Q.  What’s the definition of a meeting?
A.  A place where ideas go to die.

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According to The Washington Post, mailboxes are going to die — not in Sergey Brin’s garage – but in a “mailbox graveyard” somewhere close to Maryland, USA. Brigid Schulte wrote a touching piece, re-printed in The Age, about the demise of the mail service across the US and the 200,000 mailboxes that have vanished from her region in the last 20 years due to “under-performance.”  The figures on the right, taken from the article, tell the story. 

In 2000, there were approx. 350 million mailboxes across the US; in 2009, they’re down to 176 million. That’s a decrease of around 50%.  As for actual pieces of mail, in 2000, it was approx. 210 billion; in 2009, it’s expected to be around 170 billion.  

Charles Bukowski, for one, would be laughing in his beer.

But as a former employee of the spiritual home of the postal system — located in a unprepossessing building at 148 Old Street, London EC1V 9HQ — I’m kicking off a tribute to the diminishing, if not the total passing, of this magical medium.  I’ll be having an occasional, desultory column on letter writers of history, and first cab off the rank is Fronto, tutor to Marcus Aurelius, the future Emperor of the Roman Empire from AD 161 to 180.

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What’s extraordinary about Fronto’s letters to Marcus, and indeed, Marcus’s to him, is not their content — “I have been seized with a dreadful pain in my neck” — but their discovery.  Mary Beard in her review in the London Review of Books of a new biography of Marcus Aurelius, describes how they came to light in 1815.  In that year, a Cardinal Angelo Mai was reading the records of the First Church Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, when he noticed each sheet had been made of reused parchment. 

The earlier writing “had been erased (washing with milk and oat-bran was the common method), and the minutes of the Church Council copied on top.”  The recycled sheets had come from a wide range of books including Juvenal’s Satires and Pliny’s Panegyric.  The bulk of the sheets, however, was made up of the ”faintly legible” correspondence between Fronto, “one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century” and his charge, Marcus Aurelius.  The correspondence included 80 letters written by Marcus himself, “both before and after he had ascended to the throne,” and “unlike the passages from Juvenal and Pliny … were entirely new discoveries.”

The letters themselves, particularly after they’d been subjected to Mai’s amateur ministrations of chemicals in an effort to make them more legible, were confusing and disappointing.  No dates, no chronology, the amusingly prosaic content — what’s the “most appropriate term for ‘removing a stain’, maculam eluere, albuere or elavere?” — and liberally sprinkled with “disconcerting” expressions of homoerotic desire — “I gorge myself on love for you.” 

But what a story!  I imagine Mai sitting in the library that day and noticing the blots on the paper. From Council minutes to an Emperor’s declarations of love by an adjustment of the eye.

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