Roman Letters

 Roman Letters 

Origin

Roman Letters grows out of a simple observation in Patrick Wyman's 2016 USC dissertation, Letters, Mobility, and the Fall of the Roman Empire: the late Roman world left behind an extraordinary volume of surviving correspondence. Senators, bishops, monks, and imperial officials all relied on letters to maintain relationships across vast distances, and many of those letters still exist, scattered across digital archives and critical editions.

This project collects that scattered corpus into a single, structured database and provides tools for exploring the communication networks it reveals.

The dataset

The database currently contains:

7,048

Letters

54

Collections

1,848

People identified

4,410

First English translations

5,862

With distance data

7,048

Topic-tagged

477

Carrier mentions

81

Author bios

Letters span from roughly 97 to 800 AD, covering the transition from the unified Roman Empire to the early medieval kingdoms of western Europe. Major collections include the letters of Augustine, Gregory the Great, Symmachus, Basil of Caesarea, Jerome, Cassiodorus, and Sidonius Apollinaris, among others.

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