinion of Fronto—the one he addressed as "my very best teacher"? Well, there is a hint of it in the preface to Meditations, where the emperor acknowledges all the teachers who have influenced him. It is a long list, and Fronto comes last, almost as an after-thought.
Best wishes,
Yi-Fu
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