Author: ARISTAENETUS
Biography:
ARISTAENETUS (c. 5th century: Oxford Classical Dictionary)
The preface by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and Richard Brinsley Sheridan to their The Love Epistles, a translation from Aristaenetus, begins “The Critics have not yet decided at what time Aristaenetus appeared, or indeed whether or not he ever existed.” What was true in 1771 remains true now: no biographical details have come to light and the name “Aristaenetus” has been attached to a collection of fifty letters about love and sexual passion only because that name appears on the first of the letters. The prose letters survive in a single Greek manuscript which is known to have been copied in Italy in about 1200 CE. They are believed to have been written towards the end of the 5th century or the beginning of the 6th by an epistolographer possibly working in Constantinople under Justinian I. Two translations into English prose of selections from the letters appeared earlier in the eighteenth century. One was by Abel Boyer, issued as Letters of Love and Gallantry in 1715. The other, by Thomas Brown (1663-1704), is the only one mentioned by Halhed and Sheridan. They had probably encountered Brown’s translation in the posthumous collection of his writings, The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, edited by J. Drake and published in 1707, and they condemn it as a mere imitation by “the ingenious Tom Brown.” Halhed and Sheridan both have headnotes of their own in this bibliography; their verse translation of Aristaenetus includes 28 of the letters. (Oxford Classical Dictionary online 24 Feb. 2025; ODNB [Abel Boyer and Thomas Brown] 24 Feb. 2025; J. Drake, ed. The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown [1707]; [Abel Boyer], Letters of Love and Gallantry [1716]) SR