Letter writing has for millennia of human history been a powerful instrument for managing literary communication and guiding community life: letter writers from different cultures and territories have inaugurated the formation of communities, political leadership and influence, philosophical and moral education, dogmatic decisions, and religious edification.

Three letter writers from the late Roman republican and early imperial time - Cicero, Paul, and Seneca - have even developed epistolary visions of transformational leadership in the first century BCE until late in the 1st century CE. We believe that these three authors went beyond the medium of (ancient) epistolography by using the power of letter writing as a means of implementing - what we today call - transformational leadership.