According to Pliny the Elder, the Greek philosopher Dionysodoros of Melos was renowned throughout the Hellenistic world for being a great geometrician. He lived to an astoundingly old age and, after his death, his female heirs led a funeral procession in his honor. After bearing his corpse to the tomb, they discovered a mysterious letter sitting in the crypt. They opened it up and found, to their astonishment, that it was written in Dionysodoros’s own handwriting and that it had his signature at the bottom.
The letter was addressed to the people of earth. It claimed that Dionysodoros’s spirit had departed from the tomb and descended into the center of the earth, which was located 420,000 stades beneath its surface. (An ancient Greek stade is roughly equivalent to 600 feet on the British imperial scale.)
The letter aroused widespread excitement among geometricians, who determined that, if the statistics given in the letter were indeed accurate, it would mean that the circumference of the earth would be 252,000 stades. This number matches the estimate arrived at by the third-century B.C. Greek geographer Eratosthenes, who based his calculations on measurements of the positions of the shadows cast by the sun.
Historians believe that the letter left by Dionysodoros may have been an intentional literary forgery; he had actually written the letter shortly before his death, basing the statistics in it on Eratosthenes’s calculations. Then, he had told someone he trusted to place the letter in the tomb upon his burial to trick people into thinking it had been left there by his ghost.
Dionysodoros’s letter is not the only famous letter purportedly sent from the afterlife to the present world. The notorious “Epistle of Christ from Heaven,” otherwise known as the “Sunday Epistle,” claims to have been written by none other than Jesus himself following his ascension to heaven. The letter employs an elaborate framing device to explain how it was delivered to earth, claiming that Saint Peter delivered it to the archbishop of Rome in a dream to read it aloud to his congregation.
ABOVE: Eighteenth-century English printed copy of the “Sunday Epistle,” which claims to have been written by Jesus Christ
In reality, the letter is actually a forgery written in the sixth century A.D. by an anonymous charlatan. The malicious nature of the document is evidenced by the fact that it is effectively the world’s oldest surviving chain letter; it orders the readers to make as many copies of the letter as possible and give those copies to everyone they know and love, and warns them that anyone who does not own a copy of the letter will automatically burn in Hell for eternity. It threatens that God will send venomous wild beasts and savage wolves to devour anyone who does not make copies of the letter.
As a direct result of these demands, the hundreds of copies of the “Sunday Epistle” have survived. Although the letter was originally written in Koine Greek, it has been translated into nearly a dozen different languages.
After reading them in sometimes random order, then systematically back from the most recent, then after a couple of menu pages of that going back to the first one and working my way forward, I have now read all the pieces on this website.
This really wasn’t one of the best, but since it’s the culmination of a couple of weeks of reading your stuff rather obsessively, let me commend you here for an excellent job! I have set up email notification whenever you have a new column, and I look forward to continuing to be delighted (and yes, I read the latest one on the Elgin marbles this morning, and I basically agree, but I’ll go back and do a separate comment on that in a minute).
Even the slighter pieces, like this one, contain fascinating anecdotes. And even the pieces about subjects I know well, that have me nodding along, introduce knew bits of knowledge I hadn’t come across before. Thanks for doing this!