For St. Augustine, letters could be both powerful and perilous. Indeed, dispatching a letter to a friend raised any number of questions: how to maintain long-held classical prescriptions for letter writing in a way that was also consonant with an emerging Christian world; how to negotiate the identity, personality, and status of a person addressed in a letter; and finally, how to modulate such a letter in terms appropriate to both the authority of the writer and that of his addressee. Navigating the demands of these factors, and doing so in a way that preserved both authority and friendship, constituted a challenge for even the most accomplished of ancient letter writers. Words chosen carefully could accomplish much—phrased badly, the reverse was true.

This project considers just how Augustine manages these difficulties, investigating Augustine's 300-plus letters to uncover how authority, friendship, and rhetoric function within this corpus. Through stylistic analysis, I show how Augustine both submits to and transforms epistolary conventions, eventually creating a new epistolary virtue for stylistic variation. Using social network theory, I look at the web of Augustine's contacts, and how Augustine used letters to manage and defend this network throughout his life. I then investigate the particular relational hierarchies Augustine inhabited, and explore how friendship in Augustine functions along changing authority gradients: namely, those existing between inferiors, equals, and superiors. Finally, I then consider how authority and friendship continue their epistolary interplay long after Augustine himself has passed from the scene. As the bishop's social network becomes crucial as the repository and conduit for his ideas, the authorities addressed by Augustine end up less significant than the legacy he bequeaths them—so that, finally, Augustine the transformative agent of epistolary style becomes Augustine the literary authority himself.