In any exchange, information streams back and forth in numerous channels. This truism is worth recalling when the exchange in question is between scholars, where the temptation, reenforced by tradition, is to focus on the obvious intellectual content and ignore the rest. But no matter how strictly the writers seem to discuss only ‘objective’ matters, there is always a nonintellectual component present, and if the social and psychological context is available or can be reconstructed, then the biographer or historian finds much besides the issues discussed. In this exchange of letters between the Cambridge scholar, Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), the latter makes some keen observations about the limited value of the comparative method so far as classical studies are concerned. But beneath the text of these letters exists a personal ‘subtext’, which permits us to read the letters in a fresh or unexpected light.