The Art of Biography in Antiquity
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THE ART O F BI OG R APHY I N AN T IQU IT Y
Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch, Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents. In this book Professor H¨agg explores the whole range and diversity of ancient biography, from its Socratic beginnings to the Christian acquisition of the form in Late Antiquity. He shows how creative writers developed the lives of popular heroes like Homer, Aesop and Alexander, and how the Christian gospels grew from bare sayings to full lives. In Imperial Rome biography flourished in the works of Greek writers: Lucian’s satire, Philostratus’ full sophistic orchestration, Porphyry’s intellectual portrait of Plotinus. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not political biography or the lives of poets that provide the main artery of ancient biography, but various kinds of philosophical, spiritual and ethical lives. Applying a consistent biographical reading to a representative set of surviving texts, this book opens up the manifold but often neglected art of biography in classical antiquity. t o m a s h a¨ g g was Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Bergen. His previous publications include The Novel in Antiquity () and The Virgin and her Lover ().
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY ¨ TO MAS H AGG
Published online by Cambridge University Press
c a mb r i d g e un i ve r s it y p r ess Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ c Tomas H¨agg This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data H¨agg, Tomas. The art of biography in Antiquity / Tomas H¨agg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn ---- (hardback) . Classical biography – History and criticism. . Biography as a literary form. I. Title. pa.h .′ – dc isbn ---- Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
For Henny Daniel, Anna, Sara
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE ART O F BI OG R APHY I N AN T IQU IT Y
Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch, Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents. In this book Professor H¨agg explores the whole range and diversity of ancient biography, from its Socratic beginnings to the Christian acquisition of the form in Late Antiquity. He shows how creative writers developed the lives of popular heroes like Homer, Aesop and Alexander, and how the Christian gospels grew from bare sayings to full lives. In Imperial Rome biography flourished in the works of Greek writers: Lucian’s satire, Philostratus’ full sophistic orchestration, Porphyry’s intellectual portrait of Plotinus. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not political biography or the lives of poets that provide the main artery of ancient biography, but various kinds of philosophical, spiritual and ethical lives. Applying a consistent biographical reading to a representative set of surviving texts, this book opens up the manifold but often neglected art of biography in classical antiquity. t o m a s h a¨ g g was Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Bergen. His previous publications include The Novel in Antiquity () and The Virgin and her Lover ().
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY ¨ TO MAS H AGG
Published online by Cambridge University Press
c a mb r i d g e un i ve r s it y p r ess Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ c Tomas H¨agg This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data H¨agg, Tomas. The art of biography in Antiquity / Tomas H¨agg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn ---- (hardback) . Classical biography – History and criticism. . Biography as a literary form. I. Title. pa.h .′ – dc isbn ---- Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
For Henny Daniel, Anna, Sara
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE ART O F BI OG R APHY I N AN T IQU IT Y
Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch, Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents. In this book Professor H¨agg explores the whole range and diversity of ancient biography, from its Socratic beginnings to the Christian acquisition of the form in Late Antiquity. He shows how creative writers developed the lives of popular heroes like Homer, Aesop and Alexander, and how the Christian gospels grew from bare sayings to full lives. In Imperial Rome biography flourished in the works of Greek writers: Lucian’s satire, Philostratus’ full sophistic orchestration, Porphyry’s intellectual portrait of Plotinus. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not political biography or the lives of poets that provide the main artery of ancient biography, but various kinds of philosophical, spiritual and ethical lives. Applying a consistent biographical reading to a representative set of surviving texts, this book opens up the manifold but often neglected art of biography in classical antiquity. t o m a s h a¨ g g was Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Bergen. His previous publications include The Novel in Antiquity () and The Virgin and her Lover ().
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY ¨ TO MAS H AGG
Published online by Cambridge University Press
c a mb r i d g e un i ve r s it y p r ess Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ c Tomas H¨agg This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data H¨agg, Tomas. The art of biography in Antiquity / Tomas H¨agg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn ---- (hardback) . Classical biography – History and criticism. . Biography as a literary form. I. Title. pa.h .′ – dc isbn ---- Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
For Henny Daniel, Anna, Sara
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE ART O F BI OG R APHY I N AN T IQU IT Y
Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch, Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents. In this book Professor H¨agg explores the whole range and diversity of ancient biography, from its Socratic beginnings to the Christian acquisition of the form in Late Antiquity. He shows how creative writers developed the lives of popular heroes like Homer, Aesop and Alexander, and how the Christian gospels grew from bare sayings to full lives. In Imperial Rome biography flourished in the works of Greek writers: Lucian’s satire, Philostratus’ full sophistic orchestration, Porphyry’s intellectual portrait of Plotinus. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not political biography or the lives of poets that provide the main artery of ancient biography, but various kinds of philosophical, spiritual and ethical lives. Applying a consistent biographical reading to a representative set of surviving texts, this book opens up the manifold but often neglected art of biography in classical antiquity. t o m a s h a¨ g g was Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Bergen. His previous publications include The Novel in Antiquity () and The Virgin and her Lover ().
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY ¨ TO MAS H AGG
Published online by Cambridge University Press
c a mb r i d g e un i ve r s it y p r ess Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ c Tomas H¨agg This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data H¨agg, Tomas. The art of biography in Antiquity / Tomas H¨agg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn ---- (hardback) . Classical biography – History and criticism. . Biography as a literary form. I. Title. pa.h .′ – dc isbn ---- Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
For Henny Daniel, Anna, Sara
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Contents
Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations
page ix xiv xv
Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
Glimpses of a prehistory Socrates in the Socratic mirror: Apology, Phaedo, Memorabilia Isocrates on Evagoras, his model king Xenophon on Agesilaus’ deeds and virtues The Education of Cyrus
Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
. . . . .
. . . . . .
Fragments and hypotheses Aristoxenus’ Lives of Pythagoras and Socrates Satyrus’ Life of Euripides Hermippus the Callimachean Antigonus of Carystus Unity and diversity
Popular heroes: The slave, the king, the poet . . . . .
Open biography The Life of Aesop The Life of Alexander of Pseudo-Callisthenes Lives of Homer Conclusion
The gospels: From sayings to a full Life . What were the gospels? . The sayings of Jesus . The canonical gospels
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. Birth and infancy gospels . Jesus at thirty: Four canonical portraits
Political biography at Rome: A new start
. . . . . .
Change of scene Nepos and his Life of Atticus Nicolaus of Damascus: A Greek Life of Augustus Tacitus in praise of his father-in-law Suetonius on poets and emperors The Romanness of Roman biography
Plutarch and his Parallel Lives: Ethical biography . . . .
A Roman Greek A double Life: Demosthenes and Cicero Plutarch on his aims and methods Plutarch and the biographical tradition
Ways of life: Philosophers and holy men . . . . . . . .
Everything to do with Pythagoras? The satirical mirror: Lucian Secundus the Silent Philosopher The philosophical gallery: Diogenes Laertius Sophistic biography: Philostratus on Apollonius of Tyana Collective biography: Philostratus on his sophistic colleagues Porphyry and Iamblichus on Pythagoras: A comparative reading Intellectual biography: Porphyry on the life and books of Plotinus
Epilogue on ancient and Christian biography Further reading Bibliography Index
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Preface
This book is not a history of the ‘biographical genre’ in antiquity; it is about the art of biography as it was practised by a number of Greek and Roman creative writers from about bc to about ad . Interpretation of the extant texts is allowed to dominate over discussion of the possible nature of the many lost ones. An inclusive definition of ‘biography’ is applied, namely a literary text of book length telling the life story of an historical individual from cradle to grave (or a substantial part of it). And the story must be told by someone else: autobiography, as something basically different, is kept out of the picture. Specimens of collective biography and shorter biographical works may be included, as long as the life of the individual(s) is the structuring principle and main interest, rather than an idea or an historical process. The actual proportion of historicity against fictitiousness is not used as a criterion for inclusion or exclusion, nor the degree of objectivity as opposed to bias or special purpose. Thus, the gospels, the Life of Aesop, and Tacitus’ Agricola are treated alongside Plutarch, Suetonius, and other representatives of the more restricted canon. In writing the book, I have had in mind both students of classical antiquity and people more generally interested in biography. As far as feasible, I try to let the texts themselves speak first, through generous quotation in translation and summaries of contents, before I turn to analysis and interpretation. The idea that a reader of a book of this kind, be it a classicist or a generalist, knows the texts sufficiently well in advance or has them at hand to consult continuously is a pious illusion: it is better to bring the texts physically into the discussion, and hope that the samples offered give an appetite for subsequent reading of at least some of them in full. If it had not become a clich´e, I might have called the book ‘Reading Ancient Biography’; that is at any rate what I am literally doing, attempting to convey something of a reader’s experience of the text as it progresses. At the same time, of course, it has been important to bring in the best of the ix
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available scholarship (old or new) on each text and author, for illumination and deeper understanding. After the novel, biography is probably the most-read literary form today. Though its current exemplars are constantly under public debate, it is still perhaps the form that remains least studied from an academic point of view. It shares with the novel the further distinction of being often regarded as a modern creation, the literary response to modern individualism, owing its present excellence to the combined impact of modern psychology and historical scholarship. Plutarch and Suetonius are certainly acknowledged as ancient forerunners; but other forms of biographical literature that flourished in classical antiquity (and in the Middle Ages, for that matter) are mostly left out of consideration when the history of the genre is discussed. Demonstrating what kinds of ancient texts of relevance to this discussion we actually possess may therefore be useful; for there are signs that biography is at last beginning to attract more serious critical and scholarly attention. One of my aims, then, is to look at the various ancient forms of biography with modern biography in mind, in order to show what the constants are – in structure, literary topoi, rhetorical schemes, means of characterization – and where the main differences may be spotted. If I do not so often spell out the affinities or discrepancies, it is because they will be easily appreciated by any reader interested in biography. Turning to my fellow classicists, I would claim that Greek and Roman biography has been one of our more neglected fields of study. It was for most of the time a minor literary form in antiquity, it is true, but still tenacious and productive throughout the seven centuries covered here. Biography as a branch of historiography has been eagerly, sometimes profitably, studied; but the art of biography, with the important exception of Plutarch, has attracted less attention than it merits. Many of the texts, to be sure, have been abundantly studied from other literary perspectives; what I contribute is consistently seeing them, reading them, as biographies. By attempting an overview of the field, incorporating what I have found useful in earlier research, it will also be clear where the more significant lacunae in our knowledge are situated, hopefully inciting more specialized studies. That the emerging picture is a provisional one, and that there are other texts that might also have been included, needs hardly to be said. As I have already stressed, the emphasis on biography as an art means that the discussion of lost texts, so prominent in earlier studies, will have to yield to the study of those we really possess. Literary connections and influences can perhaps sometimes be studied in the absence of the texts (though it is a risky undertaking); art cannot. Trying to compete with –
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not to speak of ‘replacing’ – the standard works of a Leo or Dihle or Momigliano would anyway be foolish; changing the perspective is the best option. My principal aim is not to trace historical interrelationships or lines of ‘development’. Nor is my heart in generic classification, the game of delimiting genres and distinguishing subgenres. The more I have worked with these texts, the less I can see the point in drawing borders where the authors themselves so obviously moved over mapless terrain. Some of the literary highlights, such as Tacitus’ Agricola and Philostratus’ Apollonius, are taxonomical nightmares. I do address generic questions quite often; but then it is mostly because I think such a discussion is apt to bring out the characteristics of a certain composition, or because ‘genre expectation’ (a most valid issue) is at stake. I have no specific agenda in this respect: I want to show that the works I am treating may with profit be read as biographies, not that they ‘are’ biographies rather than, say, historiography, doxography, protreptics, panegyrics, novels or ‘gospels’. I am well aware that it may disappoint some readers that the book does not approach the biographical texts of antiquity from a theoretically more challenging angle. They have a point; it is true that modern cultural and literary theory in particular has enriched and renewed the study of Greek and Roman literature in recent years. But this is the book I felt able to write, and enjoyed writing. Moreover, I think it may be useful to have the full range of principal texts presented and studied in traditional terms before more adventurous ways of reading them are explored. This is not the final word. Lastly, my wish to demonstrate the latitude and diversity of Greek and Roman biographical literature has necessitated that the (few) acknowledged masters are more concisely characterized and selectively studied than their intrinsic value and historical importance would merit. This was made possible – and is I hope excusable – due to the amount of excellent work on these texts to draw on and refer to. ∗ The most important among my personal debts is to my colleague and friend Jostein Børtnes, Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the University of Bergen. We worked together in the early s on a joint project focussing on biography and hagiography in Late Antiquity, reaching backwards to ancient biographical conventions and forwards to Byzantine and Slavonic hagiography (and ending with Dostoevsky). The present work was originally planned as a Vorarbeit on my part for the more specialized study of the emergence of hagiography that we intended to write together (but never wrote). Books (like collective projects) tend to take their own
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unforeseen ways, and what I am now presenting is something very different in structure, thought, and size from what I had in mind at the time. Jostein should be credited for his initial inspiration and innumerable discussions through the years, but the responsibility for the kind of book it became is entirely mine. The actual writing started at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where I had the privilege of spending the academic year / as a Member of the School of Historical Studies. That happy period of ideal working conditions was followed by fifteen years when other academic tasks at the University of Bergen, including collective research projects, took most of my time and energy. Often, the time I was able to spend in a whole year on my most cherished project was just a week or two, preferably in some distant haven for undisturbed reading and writing. Only after retiring in from my university chair could this work become more like a full-time occupation. Though I have done my best to revise and update the parts of the book written earlier, I hope that my readers will show indulgence towards any unevenness and inconsistency that still remains and any unfortunate lacunae in my knowledge of more recent research. With such a long period of gestation, there are many persons and institutions to thank. The University of Bergen has supported my work over the years with periods of sabbatical leave and travel grants. Its University Library has been most helpful in providing research material. I would like to mention Kari Normo, who has indefatigably supplied me with interlibrary loans and copies from the most unlikely places, and Kari Walde for her understanding and expeditiousness regarding my suggestions for new books to buy. But still I have had a constant need to go to those places where ‘all’ the books and journals in the field are at hand at once for easy consultation: the Bodleian and the Ashmolean, now Sackler Library at Oxford, both of which I have been happy to visit regularly through the years; the Firestone Library at Princeton University and the library at the Institute for Advanced Study; the splendid Fondation Hardt at Vandœuvres, where I have worked for two periods; the Library of the Theological Faculty at the University of Oslo; and the Widener Library at Harvard University, where some of my updating took place in late . Several colleagues have read whole chapters of my work while it was still in progress. I would like to thank, in particular, Samuel Byrskog, Stephen Harrison, and David Konstan. Many more – too many to name – have commented on one part or other at seminars, or after guest lectures, at the Universities of Bergen, Oslo, Agder, Copenhagen, Lund, Gothenburg, and Uppsala; furthermore, at the Universities of Murcia, Munich, Graz,
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Vienna, Cyprus, Crete (Rethymnon), and Athens, Columbia University, and the University of California, LA. Colleagues in my department at the University of Bergen and collaborators in several interdisciplinary research projects deserve my special thanks for their constructive criticism and patience over the years with my special interest. A complete list would be very long, but I mention Jostein Børtnes, Tormod Eide, Ingvild Gilhus, Tor Hauken, David Hellholm, Lars Boje Mortensen, Halvor Moxnes, Richard Holton Pierce, Samuel Rubenson, P¨ar Sandin, Mathilde Skoie, Einar Thomassen, and Gjert Vestrheim. Michael Sharp, Classics Editor for Cambridge University Press, welcomed my manuscript, unintimidated by its length, and provided me with exceptionally helpful reports from two anonymous readers; their encouragement and constructive criticism were decisive for the completion of the manuscript. No sooner, however, had I by the end of March delivered my final version to the Press than I was diagnosed with a fatal disease. The diagnosis left me with no doubt that I would be unable to take on the full responsibility myself for the final editorial process. The compilation of the Index was thus through the good offices of the Press entrusted to the competent hands of Barbara Hird, while my friend and former colleague Stephen Harrison most kindly and unselfishly promised to help me out with the copy-editing. In addition, my wife Henny has provided indispensable practical assistance with the manuscript in this last period. To all those mentioned here as well as the excellent staff of the Press go my heartfelt thanks for their understanding and kindness in a difficult situation. Dedicating the book to Henny and our children is just a small token of my gratitude for their inspiring presence, all through more than twenty years of life that my family and book have shared. Kristiansand Tomas H¨agg Tomas H¨agg died on August . I am honoured to see this volume through the press in memory of a fine colleague and friend. Oxford Stephen Harrison
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Acknowledgements
Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, New York: St Martin’s Press, , p. . (Prolegomena, epigraph.) Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, translated and annotated by Wayne C by Cornell University Press. Used by permission Ambler. Copyright of the publisher, Cornell University Press. (Ch. ., translated extracts.) Life of Aesop. Translated by Lloyd W. Daly in Aesop Without Morals: The Famous Fables, and a Life of Aesop, New York: Thomas Yoseloff, . (Ch. ., translated extracts.) Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery, London: Adam and Charles Black, , p. . (Ch. , epigraph.) Cicero, ad fam. ... Translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey in Cicero’s Letters to his Friends, Vol. i, Penguin Classics; Harmondsworth: Penguin, , pp. –. (Ch. , epigraph.) M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Other Lives’, London Review of Books [] (), –, on p. . (Ch. , epigraph, quoted by permission.) Lucian, Selected Dialogues, translated by C. D. N. Costa () from ‘The Death of Peregrinus’, ‘Alexander or the False Prophet’, and ‘Demonax’ by permission of Oxford University Press. (Ch. ., selected extracts.) Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from PhiloR stratus: Volumes i–ii, Loeb Classical Library Volumes , , translated C by Christopher P. Jones, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Loeb Classical R is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard Library College. (Ch. ., translated extracts.)
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Abbreviations
ANRW FGrHist LCL LSJ NRSV OCD OCT OWC PC RE RGG SEG TrGF UPZ
H. Temporini and W. Haase (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der R¨omischen Welt, Berlin F. Jacoby et al., Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, Berlin, Leiden Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass., London H. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, th ed. with sup. (), Oxford New Revised Standard Version (of the Bible) S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, rd ed. () Oxford Classical Texts [Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis], Oxford World’s Classics, later Oxford World’s Classics Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth Pauly’s Realencyclop¨adie der classichen Altertumswissenschaft, Stuttgart Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, th ed., T¨ubingen – Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, G¨ottingen ¨ Urkunden der Ptolem¨aerzeit (Altere Funde), Vol. i, ed. Ulrich Wilcken, Berlin and Leipzig
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
Biography lacks both an Aristotle and a Northrop Frye. Ira Bruce Nadel
Each chapter of this book will apply a biographical reading to selected texts of one or several Greek and Roman authors. More general aspects of biography will be discussed along the way when it seems appropriate. The purpose of these prolegomena is simply to account in briefest possible form for some of the assumptions and views that underly my study and to comment on some topics that are often discussed in connection with modern biography, but more seldom so in studies of the ancient texts. No systematic treatment of biographic theory and practice is intended, just a series of statements or comments under various catchwords, with rudimentary bibliographical references. ∗ Biography and modern research. There still exists comparatively little serious research on the literary genre of biography generally, though there are of course numerous scholarly studies of individual biographers and some of limited periods or special trends in the history of biography. Most of the books treating biography from a more global perspective have been written by practising biographers who want to explain their own art and teach others to write (similar kinds of ) Lives. The apologetic and normative aim often leads to rigid categorization in which modern biographies (all or just a particular type) constitute the norm and most ancient and medieval Lives fail to be ‘true’ biographies. A typical exponent of this way of looking at biography is Paul Murray Kendall’s entry on ‘Biographical Literature’ in
On limited periods, there is for instance Berschin (and following volumes) on biography in the Latin Middle Ages and the recent collection of Sharpe and Zwicker a on biography in Early Modern England. The collection of France and St Clair contains several such period or trend studies.
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
the New Encyclopaedia Britannica; a recent exception to the general rule is Hermione Lee’s lucid Biography: A Very Short Introduction, which looks at biography of all ages and biography as a literary form without the usual prejudices. Her ‘Ten rules for biography’, each eventually shown to be dispensable, in effect deconstruct the earlier orthodoxy. ∗ Is biography a genre? One of the reasons for the scholarly neglect of biography until quite recently may be that it seems not to form a ‘genre’ in the same way as, say, the novel does, in spite of its many varieties and subgenres. Biography starts from a very simple concept, the life of an individual from cradle to death (or at least a considerable part of this time span), and is probably represented, in oral or written or visual form, in every culture and throughout history. But even if we restrict our view to the literary variety as developed in the Western tradition, the simple basic concept allows of a multitude of forms, and they are arguably in most cases influenced more by current literary or historical or psychological trends than by earlier biographies. The structure and style of contemporary historiography and novel tend to determine the form of biographies, at least those with scholarly and literary pretensions. To some extent, of course, it is a matter of cross-fertilization, fiction and history also receiving impulses from biography; but with regard to literary form, biography has no doubt mostly been the receiving part, typically with a slight time lag: biography of today mirrors the novel of yesterday (and seldom its more extreme types). Moreover, biographies are typically ephemeral; they only rarely achieve the status of classics, but are mostly replaced by new ones if need arises. This is true also of Graeco-Roman antiquity, the successive Lives of Pythagoras being the most prolific case and the various attempts to rewrite the Life
Kendall ; see also the same author’s monograph, Kendall ; my comments in H¨agg , –; and below, Ch. .. Lee , with basic bibliography. Of earlier theoretically informed book-length studies of biography the following may be mentioned: Romein , Shelston , Madel´enat , Nadel , Edel , Parke , and Backscheider (with extensive bibliography). Other reasons are mentioned by Lee , , such as biography being viewed as popular, impure, conservative, and a product for consumption by the general reader, or ‘insufficiently substantial and scientific to merit study or teaching’. She notes the current change, biography now beginning to be an established academic discipline. Hamilton , –, takes a more pessimistic view of the prospects. See also the discussion of Holmes . For a recent overview of the history of ‘biography’ in this global sense, see Hamilton . Hamilton , describes the phenomenon in more idealistic terms as the reinterpretation of past lives on behalf of the current generation: ‘Biographers accept that no single definitive account of a human life is possible.’ There are of course commercial factors involved as well.
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
of Alexander in different registers perhaps the most intriguing. Biography is more subject matter than form, and the ‘genre’ easily slips out of the scholarly grip. ∗ Truth and creative imagination. In criticism of biography, modern and ancient, one often finds a naive demand that it should be ‘true’, in the sense of verifiable and historically correct. Arnaldo Momigliano hides badly his irritation with fourth-century Greek biographers for not keeping ‘a constant and clear distinction between reality and imagination’, and accepts only reluctantly that ‘nobody bothered to decide whether Plato’s dialogues or Xenophon’s Memorabilia were faithful records of Socrates’ conversations’. Biography is by many viewed as a sub-branch of historiography and ideals of modern historiography are applied to it, without considering the specific conditions of this artistic form. Biography, if it is to be more than a bare curriculum vitae, must try to gain insight into an historical person’s mind to connect and explain the person’s doings and give an impression of a living character, of a ‘life’. Such a process of course escapes scientific control. The biographer has to rely on conjecture, interpretation, reconstruction, in the end on his or her own creative imagination. Now, ancient lifewriters did not encounter among their contemporaries the same demands for documentary truth as their modern colleagues do, nor did for that matter ancient historiographers, as Momigliano knew very well. Conversations are allowed to be fictitious and insight is readily granted into the acting characters’ feelings, thoughts, and motives, as long as some kind of verisimilitude is maintained. The establishment of any form of higher
In addition to the contemporary (lost) histories of Alexander, Plutarch’s Alexander (coupled with Caesar), and the many versions of Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Life of Alexander (treated below, Ch. .), there is in the Roman era in Latin Curtius Rufus’ Historia de rebus Alexandri Magni and in Greek Arrian’s Anabasis Alexandrou. Momigliano b, – = , . See also a = , on the ‘infuriating’ Socratics and – for further discussion of fiction in biography. Compare also Fornara , who speaks of ancient biography as ‘a genre . . . dominated by alien interests and predisposed to gross characterization and fraudulent exposition’. Andr´e Maurois, in his Cambridge lectures of , eloquently argues this case (against Nicolson ), speaking of the biographer ‘in pursuit of a shadow . . . flying before us – the shadow which is the truth about a man’ (Maurois , ). See also Shelston , –, ‘Truth of fact and truth of fiction’, and Edel , , , who formulates a middle position: the biographer ‘is allowed the imagination of form but not of fact’, he is ‘an artist under oath’. For an innovative investigation of biography, autobiography, and fiction (‘auto/biografiction’) in modern literature, see Saunders . This is not to deny that antiquity too, beginning with Aristotle, developed a theory of literary works’ relationship to historical fact, best known in the Latin terminology for the basic three modes of narration (tria genera narrationum): historia, fabula, argumentum. See, e.g., Cizek , – and H¨agg forthcoming a.
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
truth – be it poetic, psychological, philosophical, or religious – overrules demands for the truth of facts. ∗ Fiction, fact, and historicity. If truth is an awkward concept to apply to biography, ‘historicity’ is more useful. The degree to which the creative imagination of a biographer builds on what he or she considers to be historical facts is a distinctive aspect of his or her art. Ancient biography is no different in this respect. The popular Life of Alexander, better known as the Alexander Romance, takes a more liberal view of the king’s achievements than the Alexander historians proper, mixing romantic fiction with accounts of fantastic military deeds. Some Hellenistic biographers confront divergent versions found in their sources to show their critical attitude, while others prefer to construct a coherent and seductive narrative based on documented or (if needed) invented facts. My discussion in this book of the various texts will sometimes attempt to assess their ‘historicity’ in this sense: not so much in relation to historical facts as we think we know them today, but (as far as possible) in relation to contemporary understanding and the sources the writers may have used. ∗ Narrative and portrait. Biography is typically a narrative form: it relates the history of a person from birth to death. Even when much of the material is ordered systematically rather than chronologically, most biographers prefer to start with birth, childhood, and education, before the systematic treatment by topics begins, and to end with death. ‘The structure of biography is biology’, says Terry Eagleton. (Any exceptions, such as Porphyry beginning his Life with Plotinus’ death, are provocations against the expected order.) The metaphor ‘portrait’ used for biography is therefore somewhat misleading if independent Lives in full scale are meant, rather than character sketches within, for instance, historiographical works. It does not help that practitioners like Plutarch and Boswell favour the comparison. Portrait gives a stationary impression, while typical of biography is movement (often spatially as well, from place to place), development or (at least) change, a character confronted with a succession of events and influences.
Eagleton , also speaking of ‘the remorseless linearity of the biographical form’. ‘Portrait’ is one of the metaphors scrutinized by Lee , –. The same metaphor, specifically for ‘biographical representation’ in works other than biographies, is the title and leitmotif of Edwards and Swain . On the interrelationship of verbal and visual representation, see Francis . On Plutarch’s comparisons of biography with figural art, see below, Ch. .; Boswell is quoted in Lee , .
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
This is not to deny that characterization is an essential part of the biographical art, achieved by various direct or indirect means: character revealed in action or speech, stated in authorial comments, implied through structural arrangement, and so on. A combination of the two, life story and serial portrait, may be said to constitute biography. ∗ Private and public life. A topical phenomenon of modern biography is the revelation of the person behind the public figure, of family relations and private life. While a certain species of ancient biography is as full of gossip and slander as some modern ones, it is important to realize that in most ‘serious’ ancient Lives the public figure is the main focus all along. Plutarch famously remarks in his Life of Alexander that ‘often a little matter like a saying or a joke conveys a man’s character more than battles where thousands fall’; yet for all his anecdotes he reveals little of his heroes’ intimate life. In my investigation of the ancient specimens, special attention will be paid to what little there is to be found of references to wife and children, sexual relationships, and similar favourites of modern biography. It would be an illusion to see the dearth of private material as due just to the biographer’s lack of sources; in some cases we know that such information did circulate, and if not it might easily have been fabricated, as so much else. Its absence implies that serious ancient biographers regarded it as irrelevant to their task. Only when it becomes a central political factor through the dynasties of Imperial Rome does private life enter ancient biography massively with Suetonius. ∗ Automimesis or transference. ‘Every painter paints himself ’, Leonardo da Vinci insisted, referring critically to painters who produce series of unwitting self-portraits: ‘one recognizes the expression and figure of the artist throughout the many figures painted by him’. Ut pictura poesis, literature functions like art: examples of automimesis in modern biographies are legion. The phenomenon is in fact so common that one might argue that
By not even mentioning the names of wives, mothers, and daughters of the biographees, Greek biography seems to carry on classical ideals of respectable women’s anonymity in public life; see Schaps , basing himself on Attic private orations. Ogni dipintore dipinge se, an aphorism often recorded in the Italian Renaissance. See Kemp and Z¨ollner (quotation from Leonardo p. ). For examples and discussion, see Edel , – on ‘Transference’ (a psychoanalytical term) and Clifford , – on ‘The Author’s Involvement’. For the art-historical term ‘automimesis’, see Kemp , –.
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
biographies differ only in the degree to which this happens, or is observable. One of the reasons is evidently that biographers from the start tend to choose figures that resemble themselves (in occupation, temperament, situation in life). Novelists and poets depict great literary figures, politicians trace political careers, women prefer women. A related factor is that the biographer has to rely on introspection to reconstruct the inner life of the subject. Primarily what he or she recognizes from self-experience is likely to be included in the characterization. Sympathy and empathy are key concepts (though there are of course examples of iconoclastic biographies). The most famous instance of automimesis in ancient literature is Plato’s and Xenophon’s different pictures of their common master Socrates; several more will be noted in the course of the present study. ∗ Gaps and the quantitative aspects of biography. Temporal gaps in a biographical narrative may occur because the biographer has failed to find sources for a certain period of the subject’s life. In particular, this is apt to happen with regard to the childhood and adolescence of the future celebrity. To avoid leaving the gap open – creating an ellipsis in narratological terms – the biographer may turn from the private to the public, directing the reader’s attention to the general political or cultural development of the period. Or he or she may elaborate on the physical and social milieu in which the biographee spent the years in question. A device favoured in ancient Lives is to provide a ‘proleptic’ childhood description, giving to the child the specific traits that are to characterize the subject as an adult. An encomiast may be content to state the child’s superiority in all disciplines. A further, more sophisticated method to bridge such a gap is creating typical or ‘emblematic’ scenes, as when Luke represents Jesus in the temple of Jerusalem at the age of twelve.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, in his biographical essay on Leonardo (), ‘biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because – for reasons of their personal emotional life – they have felt a special affection for him from the very first’ (Freud , ). Backscheider , , in constrast, calls it ‘familiar folklore that biographers have an “affinity” for their subjects, may have long “identified” to some extent with them, and “like” them’, yet her examples seem to speak in the other direction. The problem of temporal gaps in the biographical material, and how to bridge them, is discussed by Kendall , –. A modern example is the childhood episode in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet: Com´edien et martyr (), in which ten-year-old Jean Genet is first branded a ‘thief’. But few biographers would, like Sartre, immediately afterwards reveal the technique: ‘That was how it happened, in that or some other way. In all probability, there were offenses and then punishment, solemn oaths and relapses. It does not matter.’ (Quoted from Ellmann , –.) See also below, Ch. ., on typical scenes in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
Now, lack of material is not the only or even most important reason for gaps to occur or threaten in biography. The problem naturally arises owing to the long time span that has to be covered in a Life (few biographees have died as young as Alexander the Great); and it is particularly accentuated in ancient biographies because of the limited textual space of most such compositions. The average for a single Plutarchan Life is just the equivalent of fifty printed pages; only a couple of extant Lives from antiquity (Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, Philostratus’ Apollonius) approach the format of a moderate-size modern biography. Much fabula time has to be covered in little story time. Such quantitative aspects are important, and easy to overlook if one reads about literature, rather than reading the works themselves. In my presentation of the various texts, both such figures (usually printed pages of the original text) and the analytical tables of contents (with chapter numbers) are intended to help in visualizing the textual space. ∗ Titles and names. Book titles are important generic markers. With regard to biography, the matter is, or should be, rather straightforward. In his essay ‘L’illusion biographique’ Pierre Bourdieu elaborates on the apparently simple fact that the personal name of the biographical subject is the basic unifying factor of any biography. It is a non-characterizing name because it is historical, in distinction to the many more or less ‘telling’ names of narrative fiction. If we turn from biography in a non-literary sense, any person’s constructed life story, which is what Bourdieu explores from a social and existential point of view, to the art of biography and the matter of book titles, his observation remains fruitful. The historical name of the biographee is normally used as the title of the biography. It may stand alone or be used in various combinations with some word for ‘Life’ or more specific qualifications. The point is that an unmarked historical name as book title, say ‘Napoleon’, indicates biography. Something must be added to the name for us to expect another genre. What we cannot know, on the other hand, is the actual degree of historicity: it may be a research biography or a biographical novel, or something between these extremes. All this is in principle applicable to ancient biography as well. However, scholars have paid much attention to the kind of ancient book title that begins with a preposition: ‘on’ or ‘about’ (Greek eis, peri; Latin de) + life (bios, vita) + name, or alternatively just preposition + name. It has been maintained that the word bios or vita must appear in the title, with or without a preposition, to make it indicate a Life; furthermore, that
Bourdieu , –.
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
a preposition may anyway reveal some other kind of interest than the biographical. Still, when we can read the works themselves, it appears that such variations in the form of titles are hardly distinctive of a work’s character of ‘biography’ (by whatever definition). Added to this comes the general uncertainty in ancient literary history whether a title transmitted in the medieval manuscripts (or found in some ancient textual reference or encyclopaedia) is really the original one. I shall regard the proper name itself as the all-important distinctive mark and be brief on interpretation of titular varieties. ∗ Some final preliminaries. I spell Greek personal names as they appear in standard reference works like The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD) and may be most easily found on the internet, which mostly means a Latinized (occasionally Anglicized) form. So Nicolaus rather than Nicolaos or Nikolaos, Croesus rather than Kroisos; and Aesop rather than Aisopos. Roman personal names appear in their original form, with a few exceptions, as Pliny for Plinius, Jerome for Hieronymus. Analogous considerations apply to geographical names, though the Modern Greek forms are often preferred. Greek book titles represent a similar problem which cannot be solved consistently. I mostly avoid the conventional Latin or Latinized forms in the main text, so Eikones rather than Imagines and Deipnosophistai rather than Deipnosophistae; exception is made for some titles that have become standard in English, like Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Cyropaedia. When it seems more convenient (and the original title is immediately recognizable), I may prefer the translated form: Life of Alexander (or just Alexander), On the Death of Peregrinus (or just Peregrinus). This also applies to Roman book titles: Lives of the Caesars. In the footnotes, however, references to passages in Greek and Roman works are often given with conventional abbreviations of the Latin titles, as listed for instance in the OCD. When referring (exclusively) to ancient biographers, I freely use the pronouns he/him/his, since all the names we know of biographical writers in antiquity are male. (The closest we get to a female voice in ancient biography is Satyrus in his dialogic Life of Euripides letting one or two of his discussants be women.)
See, for instance, the recent discussion by Mark J. Edwards , –. Titles of Platonic dialogues, such as Phaedo or Meno, are only superficially exceptions to the rule about historical names indicating biography; they are conventional catchwords rather than book titles proper.
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Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient
In the main text, mostly in parenthesis in the translations, Greek words are quoted in strictly transliterated form (hubris, egk¯omion, kharis), either in their lexical form or as they appear in the text in question (according to what seems most natural or clear at each place). The use of Greek font is reserved for quotations in the footnotes. ‘Life’ with a capital L (but without quotation marks or italics) refers to a written Life (bios, vita, biography), while ‘life’ refers to a lived life. I use the term ‘literary biography’ in the sense reserved for it in modern literary criticism, not to denote any particularly ‘literary’ form, but simply meaning the biography of a literary figure, an author. Similarly ‘philosophical biography’ and ‘political biography’ denote the occupation of the biographee, not the character of the work. ‘Historical biography’ is occasionally used synonymously with ‘political’. My English translations from Greek and Latin are usually based on some published translation, yet often modified, sometimes drastically so, to bring out the meaning, style, or nuances that are important for the context; or to conform to an improved original text. To indicate this state of affairs I use standard phrases of the type ‘translation based on’, ‘adapted from’, or ‘modified’. The ‘Further Reading’ section has three main purposes. First, of course, it directs interested readers to places where more is to be found about the topics treated in the book, and where the texts discussed may be read in full. Second, it relieves the footnotes of more general references to standard works and discussions. Third, it is meant to give some impression of what sort of literary topics international research in the field has addressed, and is currently addressing. Of course, it is a subjective selection; and I only mention books and articles that I have seen myself and found of value and interest.
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c h ap t er 1
In the beginning was Xenophon Memoir, encomium, romance
In diesem Sinne ist der ideale, ja der postexistente Sokrates der reale, und der Sokrates samt seiner Xanthippe, den etwa die photographische Kleinkunst zeigen k¨onnte, ist bedeutungslos, ja im h¨oheren Sinne unwirklich. Adolf von Harnack
1.1 glimpses of a prehistory The single most important force for the emergence of Greek biography in the fourth century bc, it has been convincingly argued, was the personal and historical impact of the figure of Socrates, as reconstructed or invented by the Socratic writers. But the one individual writer – the creative mind – to whom Greek biography owes most is no doubt Xenophon of Athens (ca. –ca. bc), who wrote not only a memoir of Socrates, but also a prose encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus and a romantic Life of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great. Each of his three works displays a distinct biographical strategy: the privileged viewpoint at work in the Memorabilia, the novel literary structure of the Agesilaus, and the imaginative mixture of fact and fiction in the Cyropaedia. Xenophon accordingly provides three different literary models for future life-writers to merge and develop. Now, interest in the character, acts, and lifespan of an important individual was of course not unknown in Greek society before the fourth century. Speculation about the identity of Homer, his birthplace, travels, and death, began early, as the many references show that we find scattered in poetry, drama, and early prose. The corresponding legends of Hesiod’s life had a starting-point in first person statements in his own poems, those of Archilochus perhaps also in local tradition on his native island of Paros. Solon and Simonides are further, not so distant, figures who attracted early
The principal argument in Dihle . Similar views were expressed by Leo , and Momigliano , . See further Reichel .
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1.1 Glimpses of a prehistory
biographical attention of various kinds. Legends developed about the lives of Aesop and the Seven Wise Men. The list could easily be prolonged; the only limit to it is our necessarily fragmentary knowledge of the oral period of Greek culture. As Mary Lefkowitz has demonstrated, most of the biographical material concerning the archaic and classical poets that surfaces in the transmitted Lives is based on inferences from their own literary texts. But in our context the important thing is not their historicity but the early biographical interest to which this tradition bears witness, however unhistorical (and gossipy) the assembled facts may be: the lives of the poets get into focus, as distinct from their poetry. It remains a matter of debate, however, whether whole Lives of poets were composed as early as the fifth century; the references in Old Comedy and elsewhere may be aimed at an oral flora of anecdotes rather than written works. This interest in the character and private life of famous people manifests itself in a more personal way in the prose fragments of the versatile poet and dramatist Ion of Chios (ca. –/ bc). His Epidemiai or ‘Visits Abroad’, composed in the s or s, is sometimes referred to as an autobiography; but we have in fact nothing to indicate that Ion’s intention was to tell the story of his own life or that he structured his work in such a manner. What seems to have characterized it, to judge from the fragments, is rather the author’s keen interest in others, in Athenian celebrities whom he claims to have met privately, typically at dinner parties, when they happened to visit Chios or he himself Athens. The book was probably structured as a loose series of portraits, each beginning with the name of the personality and the occasion of the encounter. Ion shows a peculiar talent for describing their character by telling typical anecdotes of their off-stage behaviour. Among the portrayed figures are both politicians, such
On Homer, see Momigliano , –; Lefkowitz , Ch. ; and below, Ch. .. On Hesiod and Archilochus, see Lefkowitz , Ch. and , respectively, and Momigliano , –. On biographical interest generally in the oral period, see Wehrli . West , –, however, argues for the possible existence already in the latter half of the fifth century of a written account of Aesop’s life. See further Ch. . below. It makes more sense to call the work ‘memoirs’, namely, of others; see Misch , –; Strasburger , –; and Meister , –. The title Epidemiai has been variously rendered ‘Visits (Abroad)’, ‘Passing Visits’, ‘Sojourns’, ‘Stopovers’, ‘Stopping-Off Places’, or ‘Dropping In’; see Geddes , . The terminus post quem for the work is the dramatic date of the Sophocles anecdote, ca. ; but since the impression is of a memoir rather than an immediate report, the work may well have been composed in Ion’s last years; see Jacoby in FGrHist iiiB Text, –. This is plausibly suggested by West , ; similarly Dover , –. On the nature of the work, see also Geddes , –. Only one of the larger fragments, that about Sophocles, is explicitly referred to as deriving from the Epidemiai, but the others are likely to have the same source; in addition to Jacoby’s discussion in FGrHist, see Leurini and .
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
as Cimon and Pericles, and poets, notably Sophocles. The passage about his visit to Chios is the only literal quotation we have of Ion’s prose in his original Ionian dialect; we owe it to Athenaeus in his Deipnosophistai or ‘Learned Banqueters’ (.e–d): I met the poet Sophocles on Chios when he was sailing to Lesbos as a general; he was playful (paidi¯od¯es) and clever (dexios) when he was drinking wine. Hermesilaus, who was an old friend of his and the consul (proxenos) of Athens, gave a feast in his honour. When the slave-boy who was pouring the wine as he stood by the fire, Sophocles obviously and asked him, ‘Do you want me to enjoy my drink?’ When the boy said that he did, he continued, ‘Then hand me the cup nice and slow, and take it back nice and slow too.’ When the boy blushed even more, Sophocles said to the man who was sharing his couch, ‘Phrynichus got it exactly right when he said in his poetry: “The light of love glows on his purple cheeks.”’ The fellow from Eretria, who was a schoolmaster, responded, ‘You’re skilled when it comes to poetry, Sophocles; but Phrynichus was still wrong to refer to a good-looking boy’s cheeks as purple. Because if an artist covered this boy’s jaws with purple paint, he wouldn’t be handsome any longer – and you certainly shouldn’t compare something that’s beautiful with something that doesn’t seem to be.’ Sophocles laughed at the Eretrian and said, ‘Well, my friend, then you don’t like the following passage from Simonides either, although the Greeks generally consider it extremely well-expressed: “A girl sending forth words from her purple mouth.” Nor do you like the poet’, he added, ‘who called Apollo “golden-haired”; because if an artist made the god’s hair golden rather than black, the painting would not be as good. Nor him who used the word “rosy-fingered”, because if someone dipped his fingers in rose-coloured pigment, he would produce the hands of a purple-dyer, not of a beautiful woman.’ Everyone laughed and the Eretrian looked embarrassed by the scolding; but Sophocles began talking to the boy again. The boy was trying to get a bit of straw out of the cup with his little finger, and Sophocles asked if he saw the straw. When he said that he did, Sophocles said, ‘All right, then – blow it off, so your finger doesn’t get wet!’ But when the boy moved his face toward the cup, Sophocles brought the cup closer to his own mouth, so that his head would be closer to the boy’s head. And when the boy was very close to him, Sophocles grabbed him and kissed him. Everybody applauded, and laughed and shouted that he had done a nice job of luring the boy towards him, and he said, ‘I’m practising my strategy,
Text according to Leurini , fr. . There are critical editions in TrGF Vol. (Soph. T Radt) and FGrHist F as well, and a translation by Lucas , –. My translation is based on S. Douglas Olson in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, Vol. , – (LCL). The passage is analysed in detail, and its importance stressed, by Bruns , –. See also Jacoby’s discussion in FGrHist iiiB Text () –, and Ford , –. The text is obviously corrupt, and a lacuna has been suspected. I adopt von Blumenthal’s text (though preferring the Ionic form of the participle): . . . pa±v , wn dlov §n . . . (Blumenthal , –).
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1.1 Glimpses of a prehistory
gentlemen; because Pericles claimed that I can write poetry, but I don’t know how to be a general. So then – didn’t my stratagem work out the way I wanted it to?’ He was full of such clever words and acts whenever he was at a party. As for politics, on the other hand, he was neither skilled (sophos) nor efficient (rhekt¯erios), but just like any one of the worthy Athenians.
Ion’s vivid picture of Sophocles in the sympotic mood indeed takes us a long way from any pseudo-biographical information rooted in passages of a poet’s works or in pure literary speculation. Its source is obviously a contemporary’s personal glimpses of the great man; ‘no one would invent such a thing’, as Wolfgang Schadewaldt remarks. This is not to say that what is told must be historically true in every detail, or that Ion necessarily witnessed the scene himself. What he actually says (in Athenaeus’ excerpt, at least) is that he met Sophocles on Chios, and that the tragedian took part in a dinner party with a friend when this episode took place. Ion himself plays no part in the story, and notably there is no explicit ‘we’ in the description of the reactions of the other guests. The story serves to characterize Sophocles as an amusing and humorous man in private company, in implied contrast to his austere work and civic position. It does so scenically, showing him as a lover of beauty and young boys and with an ironic distance from his own official persona. It also, in the philological anecdote interwoven with the erotic one, shows him involved in a light-hearted discussion with a pedantic schoolmaster on the poetic use of colour epithets. In addition to this mimetic way of characterization, we are, at beginning and end, presented with Ion’s own summing up of the character traits that the episode is meant to illustrate: when drinking wine, Sophocles becomes paidi¯od¯es – ‘playful’, but no doubt also a pun on pais, ‘boy’: ‘a lover of boys’ – and dexios, ‘clever’ (used both before and after the scene). Finally, following up Sophocles’ own self-ironical remark about his ‘strategic’ faculties, Ion comments that in politics the poet was neither sophos (‘skilled’) nor rhekt¯erios (‘efficient’, ‘a doer’), the very qualities he was just shown to possess in seducing the slave-boy. Both these modes of describing a character, the scenic and the authorial, are present in other fragments of Ion as well, although our Sophocles piece is the only one which shows his technique in full: an anecdote with a moral attached. In the case of Cimon only the anecdote is extant, in the case of Pericles only the summing up of his character traits. There also survives a glimpse of Ion’s description of the physical appearance of his object in Plutarch’s Cimon (.): ‘His physical presence was imposing, too,
Schadewaldt , .
Fr. * and * Leurini = FGrHist F and F.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
. . . for he was tall (megas) with a thick and curly head of hair.’ This is, as Felix Jacoby notes, an early instance of a type of description that is otherwise not to be found before the fourth century and was then still in its beginnings. Several important tools for biographical writing were already in Ion’s hands. Whether he was alone as a writer of biographical snapshots of this kind, or at least the first, is difficult to tell. Stesimbrotus of Thasus is a possible counterpart to Ion, provided it is true that his lost treatise ‘On Themistocles, Thucydides and Pericles’, roughly contemporary with the Epidemiai, was less concerned with slandering the three Athenian generals and statesmen on political grounds than with showing their true characters by means of anecdotes. However that may be, no scenic portrayal is extant among the fragments. What seems typical of Ion is precisely that his portraits of politicians like Cimon and Pericles intend to depict their human qualities and the personal impression they made on other people. If Thucydides shows Pericles as the great ideologist and speaker, Ion is ready to supply the air of arrogance and self-sufficiency which was also part of his public appearance. The fragments of Ion of Chios are interesting in our context, in the first place, for showing what was already possible of biographically orientated writing at such an early stage of Greek literary prose. We can only speculate about the role – and form – of similarly characterizing anecdotes of important men in contemporary and earlier oral transmission. Yet, setting them down in the guise of personal recollections in artistic prose writing, as Ion did, means an important step towards what we are finding some thirty or forty years later in Xenophon and Plato. That they were influenced by him is a reasonable guess, though hard evidence in the form of references by name is lacking. The literary structure of parts of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, with series of anecdotes like pearls on a string, may go back to Ion; so
Fr. * Leurini = FGrHist F: §n d kaª tn «dan oÉ mempt»v . . . ll mgav, oÎlh kaª poll¦ tricª komän tn kefaln. Trans. Scott-Kilvert . FGrHist iiiB Text, (on F); cf. also Jacoby’s remarks on Ion as an early ‘biographer’: on F and on F. See also Stuart , , ; Strasburger , . FGrHist F–; F–. Stesimbrotus’ work has been variously described as a political pamphlet, a political biography, or having a philosophical-biographical intent. See Schachermeyr , –; Dihle , –; Meister ; Strasburger , –; Carawan , –; Tsakmakis ; J. Engels in Bollans´ee et al. , (‘a precursor of fully developed Greek biography’); Pelling , . Fr. * Leurini = FGrHist F, quoted in Plut. Per. .–. See Jacoby , n. and FGrHist iiiB Text, , comparing with Thuc. ..–, and Pelling , –. Hirzel :i, –, speaks of the Epidemiai as ‘Vorbild aller sp¨ateren Werke dieser Art’, of Ion as ‘Begr¨under der Memoirenliteratur’, and gets Jacoby’s cautious assent in FGrHist iiiB Noten, – (n. ). Jacoby states that ‘die kenntnis I.s bei den Sokratikern (auch Platon . . . ) vorausgesetzt
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1.1 Glimpses of a prehistory
may the technique of dialogue in a sympotic setting, although in that case the form had to be more drastically developed, at least to arrive at Plato’s mastery. There also seem to have existed direct links between Ion’s writings and the biographical literature of later dates. Aristoxenus, in writing about Socrates’ relationship to the natural philosopher Archelaus, probably drew on Ion, who reports that Socrates as a young man accompanied Archelaus to Samos; and Plutarch, in his lives of Cimon and Pericles, has several quotations from Ion, one of them fairly extensive. This testifies not only to Ion’s value as a primary source for fifth-century biographical material, but presumably also to Plutarch’s appreciation of his early forerunner’s biographical method, so close to his own professed ideal: ‘often a little matter like a saying or a joke conveys a man’s character more than battles where thousands fall’. Ion’s depiction of Sophocles is the earliest biographical text of some extent that happens to have survived, thanks to Athenaeus’ interest in the erotic preferences of the Attic tragic poets. But for that reason to proclaim his Epidemiai the first biographical work in Greek literature would be unwise. There have been several candidates for that distinction, depending on what scholars have thought constitutive for ‘biography’ and what they have conjectured to be the true nature of various works known to us only through brief references in later literature. Friedrich Leo regarded Thucydides’ description of Themistocles’ last years, with its appended retrospect on the Athenian statesman’s intellectual gifts (.–), as the first ‘genuinely biographical account’ in Greek literature. Helene Homeyer, in turn, called attention to Herodotus and his descriptions of the lives of Cyrus (.–, –, –) and Cambyses (.–), which, though being part of a greater whole, display some of the characteristics of later political biography: Herodotus, to Homeyer, is the Father of Biography as well as History. Arnaldo Momigliano, looking for self-contained works,
werden darf’, but only points to Plato, Sophistes cd as a possible reference to Ion (similarly Jacoby , ). For Isocrates, there is firmer evidence (FGrHist iiiB b, with Jacoby’s comments in iiiB Text, , –). See Hirzel : i, –; Leo , , ; and, in particular, Dover , –. It should be noted that Ion’s work is alternatively referred to as Hypomn¯emata (T Leurini, T Jacoby), and that Plutarch (Cim. .) says: ¾ dì ï Iwn pomnhmoneÅei . . . ; compare the Greek title of Xenophon’s memoir, Apomn¯emoneumata. On the titles, see further Leurini , –. Aristoxenus fr. Wehrli; Ion fr. Leurini = FGrHist F. Plutarch, Cim. ., .–, .– and Per. ., .; Ion fr. *–*, *–* Leurini = FGrHist F–. On Plutarch’s use of Ion, see now Pelling . Leo , –; see also Stuart , –. Plut. Alex. ., see below, Ch. .. Homeyer , –; see also – on Herodotus’ life of Miltiades (.–, –, –).
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
found ‘The Story of (Ta kata) the Tyrant Heraclides of Mylasa’ by Scylax of Caryanda (ca. bc) likely to be the earliest political biography known to us, if only through a late and bare reference in the Byzantine lexicon Suda. Klaus Meister stated emphatically that Stesimbrotus’ work on three Athenian statesmen (see above) is the first biography in Greece ‘that we can definitely say existed and know what it was about’. Tilman Krischer made a case for Herodotus’ uncle, Panyassis of Halicarnassus, and his Heraclea, presumably (in Franz Stoessl’s term) an ‘epic biography’ of Heracles with the unity of character (ethos) replacing the old epic ideal, the unity of action. Italo Gallo, finally, found that the first attested Greek biography must be what the Christian apologist Tatian (Oratio ad Graecos .) refers to as an investigation of Homer’s ‘poetry, family (genos) and date’ undertaken by Theagenes of Rhegium – we have then passed the year bc on our forage backwards in time. Others have produced other candidates. For lack of surviving texts, even of fragments of some extent, such suggestions must remain hypothetical. The claims concerning Herodotus and Thucydides are, of course, of a different nature, since the texts are available for everyone to read. Herodotus does indeed follow the lives of Cyrus the Great and Cambyses from childhood to death; but is a biographical interest really what motivates him? Helene Homeyer, in effect undermining her own claim, rightly answers no. Some of the ingredients of later biography are present (ancestors, appearance, character traits, early feats, etc.), but they are integrated parts of an historical narrative and justified by its topic, the succession of power in an hereditary system; Herodotus shows no similar interest in the preor post-political life of the Greek leaders. Thucydides on Themistocles is different, digressing from the main narrative to follow the deposed politician in the vicissitudes of his last years. The account of his death and burial as well as the retrospective evaluation of his political talents preceding it (..) are genuine sherds of a biographical concept. But to find a complete ‘biographical epilogue’ within an historical discourse, displaying an interest in the compass and characteristics of an individual’s whole life, we have to move into the following century. Xenophon’s Anabasis, his memoirs of the Persian expedition and its aftermath, probably written in the middle or late s, interrupts the
FGrHist ivA T. Meister , ; similarly, before him, Stuart , –. For other views of the nature of this work, see above n. . Gallo = , –. Krischer , –. The term is from Leo , . Homeyer , .
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1.1 Glimpses of a prehistory
narrative after Cyrus the Younger has died on the battlefield (.) and again after three allied Greek generals have been executed (.) to give retrospects of their lives. That of Cyrus is the most detailed one (more than four printed pages). After a general statement of his exceptional qualities, according to those who knew him personally, to become a king and a ruler (basilik¯otatos te kai arkhein axi¯otatos), the description proper starts from his childhood (..–): In his early life, when he was still a child and brought up with his brother and the other boys, he was regarded as the best (kratistos) of them all at everything. All the sons of Persian noblemen are brought up at court, and there a child can pick up many lessons in decent behaviour (s¯ophrosyn¯e) while having no chance of hearing or seeing anything bad (aiskhron). The boys watch and hear some men being honoured by the King and others being dismissed in disgrace, and so from their childhood they learn how to rule and how to be ruled. Here Cyrus was considered, first, to be the most respectful (aid¯emonestatos) of his contemporaries and more willing even than his inferiors in rank to listen to his elders; second, he was the one who loved horses most (philhippotatos) and handled them best (arista). In the military skills of archery and javelin-throwing as well they judged him to be most eager to learn (philomathestatos) and most diligent to practise them (melet¯erotatos). When he reached the appropriate age, he was the one who loved hunting most (philoth¯erotatos) and was most ready to take risks (philokindynotatos) in his encounters with wild animals. Once a she-bear charged at him and he, showing no fear, got to grips with the animal and was pulled off his horse. He was wounded – that is how he got his scars – but he killed the animal in the end, and he made the first man who came to help him a general object of envy.
Several of the tricks of the biographical trade are discernible. Little is known to the author, of course, about his object’s childhood, so he expands on a general (idealized) picture of the upbringing of Persian noblemen, simply making Cyrus ‘the best’ in all respects (ten superlatives in twenty lines), suitably for his princely position. The biographer’s personal predilections shine forth in the characterization of his hero (decent, docile, good with horses). Only one concrete episode is told, the bear-hunt, highlighting the scars still visible on his body as the documental proof of young Cyrus’ exceptional boldness – a character trait remaining with Cyrus, like the scars,
The biographical epilogues are analysed in Bruns , –; Leo , –; Dihle , –; and see most recently Reichel . The literary genre of the Anabasis itself is discussed by Reichel b. While earlier research has defined it as ‘war memoirs’, ‘war diary’, ‘travelogue’, or a variety of historiography (–), Reichel highlights its apologetical and self-assertive features. He refrains, however, from calling the work an autobiography because of the limited time span, the third person narrator, and the fact that Xenophon himself is the protagonist only in Books –. My translation is based jointly on Warner (PC) and Waterfield (OWC), but adjusted to bring out the encomiastic features more clearly.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
to his last fatal attack on his brother Artaxerxes at Cunaxa. Childhood is present because it belongs to a life, not because there is a story to tell, as there is in Herodotus’ narrative of Cyrus the Great being exposed, saved, recognized, and reinstated. When the account goes on to Cyrus’ manhood (..–), the structuring principle is not his career as a satrap or the wars he fought, but the enumeration and demonstration of all his kingly virtues. The most important event of his short life, his march against the Great King, need not be told since it has been the topic of the main narrative. What begins as potential biography thus turns into a panegyrical portrait of his personality. Similarly, the shorter biographical epilogues on the executed Greek generals in Anabasis . concentrate on their character traits, their actions being brought in as illustration and proof. But while the account of Cyrus is entirely laudatory, the characters of the three generals are looked upon with much less admiring eyes: as for Clearchus (..–) and Proxenus (..–), their good traits are weighed against the bad ones to achieve remarkably nuanced pictures, while Menon (..–) is described as the incarnation of all ethical defects. Therefore, it is not enough to point to the tradition of grave epigrams and funerary speeches to situate Xenophon’s biographical epilogues historically, as Friedrich Leo does. Nor do the formal similarities with the panegyrical pattern of Isocrates’ Evagoras and Xenophon’s own Agesilaus (see below), to which Ivo Bruns points, provide a sufficient literary context. To give a balanced or even negative description of the character of the deceased is something different in nature from the necessarily positive selection and emphasis of a funeral speech or literary encomium; in those genres, darker traits of personality may only occur as rhetorical means to highlight the positive ones. Xenophon, by contrast, uses the typological locus of the obituary for his own purposes, unhindered by conventions. In the case of Cyrus, he chooses to cultivate an attitude of unconditional admiration, constructing what is in effect a miniature mirror for princes, anticipating his own magnum opus on Cyrus the Great. Of the others, he presents a more mixed picture, based on his personal experiences of them in their joint military enterprise. The ethical aspects are in focus, a significant step
In Otto Lendle’s precise wording: ‘Es handelt sich dabei nicht um eine Kurzbiographie, sondern um ein auf die F¨uhrungsqualit¨aten des Kyros ausgerichtetes Pers¨onlichkeitsbild’ (Lendle , ). Leo , –, who also (followed by Momigliano , ) adduces Euripides’ poetic adaptation of the funeral speech in Supplices – (further analysed by Dihle , –). See too the detailed analysis in Lendle , –, with the comments of Erbse . Bruns , ; see also Lendle , .
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1.2 Socrates in the Socratic mirror: Apology, Phaedo, Memorabilia
away from Thucydides’ searchlight on Themistocles’ intellectual faculties and in the direction of the Plutarchan type of biography. The didactic purpose of these epilogues, summing up and articulating characteristics which have partly been shown through action in the preceding narrative, is evident. The historian has a second agenda here which will take the upper hand in later works of his, in particular, the Agesilaus and the Cyropaedia. 1.2 socrates in the socratic mirror: apology, phaedo, memorabilia The earliest and most accomplished literary work to embody in its entirety the ‘biographical element’, Albrecht Dihle suggests, is Plato’s Apology of Socrates. Biography to Dihle is ‘the portrayal of a person through the description of his/her life understood as a whole’. Life and achievement are inseparable; Socrates’ life embodies his individual Sittlichkeit, ‘morality’. Yet the Apology is not structured as a biographical narrative, but as a defence speech, or rather a series of three separate such speeches. The most distinctive trait of most biographies, a chronological arrangement of some sort, is missing. The concrete biographical – or shall we say pseudoautobiographical – details that occur are scattered all over the text without regard to their actual sequence in time: Socrates is now seventy and for the first time summoned to court (d); he has already for many years been subjected to slander, culminating in Aristophanes’ attack (b, a); Chaerephon, a friend of his from his youth, once visited Delphi to ask the oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates (a); he has participated in three military campaigns (e); as the magistrate in charge, prytanis, he opposed the collective condemnation of the generals after the battle at Arginusae (b–c) and later he similarly defied the Thirty (c–d); he was born ‘of human parents’, has relatives and ‘three sons, one nearly grown up, and two still children’ (d); and so on. Still, the speech is biographical in the sense that its prime intention is to transmit Plato’s picture of Socrates’ personality by displaying and interpreting his life seen as an ethical unity. That unity is more important to the
Dihle , . Dihle , . Momigliano , , argues against Dihle’s claims of priority, but does not deny the overall importance of the Socratics for biography (see also –, –). For criticism of Dihle’s concept, see also Arrighetti , , and Gallo , –. After Dihle , –, who gives a more complete list. Quotations: trans. H. N. Fowler (LCL). For ‘Socratic personalia in the Platonic corpus’ generally, see Vlastos , –. See Dihle , .
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
author than chronological succession. While the outer facts are comparatively few and scattered, the inner life is constantly in focus, through the simple expedient of making Socrates himself the speaker. Characterization resides both in what is said (about motives, feelings, thoughts, acts, the reactions of others) and in how it is said. The retrospective point of view, constitutive of biography, is present in a natural way: the Apology is conceived as the defence of a whole life, and the reader knows that this life will actually be finished soon after. Anecdotal illustration in scenic form occurs within the narrative, as in the encounter with Callias, who had bought such excellent teaching for his two sons (a–c); and once the monologue is interrupted for an extended exchange with one of the accusers (–), serving as an additional demonstration of Socrates’ method and his ironic superiority. The man who comes to life in this way is not a poet or general or politician, but one who attracts biographical attention purely through his inner merits. It is Socrates’ personality as such, and the intellectual and ethical ideal he incarnates, that are reconstructed by Plato when he shows and relates illustrative facts (or factoids) of his life. This consistent concentration on the living individual, with all its human traits, as opposed to any feats or monuments subsisting separately from it, may be regarded as the real start for bio-graphy, life-writing, after the hundred years of hesitant prehistory that our sources permit us to divine or discern. The individual is in focus, and the Life is the mode to convey its essence in an articulated form. The Apology then is a forceful evocation of Socrates’ life as filtered through young Plato’s mind. But this is just one of the numerous Socratic works written and circulated in the first decades of the fourth century. It is rather through the accumulated sum of such works than through any single one, however masterly in conception, that Socrates’ charismatic personality makes its impact – and that the claim can be made that this is the true beginning of biography in Greek literature. The Apology as a literary construct seems to have had no influence on the nascent genre. To remain with Plato, such influence will rather have emanated from his mimetic portrayal of Socrates in action in many of his dialogues: Socrates walking, discussing, eating, drinking, doing all the everyday things, and at the same time revealing his ethos. In addition, Plato offers little pieces of characterization through other people, culminating in Alcibiades’ detailed eulogy of Socrates in the Symposium (a–b), which includes vivid
For an attempt to trace the emancipation of the individual in Greek society of this period (starring Alcibiades) and connect it with the emergence of biography, see Dihle , –.
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1.2 Socrates in the Socratic mirror: Apology, Phaedo, Memorabilia
snapshots from their early encounters to demonstrate his master’s selfcontrol and endurance. ‘It was the device of an inspired biographer’, Duane Reed Stuart remarks, ‘to show Socrates as he appeared to the eyes of the unregenerate Alcibiades.’ We may leave the historicity of Plato’s Socrates outside the discussion at this point, and also to what extent Socrates is or gradually becomes the mouthpiece of Plato’s own thought. The historical Socrates is unimportant, as Adolf von Harnack reminds us, in comparison with the Socrates of the spiritual tradition; and that figure of Socrates was shaped in these Socratic writings. Gregory Vlastos distinguishes between two main Socrateses in Plato, the moral philosopher of the early dialogues (to which the Apology belongs) and the ‘moral philosopher and metaphysician and epistemologist and philosopher of science and philosopher of language and philosopher of religion and philosopher of education and philosopher of art’ of the middleperiod dialogues (to which the Phaedo belongs); but it is Socrates the philosopher that undergoes these metamorphoses, while Socrates the man remains fully recognizable throughout. In our context, it is of particular interest to study the kind of description of Socrates that through Plato’s mimetic mastery served to widen the potentials and aspirations of future biography. One example will have to suffice. Socrates’ childhood is missing in the Apology, and so is, for obvious reasons, his death. But Plato compensates for the latter absence by ending his Phaedo, which describes Socrates’ conversations in prison on the day of his execution, with a moving and memorable depiction of his last hour and death. Socrates has taken his bath and said farewell to his three sons and the women of his household, telling them to leave. The sun is now setting and Socrates orders the poison to be brought in. He asks the man who brings the cup, ‘What must one do?’ (Phaedo –): ‘Simply drink it,’ he said, ‘and walk about till a heaviness comes over your legs; then lie down, and it will act of itself.’ And with this he held out the cup to Socrates.
Stuart , . Compare the epigraph of this chapter from Harnack , . Momigliano , –, as a professional historian, expresses his exasperation over the bewildering blend of truth and fiction in Socratic biography; an historian of philosophy like Guthrie , takes more easily the prospect of never arriving at the historical Socrates. For full discussion, see Vlastos . Vlastos , . Text: J. C. G. Strachan in Duke et al. (OCT), trans. Gallop (OWC), with some modification, in particular of the verbs in e–a, following Rowe , : the terminology used by Plato shows that the man who administers the poison is ready to cope with more violent symptoms than those he himself has mentioned, and which actually occur.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
He took it perfectly calmly (mala hile¯os), Echecrates, without a tremor, or any change of colour or countenance; but looking up at the man, and fixing him with a mischievous look (taur¯edon), he said: ‘What do you say to pouring someone a libation from this drink? Is it allowed or not?’ ‘We only prepare as much as we judge the proper dose, Socrates,’ he said. ‘I understand,’ he said; ‘but at least one may pray to the gods, and so one should, that the removal from this world to the next will be a happy one; that is my own prayer: so may it be.’ With these words he pressed the cup to his lips, and drank it off with good humour and without the least distaste (mala eukher¯os kai eukol¯os). Till then most of us had been fairly well able to restrain our tears; but when we saw he was drinking, that he’d actually drunk it, we could do so no longer. In my own case, the tears came pouring out in spite of myself, so that I covered my face and wept for myself – not for him, no, but for my own misfortune in being deprived of such a man for a companion. Even before me, Crito had moved away, when he was unable to restrain his tears. And Apollodorus, who even earlier had been continuously in tears, now burst forth into such a storm of weeping and grieving, that he made everyone present break down except Socrates himself. But Socrates said: ‘What a way to behave, my strange friends! Why, it was mainly for that reason that I sent the women away, so that they shouldn’t make this sort of trouble; in fact, I’ve heard one should die in silence. Come now, calm yourselves and have strength.’ When we heard this, we were ashamed and checked our tears. He walked about, and when he said that his legs felt heavy he lay down on his back – as the man told him – and then the man, this one who’d given him the poison, laid hold of him, and after an interval examined his feet and legs; he then pinched his foot hard and asked if he could feel it, and Socrates said not. After this, in turn, he squeezed his shins; and moving upwards in this way, he showed us that he was becoming cold and numb. He himself kept hold of him, and said that when the coldness reached the heart, he would be gone. By this time the coldness was somewhere in the region of his abdomen, when he uncovered his face – it had been covered up – and spoke; and this was in fact his last utterance: ‘Crito,’ he said ‘we owe a cock to Asclepius: please pay the debt, and don’t neglect it.’ ‘It shall be done,’ said Crito; ‘have you anything else to say?’ To this question he made no answer, but after a short interval he stirred, and when the man uncovered him his eyes were fixed; when he saw this, Crito closed his mouth and his eyes. And that, Echecrates, was the end of our companion, a man who, among those of his time we knew, was – so we should say – the best, the wisest (phronim¯otatos) too, and the most just.
This is Phaedo’s eyewitness report (Plato himself was not present, b), marked as authentic in the exchange between him and Echecrates at the beginning of the dialogue: ‘I was there myself’ (a). The subject of the whole dialogue is death and the immortal soul; and, as usual with Plato,
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1.2 Socrates in the Socratic mirror: Apology, Phaedo, Memorabilia
the biographical mode that we see so brilliantly employed in this final scene is a means of embodying the message. Socrates’ own calm and confidence are contrasted with Crito’s nervous concern and the various emotional reactions to death and deprivation among the friends present. The physical process itself is reported in a clinical fashion, sanctioned by Socrates’ own attitude to it. It appears, however, that we are presented with a significant selection of symptoms: Socrates is not, like other victims of hemlock poisoning, affected by nausea, vomiting, spasms, or convulsions. Plato’s whole emphasis is on the numbness that gradually spreads from the feet to the heart. In this way he wants to give a physical expression – an image – of the process of ‘purification of the psyche from the body’, as Christopher Gill has suggested. This purification is a conspicuous tenet of the dialogue’s philosophical argument (a, etc.); here, in the biographical ending, it is shown in a visual form. Furthermore, Socrates’ concern in his last minutes for the traditional religious practices (libation, prayer, sacrifice) is conveyed in direct speech, but not commented on – an ironic grimace to those who had accused him of atheism, and another instance of Plato’s implicit mode of demonstration. Not only is the death of Socrates in Plato’s version an illustrative example of the philosopher’s skills in scenic characterization, but this scene itself was to have an historical impact. In Hellenistic and Roman times it became a model for the philosophical attitude to death; and with the execution of Socrates seen as a prefiguration of the crucifixion, it is natural that it also influenced literary descriptions of the death of Christian saints. Such influence can sometimes be traced directly from the Phaedo, but no doubt it was usually transmitted indirectly as an ethic or hagiographic topos. So, while Phaedo is not a biography – it covers only the last day of Socrates’ life – it provides the first close description of a person’s death in private, among friends and disciples, rather than on the battlefield. It was a description that could easily be adapted and incorporated into full biographical accounts, all the more because it in an exemplary manner encapsulates the main characteristics of the person’s life. We saw how Plato at the end of the Phaedo demonstrated Socrates’ piety and attitude to traditional religion without resorting to authorial comment. Xenophon, at the beginning of his Memorabilia or ‘Memoirs of Socrates’, provides a striking contrast. He first refers explicitly to the groundless accusations against Socrates for disregarding the gods recognized by the state, and adds as proof: ‘Everyone could see that he (phaneros ¯en . . . ) sacrificed regularly at home and also at the public altars of the state’
Gill ; quotation p. .
Greek title %pomnhmoneÅmata Swkrtouv.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
(..). This distinction between Plato showing and Xenophon telling (or, to be fair, Xenophon telling and showing), between subtle implicitness and open didacticism, is typical of their different ways of depicting their common master. Their contrasting rhetorical strategies are part of the greater complex, the fundamental difference between the two figures of Socrates that come to life in their respective writings (or three figures, if we count two main ones in Plato alone, see above) – what is sometimes referred to as ‘the Socratic problem’. To a certain extent, it is obvious that we have to do with what in biographical studies is called ‘transference’ or ‘automimesis’: a biographer, like a portrait painter, tends to give his subject some of his own traits (see above, Prolegomena). The difference has often been so explained, with Xenophon’s as the inferior representation of the master. An extreme example is Bertrand Russell’s characterization of Xenophon as ‘a military man, not very liberally endowed with brains, and on the whole conventional in his outlook’. Such a man cannot of course be expected to present a reliable picture of Socrates: ‘A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.’ Now, the evaluation of Xenophon’s talents and achievement has changed drastically in recent decades, and his Socrates figure has been analysed with more subtlety and sympathy. While it is obvious that he and Plato have appreciated or ‘understood’ different parts of Socrates’ teaching, it is equally relevant to ask what purpose each of them pursued in his writings. That Plato has used Socrates to propound his own philosophy in his dialogues has been obvious to all; but it is only more recently that Xenophon too has been allowed to have respectable aims with his Socratic works, aims that have decisively influenced both form and contents. These aims, as has been argued recently by Robin Waterfield, may be summed up in the term ‘popularization’. Waterfield does not deny that Xenophon’s personal concerns also play an important role, as when we find
I quote Xenophon’s Socratica according to the text of Marchant (OCT) and the translation of Tredennick and Waterfield (PC), sometimes modified. For a balanced view of its philosophical aspects, see Guthrie , –; for a penetrating (though partly controversial) study, Vlastos , especially Chs. and . See further the critical survey in Waterfield , –. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London ), –, quoted from Waterfield , . Waterfield ; quotations below from pp. –, ‘Xenophon’s Mission’. See also Mueller-Goldingen , –, who similarly wants to show that the Memorabilia ‘einen ernstzunehmenden Versuch darstellten, ein eigenst¨andiges Sokratesbild zu entwerfen’ ().
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1.2 Socrates in the Socratic mirror: Apology, Phaedo, Memorabilia
in his works Socrates ‘discussing estate-management, the benefits of hunting, generalship, horsemanship, and so on’; but the main reason for Xenophon’s choice of topics and style is his conviction that ethics is the most useful part of Socrates’ teaching and that it needs to be expressed in clear terms to reach as wide an audience as possible, in order to combat the moral decline that Xenophon sees in contemporary society. Xenophon, according to Waterfield, has no use for Plato’s ‘ironic and opaque Socrates’; his mission is, while defending Socrates’ memory, ‘to defend traditional morality in an easily accessible way’. The didactic telling-and-showing technique that we encountered right at the beginning of the Memorabilia is no doubt part of this programme. The effect of such structural elements will emerge in the following reading of the work as biography. The Memorabilia is yet another of the texts that has been proclaimed the ‘first’ of the genre: ‘We meet first with deliberate biography in Xenophon’s memoirs of Socrates, a work of epoch-making value’, said Edmund Gosse in the classic eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. As in Plato’s Apology, there is no birth-to-death sequence here. It is the apologetic message that decides its literary structure from the start. In the ‘Defence’ part proper (.–), the accusations raised against Socrates are quoted and refuted by reference to various episodes in the philosopher’s life. The favoured procedure, as we have already seen, is first to state, in the abstract, how Socrates ‘was’ (or was not), and then to say how this was evident from his usual behaviour (using the durative-iterative tense, repeated ‘always’ and ‘often’, much indirect speech). References to concrete incidents (as the Arginusae affair, ..) are rare. A couple of individual scenes, however, liven up the narrative: Socrates summoned to interrogation with two of the Thirty tyrants, Critias and Charicles (..–), and young Alcibiades discussing the nature of law with his guardian Pericles (..–). Since Critias and Alcibiades were among the youths allegedly ‘corrupted’ by Socrates, these scenes also belong to Xenophon’s case for the defence. The historical episodes alluded to are not part of any chronological sequence: they took place in the years , , and before , respectively. The ‘Recollection’ part of the work (.–.), by far the larger one ( pages of a total of ), continues to have an apologetic tendency, but shifts
Gosse , . Gigon , disagrees: ‘Einen Bios des Sokrates erhalten wir nicht, nur isolierte, letzlich anekdotische Einzelheiten, die vom geschichtlichen Augenblick grunds¨atzlich abl¨osbar sind.’ On the structure of Mem., see Erbse and Breitenbach , –. The distinction between a ‘Schutzschrift’ (.–) and an ‘apomnemoneumatic’ part (.–.) is a commonplace in modern scholarship on the Mem.; Erbse , while accepting the distinction, argues for the organic unity of the whole as an apologetic treatise. See also Gray , –.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
from defensive to offensive strategy. Now, Xenophon announces, will be demonstrated what benefit, rather than damage, Socrates’ associates might derive from his example as well as his conversations – ‘as much as I can recall (diamn¯emoneus¯o)’, he adds (..). The concept ‘benefit’, o¯pheleia (sometimes expressed in other words), will play a role as a leitmotif in the whole work. There is a shift to a different literary form as well: that of the ‘memoir’, which we have already seen Ion of Chios using. Xenophon himself is in the narrative centre, at least formally, narrating what he ‘recalls’, presumably because he has watched and listened to it himself. But this witness role of his is only very seldom stated explicitly. A couple of times he starts the report by saying, ‘I heard him . . . ’ (..; ..), and there is one sole more emphatic instance of authentication: ‘I was present (paregenom¯en) when . . . ’ (..). Like Ion, he never interrupts the following dialogue by hinting at his own presence among the audience. Written sources, like earlier Socratic writings, are not invoked; that might have risked spoiling the impression of immediacy. An oral source is referred to once: ‘I shall relate also what I heard about him from Hermogenes the son of Hipponicus’ (..), and presumably the same is more vaguely implied by the formula, ‘I know (oida) that . . . ’ (e.g., ..). But that is all; Xenophon does not show the biographer’s instinct to verify his account. The only time he reports a conversation in which he himself actively participated (..–), he even refers to himself in the third person, as ‘Xenophon’ (as all along in the Anabasis), and does nothing to promote his young self. The whole is a rather loose collection of scenes and descriptions within a framework of authorial comment, mostly consisting of short transitional formulae, announcements of topics, or summings-up. In fact, as in the Defence part, very little of an historical-biographical nature is told. There are two notable exceptions to the rule, however: Socrates exercising his influence on Glaucon because of his friendship with his uncle Charmides and his brother Plato (..) and his repeated interventions in public matters because of his respect for the law (..–). The ‘scenes’ themselves are remarkably bare, just the words exchanged between Socrates and his current interlocutor, without the small details of a concrete setting that we find in
Occurrences listed in Breitenbach , ; see also Erbse , with n. . On the narrative technique (narrators, narratees, authentication, etc.), see Gray a, –. In the Defence part, at .., there is also an instance of ‘I heard’, but in the negative as typical of that part: ‘I never heard Socrates do this myself . . . ’; of course it still functions as a witness’s authentication. For interpretation of his role in this scene, see Gray , – and a, .
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1.2 Socrates in the Socratic mirror: Apology, Phaedo, Memorabilia Plato or the dramatic context that Xenophon himself supplies for similar scenes in his historical works. Yet what the Memorabilia achieves, if only additively, is the conveying to its readers of a consistent, pregnant picture of Socrates. The miniencomium that ends the work sums up neatly the kind of behaviour and character that Xenophon, in his authorial commentary as well as the narrative proper, has wanted to impress upon his readers (..): In my experience (emoi men d¯e), Socrates was, as I have described him, so devout (euseb¯es) that he never did anything without the sanction of the gods; so upright (dikaios) that he never did the slightest harm to anybody, but conferred the greatest benefits upon (¯ophelein) those who associated with him; so self-disciplined (egkrat¯es) that he never chose the more pleasant course instead of the better; so wise (phronimos) that he never made a mistake in deciding between better and worse, and needed no advice, but was self-sufficient (autark¯es) for such decisions; he was capable of explaining and defining such matters, and capable moreover of both assessing and refuting errors and encouraging people towards virtue and true goodness (kalokagathia). In view of these qualities, he seemed to me to be the perfect example of goodness and happiness.
Xenophon’s laboured insistence here may be compared to Plato’s few words, to much the same effect, at the end of the Phaedo. Now, most of the text of the Memorabilia is devoted not to narrative or comment, but to scenic impersonation: Socrates is shown either in long monologues (‘he used to say’) or, more typically, in conversation with someone (always just one interlocutor). Do these parts then give the same impression of Socrates as Xenophon’s explicit evaluation? To a large extent they do, for the simple reason that the same virtues are also propagated through Socrates’ mouth: as for the message, it does not matter much if it is Socrates or Xenophon himself that speaks. Yet it is important to note that much of the characterization of Socrates the individual is achieved through the way he speaks, his method of inquiry, his use of parables and examples from daily life, his irony and wit. Though some of these characteristics, in particular the irony, are much less prominent in Xenophon’s work than in Plato’s, it is no doubt this picture of Socrates the constant questioner as much as that of the moral teacher and example that stays in the mind after reading the Memorabilia. Xenophon’s talent for observation and imitation creates a picture that goes beyond the incarnate ideal of virtue that he chooses to stress in his comments.
Dihle , is too categorical: ‘Das xenophontische Sokrates-Bild ersch¨opft sich in den Z¨ugen, die aus seiner – wirklichen oder vermeintlichen – Lehre gewonnen werden. Es fehlt die von Platon immer wieder betonte Identit¨at von Leben und Lehre.’
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Some of the explicit characterization that Xenophon avoids in his role as narrator, he allows Socrates’ interlocutors to express, as when Hippias protests (..): ‘You content yourself with making fun of other people by questioning and testing (elegkh¯on) them all, while you won’t state your own case or disclose your own opinions to anyone about anything.’ It is also in people’s speech, and not in the narrative, that we get a few details about Socrates’ daily life apart from the teaching and discussion. ‘On one occasion’ (with typical use of the indefinite pote) Antiphon the sophist addressed Socrates with the following words, thereby providing us with a rare glimpse of his habits and apparel (..–): Socrates, I always thought that people ought to become happier through the study of philosophy, but it seems to me that you have experienced the opposite effect. At any rate, you lead the sort of life that no slave would put up with if it were imposed upon him by his master. You eat and drink the worst possible food and drink (ta phaulotata), and the cloak you wear is not only of poor quality, but is the same for summer and winter; and you never wear shoes or a tunic. Then, you never accept money, the receipt of which is cheering and the possession of which enables people to live with more freedom and pleasure. So if you are going to affect your associates in the same way as the teachers of other occupations, who turn out pupils after their own pattern, you should regard yourself as a teacher of misery (kakodaimonias didaskalos).
In his reply, Socrates does not deny the facts, but rather underscores them in his elaborate defence for this kind of lifestyle (..–). This is then an effective way of describing Socrates through the eyes of others; but it should be observed that as such it is unique in the work. Furthermore, we lack any allusion to his peculiar physical appearance, the Silenus face and bulging belly commonly ascribed to him in fourth-century literature and art. Xenophon himself draws such a picture in his Symposium (.; .–), while its absence in the Memorabilia contributes to this work’s peculiar abstractness. Socrates’ descent, childhood, or youth are never referred to; all the scenes (except the last one immediately before his death) are picked from somewhere in his mature life as if it constituted a timeless and unchanging whole. Perhaps we may detect an indirect defence for this approach when Hippias scolds Socrates for ‘still saying the same things I heard you say all that time ago’, with Socrates cheerfully admitting, ‘I’m not only saying the same things but saying them about the same subjects’ (..). There are
See Zanker , –. In contrast, the philosophical ‘autobiography’ which Plato puts in Socrates’ mouth in the Phaedo (from a) operates with chronological stages beginning with his ‘youth’ (a nov ßn).
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1.2 Socrates in the Socratic mirror: Apology, Phaedo, Memorabilia exceedingly few specific references to Socrates’ own experiences (but there is one to his erotic expertise in ..–); most of the discussions are on a general level. His family is brought in only once: the first of two discussions of family relationships (.) is conducted with his eldest son, Lamprocles, who has had a fight with his mother. In the usual generalized style, it discusses why children should feel gratitude towards their parents; only on one occasion does it descend to the personal level (..–). Notably, it is the son who tries to conduct the conversation at a concrete level, while Socrates escapes from particulars to generalities; this is no doubt a deliberate trait in Xenophon’s characterization of him (rather than the result of a contamination of sources, as Olof Gigon seems to imply). Socrates’ own relation to his wife or sons is not touched upon here. His notorious marriage was probably not so easy to transform into an ideal model, as Gigon observes, so rules about marital relations are wisely saved for the figure Ischomachus in the Oeconomicus (–). The only other characterization of Xanthippe – and simultaneously of Socrates as a husband – that Xenophon offers is in an outspoken interchange with Antisthenes in his Symposium (.–). There will have been many such private comments to report or reconstruct and much gossip to build on, had Xenophon wanted to make the Memorabilia a personal account of Socrates’ life. Though he presumably came to his Socratic authorship rather late in life (apparently in the s to s), decades after his own short acquaintance with Socrates, no lack of sources or literary talent could have hindered such an enterprise. His actual agenda, however, seems to have been different, and twofold: to rehabilitate Socrates from the accusations levelled against him (ostensibly in the trial of , in reality in the pamphlet of the sophist Polycrates issued in the late s), and to propagate certain social and moral values for which he found Socrates a suitable mouthpiece and his way of life the perfect illustration. A more authentic and concrete picture of Socrates’ personal life could easily have jeopardized both these aims. In the history of biography the Memorabilia is a key text. It collects in one work what purports to be the author’s personal apomn¯emoneumata of a single individual – Ion’s recollections had been of a series of different acquaintances – and it gives by a combination of scenic anecdotes and
Gigon , –. In his detailed commentary on this chapter, Gigon , –, at . On Socrates and his family in the biographical tradition, see Gigon , –. That Xenophon restricts his exposition of Socrates’ philosophy to its ‘utilitarian’ (¯opheleia) aspects is similarly explained by Erbse , –.
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authorial statements a consistent portrait, however partial and static, of this person’s character. 1.3 isocrates on evagoras, his model king The lifespan as a structuring principle that was absent in the Apology as well as the Memorabilia appears in two other writings of the same period, Isocrates’ Evagoras and Xenophon’s Agesilaus. Formally, the Evagoras is an epideictic speech; and, according to the speaker himself (, ), it is the first Greek prose encomium of a contemporary figure. Isocrates (– bc) composed it some years after the death, in / bc, of King Evagoras of Salamis on Cyprus. It was presumably to be delivered in Salamis at a festival commemorating the late king, but we do not know if it was ever performed. It is addressed to Evagoras’ son and successor, Nicocles, who appears to have been Isocrates’ student, and provides a picture of the ideal ruler for him to emulate. Though overtly functioning as a (belated) funeral speech, the text seems as much adapted to influence the new king (and other prospective rulers) as to honour the deceased. It is thus cognate with the miniature mirror for princes that Xenophon inserted in the Anabasis in the guise of an encomium of Cyrus the Younger (see above). But that encomium lacks a chronological sequence of events to balance and structure the virtues singled out for praise. The Evagoras, as a self-contained literary unity, combines the narrative of its hero’s life with a description of his character traits. In this case, it is the author himself (rather than modern critics) who voices the claim that his work is the first of its kind; this justifies a closer look at the claim. In what terms does Isocrates describe his enterprise, and in what sense does he advertise it as new? At the beginning of the proem (–), he praises Nicocles for honouring his father’s tomb with magnificent gifts and spectacles, but adds that Evagoras, in his opinion, would be still more grateful ‘if someone should worthily recount (axi¯os dielthein) his accomplishments (epit¯edeumata) and his perilous deeds’.
The dates given for the composition of the speech, such as or , are just guesses; the certain terminus ante quem is /, the date of Isocrates’ Antidosis, in which Nicocles is referred to as dead (). See the critical scrutiny of the dating criteria and the occasion for the speech in Mason , –. The priority of Anabasis and Evagoras has been much discussed (e.g., by Bruns , –); but see Momigliano , –, who sensibly opts for mutual independence. ´ Isocrates is quoted according to the text of Emile Br´emond in Mathieu and Br´emond . My translations are based on that of Yun Lee Too in Mirhady and Too , often modified to be closer to the Greek.
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1.3 Isocrates on Evagoras, his model king
The king’s accomplishments and deeds, then, will be the subject of the speech. For ‘ambitious and noble men’ desire most of all ‘to leave behind an immortal memory of themselves’. And Evagoras’ excellence (aret¯e), the speaker explains, can only be given immortality by a speech (logos) that well recounts (kal¯os dielthoi) his deeds (praxeis). So far a neutral word, ‘recount’, is used to describe what Isocrates is doing. The specification follows next, in an important but somewhat ambiguous statement (): Others too should have praised (epainein) the good men among their contemporaries to ensure that those capable of glorifying (kosmein) the deeds of others would speak the truth about them, by addressing their speeches to those who knew the facts (en eidosin); and so that the youth would strive harder to achieve virtue, knowing that they would be praised (eulog¯esontai) more highly than those whom they have excelled in merit.
Three different words are used for ‘praise’: epainein, kosmein, eulogein, but so far not egk¯omiazein. In an indirect manner, Isocrates also embarks on his claim to be the first: ‘others too should have . . . ’ What ‘others’ obviously have neglected to do is praise their contemporaries. This is a difficult art: it requires truth, and the audience, itself witness to the events, is its control and guarantee. It is difficult, but important from an educational point of view, for the prospect of being formally praised after one’s death will stimulate virtue in the young. But how can Isocrates claim that he is the first to praise contemporaries? Do not the historians sometimes stop the narrative to pronounce positive judgements on recent politicians and generals, and are not the Socratics praising Socrates in a growing industry of writings? Isocrates simply did not care much for the Socratics, said Ivo Bruns, who raised this question, while his omission of the historians is deliberate and important: he indirectly criticizes Thucydides and his followers, including Xenophon, for not attributing enough importance to the role of individuals in the historical process. They conservatively suppressed the interest in great personalities that had become paramount among people, and Isocrates’ great achievement, according to Bruns, was to create a genre in which this interest was productively exploited: he filled a literary vacuum. This is an interesting hypothesis, but perhaps not quite necessary to explain Isocrates’ claim: implying that he is the first ‘to praise’ contemporaries, Isocrates no doubt means ‘to compose autonomous encomia’ of them, something neither the
Bruns , –.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
Socratics nor the historians did. It is the form and the occasion that are new, rather than the praise itself. Now, introducing the praise of contemporaries is just half of Isocrates’ claim of innovating the encomium; he next stresses that he is the first to praise them in prose. A necessary qualification, of course, with Pindar and the other artisans of encomiastic poetry in clear memory. It is a difficult task, he says (–), ‘praising (egk¯omiazein) a man’s excellence (aret¯e) in a speech’. This is the key sentence: the medium is prose, for the implied opposite to ‘speech’ (logos) is poetry; the virtue (not the deeds, not the ‘life’) is the topic, the virtue of a man (not a god or hero, or a collective as in earlier funeral speeches). Poets have all the advantages, Isocrates continues: their free use of novel words, figures of speech, metre, and rhythm may gloss over incredible action and deficient thought, while orators are confined to using ‘only words in circulation among ordinary people (ta politika t¯on onomat¯on) and only arguments that bear upon the actual facts’. Still, one must make the attempt to see ‘if prose speeches will be able to eulogize good men just as well as those do who praise them in songs and verses’. So Isocrates, in his proem, places a great emphasis on the novelty of his enterprise. Without bold attempts, no progress is possible, in arts or other pursuits (). And his metadiscourse on what the speaker is actually doing is resumed in the epilogue (–). This eulogy (epainos) could have been worked out ‘more precisely and with greater care’ (akribesteron kai philopon¯oteron), he says, had he not been past his akm¯e, his ‘prime of life’. Even so, Evagoras is now at any rate not left ‘without his encomium’, anegk¯omiastos, a word coined for the occasion. Next follows, in detailed elaboration, a comparison with the plastic arts as means of praise and commemoration. ‘Images of the body’ are fine memorials; but far more worthy of esteem are the images of actions (praxeis) and thought (dianoia)
Too , n. regards Isocrates’ claim to be the first as ‘a commonplace that cannot be taken at face value’; but see the discussion in Pernot , –, concluding that ‘Isocrate reste le premier, a` notre connaissance, qui ait pris le risque de traiter le genre sur le mode s´erieux’ (in distinction from diverse erotic paignia referred to by Plato and others). ndr¼v retn di l»gwn gkwmizein. According to Dover , , ‘the earliest explicit contrast between poetic and prosaic language’. Usher , interestingly confronts this prose manifesto with Isocrates’ practice in the Evagoras. See also the comments on Isocrates’ ‘poetic prose’ in Papillon , – and Graff , –, –; and on this whole passage in Alexiou , – (with further refs.). Isocrates’ actual practice, in comparison to the Pindaric encomium, is the subject of Race ; Vallozza and ; and Papillon , –. See also the discussion in Poulakos . References to his old age, partly ‘to create a context for making self-conscious remarks about his writing’, is a recurring topos in Isocrates, see Too , –. The honorary statue of Evagoras that the Athenians, after the battle at Cnidus in bc, put up in the Agora, close to Zeus Eleutherios, will have been in Isocrates’ mind here (though he mentions it
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1.3 Isocrates on Evagoras, his model king
that can be contemplated only in well-composed speeches. There are three reasons for the superiority of speech. First, serious men pride themselves not so much on their bodily beauty as on their deeds (erga) and intellect (gn¯om¯e). Second, statues are stationary (an allusion to Pindar, Nemean Odes ), while speeches may be distributed to Greece – we are, it is imagined, on Cyprus – and received by people whose opinions really matter. Evidently, Isocrates by logoi now primarily means written speeches, though this particular cat is not yet let out of the bag. Third, those who want to become good themselves cannot make their own bodies resemble statues and paintings; it is easier to imitate other people’s characters (tropoi) and the thoughts (dianoiai) represented in spoken words. This is Isocrates’ main reason, he asserts (–), for writing the speech – now, at last, the word graphein occurs (both modes of communication appear in , legein kai graphein). For Nicocles and other descendants of Evagoras it would be the best incentive for emulation ‘if someone assembled his virtues (aretas), arranged them in a speech, and passed them down to you to study and practise’. Evagoras should serve as their paradeigma; emulation of those praised is the raison d’ˆetre of encomia. More than for its artistic qualities, the Evagoras is important in the history of biography for this elaborate self-reflection. There is nothing similar in the works we have encountered so far, and though meta-statements will become common at the beginning and end of biographical works, few match Isocrates in explicitness and insistence (at least in proportion to the small compass of the whole work, ca. twenty printed pages). To a certain extent, this is no doubt due to the rhetorical category to which this speech belongs: epideictic oratory invites reflection on the part of the speaker concerning his own person and ability in relation to topic and occasion. To this standard repertoire belong, for instance, Isocrates’ allusions to the inadequacy of his attempt to do justice to Evagoras’ great merits (also later in the speech: , , ), in some contrast to the self-esteem that the rest of the speech breathes. Yet the fact that the self-contemplation is so much directed towards the formal and literary aspects of the enterprise must be explained on the personal level. Among the fourth-century Attic orators, Isocrates is the one most concerned with theory, and at the same time the professed educator. He is writing, in Evagoras, a mirror for princes, reflecting his own ethical
only in another context, ). On a possible copy of this statue in Rome (Mus. Naz. Rom. ), see Hermary , , – (Figs. .–). On the topos of immovable statues, see Alexiou , and on Isocrates here emulating Pindar, ibid. – (with further refs. in n. ). See also Papillon , – and Ford , –.
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and political ideals, but wishes simultaneously to create a literary model for the future celebration of contemporary heroes, utilizing the modern medium, prose, of which he himself was an important stylistic innovator. Students of rhetoric were presumably a more readily available target group in Athens than future kings or tyrants. To our advantage, Isocrates is not content with just presenting his model, but as a dedicated pedagogue he also discusses indefatigably its form and function. The historical importance of the Evagoras of course lies not only in this theoretical awareness in itself, but also in the fact that its literary structure came to function as a model for future Lives, whether encomiastic or more generally biographic. In this work, we meet for the first time, in the Life of an historical person, a number of the typically biographical topoi, ordered in a chronological sequence and accompanied by an equally topical authorial commentary, in addition to that of the proem and epilogue that we have already reviewed. We shall have a closer look at the general structure and main body of the speech. The speech has a strictly symmetrical disposition: A. Proem (prooimion, –; . pages) B. Genealogy (genos, –; . page) C. Birth (genn¯esis, –; . page) D. Childhood to seizure of power (–; . pages) D. Rule (–; pages) D. War against Sparta (–a; . pages) D. War against the King of Persia (b–; pages) C. Recapitulation (anakephalai¯osis, –; page) B. Blessing (makarismos, –; page) A. Epilogue: legacy (epilogos, –; pages) Death is conspicuously missing as a special topic, probably because – as Aristotle (Politics b) informs us – Evagoras was murdered in his palace by a eunuch, a fact that has no natural place in an encomium. On the whole, we must take for granted that, whether the speech was actually delivered live in Cyprus or only published in Athens, the speaker made a strict selection of historical facts from Evagoras’ life; and in so far as his picture is unhistorical, it is rather through omission or reinterpretation of
This is perhaps what G. L. C[awkwell] in OCD (, ) is aiming at when he dismisses Evagoras together with Isocrates’ two other Cypriot orations as ‘hardly . . . much more than rhetorical exercises’. After Sykutris , (slightly modified); see also Krischer , – and Pernot , . As Mason , points out, the symmetrical design is even more pronounced if one considers that in the very centre of D, at –, and thus in the middle of the whole speech, ‘falls the antithetic, Gorgianic catalogue of the subject’s virtues which radiates forward and backward in its effects’.
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1.3 Isocrates on Evagoras, his model king
such facts than by openly contradicting what was generally known at the time about his hero. After the extensive proem, the discourse proper on Evagoras’ life begins with his ancestors (–). The reason for speaking of them, we are told, is to show that they were great models (paradeigmata) to whom Evagoras in fact proved equal. The ancestors actually mentioned by name are only the very first ones, Aeacus the son of Zeus, his son Telamon, and his grandson Teucer, who after the capture of Troy founded Salamis on Cyprus and became the forefather of its royal family. Much is said about the virtues and brave deeds of these early Aeacidae, also including Peleus, Achilles, and Ajax; they are present in the speech ‘as if they had closed their eyes just a few decades earlier’, while the rest of the royal line down to the fourth century is left unspecified. So are even, remarkably enough, Evagoras’ own parents. It is only mentioned that at some point a Phoenician usurper seized the throne of Salamis, and that his descendants were still in power when Evagoras was born. The genos topos is thus reduced to the display of some well-known mythological exempla of bravery, formally justified by the fact that Evagoras traced his ancestry back to Aeacus. Isocrates draws on the traditional encomiastic repertoire (as in his own encomium on Helen), rather than implementing consistently his intention to innovate in the genre by praising a contemporary. It has obviously, in practice, been more important to him to provide his hero with an ethical potential inherited from mythical ancestors than to prove his own literary-theoretical point. The next topos, the hero’s birth, is covered by a detailed paralipsis (): the speaker will not tell about all the ‘rumours, prophecies, and dreams’ that distinguished the baby as superhuman, not because he himself disbelieves the reports, but to ‘make clear to all how far I am from fictionalizing (plasamenos) when I speak of his deeds, so that even of matters that are in fact true I will avoid what is known only to a few and is not common knowledge among all citizens’. The authorial commentary from the proem thus continues, attempting to disarm in advance any attack on the credibility of the account. The speaker may now with confidence proceed to ‘the generally acknowledged facts’ about Evagoras’ childhood (–):
On the historical Evagoras, see Costa and Maier , –, with further refs. The most detailed analysis of the Evagoras as an historical source is that of Spyridakis , –, who predictably detects omissions and reinterpretations, but concludes: ‘Nichts von dem aber, was wir nachpr¨ufen k¨onnen, ist frei erfunden’ (). Bruns , . Thus Halliwell , .
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As a child he possessed beauty (kallos), strength (rh¯om¯e), and restraint (s¯ophrosyn¯e), which are the most appropriate qualities for that age. One could find witnesses to each of these qualities: to his restraint, the citizens who were his fellow students; to his beauty, all those who saw him; and to his strength, the contests in which the boy defeated his contemporaries. When he became a man, all these qualities grew with him, and in addition he gained courage (andreia), wisdom (sophia), and justice (dikaiosyn¯e), and not in moderation, like others, but each of them in excess.
From the description of the childhood of Cyrus the Younger in Xenophon’s Anabasis we recognize the concept of s¯ophrosyn¯e and the claim that our hero was number one physically among his comrades. But where Xenophon suggestively depicts the Persian courtly milieu in which Cyrus grows up, adding a vivid hunting scene, Isocrates is content to state young Evagoras’ character traits exclusively in abstract terms, with witness confirmation in a generalized form (‘all’). This might be anywhere in Greece at any time. Then he rapidly proceeds to manhood. Evagoras’ childhood is thus no selfcontained topic in the speech; it was apparently as unknown – or perhaps unpalatable? – to Isocrates as were his hero’s parents. The continuation of the manhood description (–) is dominated by one aspect: Evagoras’ relation to power and to the reigning Phoenician dynasty. The actual string of violent events that (in bc) brought him to the throne is then examined in some detail (–). But the emphasis is still not on the various feats themselves, but on what they tell us about Evagoras’ ethos. His behaviour during his enforced exile illustrates his greatness of mind (megalophrosyn¯e) and piety (eusebein), his successful attack – with only fifty men or fewer – on the royal palace of Salamis demonstrates his authority and leadership. Typical of Isocrates’ way of structuring his narrative, in constant alternation between act and comment, are transitional phrases like ‘from this one might best observe both his nature and the reputation he held among others’ () or ‘this is evident from his deeds’ (). The alternation conveys Isocrates’ view of the immediate correspondence between character and action; in Stephen Halliwell’s words, ‘Character is exhibited by action, and action allows Isocrates to deduce and establish the nature of character.’ Concrete description of strategy, topography, or fighting is exceedingly sparse; even at the very climax, when the rebel force enters the palace, the speaker has recourse to generalization (): ‘The confusion attendant on such occasions, the fear of his followers, the exhortations of their leader – why should I spend time to describe?’ Such
´ Halliwell , . See also Pernot , , stressing the alternation: ‘L’Evagoras concilie portrait et r´ecit au moyen d’une e´l´egante pulsation entre passages e´thiques et passages historiques.’
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1.3 Isocrates on Evagoras, his model king
expedients, besides their rhetorical effect, relieve him from any demands for historical accuracy, or such criticism of its absence as a more concrete description might have elicited among his audience. The focus on ethical implications rather than historical facts is only natural in a speech that intends to educate future rulers. But at the same time, from a biographical point of view, it is no doubt an instance of the common mechanism that biographers tend to dwell on those aspects of the object that are congenial to themselves: the automimesis phenomenon. Evagoras, to judge from his historical record, was very much a man of action. Isocrates, it is well known, had quite different qualities and interests. He admired action, and encouraged it; but the realities of the battlefield and of political action were beyond his personal realm of experience. So instead of relishing further details about Evagoras’ rise to power, like another Thucydides or Xenophon, he now devotes as much time comparing him to other usurpers in history (–) as he has just spent on his whole life from childhood to kingship. The ruler finally chosen as the most suitable object of comparison turns out to be Cyrus the Great (). The king of Persia, however, is shown to have been inferior to Evagoras. Again, it is not ‘the magnitude of the outcome’ that counts for Isocrates (he is well aware that the Persian Empire is of another dimension than the kingdom of Salamis), but ‘the moral excellence (aret¯e) of each’ () – for Cyrus had won his success impiously (ouk euseb¯os), by killing his mother’s father, Astyages. After usurpation comes rule, and Isocrates is more on his own ground when he sets out to describe the new tyrant’s governing style, cultural policy, and philhellenism (–). He presents a ruler who spends ‘the most time investigating, reflecting, and deliberating, for he thought that if he prepared his own mind (phron¯esis) well, his regime would also fare well’ (). This is Isocrates’ variety of the philosopher-king and a proper example for Nicocles, the new ruler of Salamis. Most of the description of this rule of ‘mildness and moderation’ () is set in the iterative-durative mode, using the finite verbs in the imperfect tense, adverbs like ‘generally’ (hol¯os, ), and phrases like ‘all the time’ (). No particular incident or individual
On the function of heroic comparison in the prose encomium, see Cizek ; on Evagoras, –, . That Cyrus killed his grandfather is a piece of information found in no other source; Herodotus, Xenophon, and Ctesias each has his own version of his death. Isocrates may simply be mistaken, unless his urge for rhetorical amplification has made him follow an obscure source or even invent the murder; see Alexiou , –. See Jaeger , on ‘how Isocrates incorporates his Panhellenic ideal of political education in his description of the Cyprian monarch’.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
scene is allowed to interrupt the feeling of continuity and permanence. This is, literally as well as in terms of its importance, the central piece of the speech, the mirror for princes proper, and it contains its rhetorically most vigorous passages (–). Next follows the description of Evagoras’ alliance with Conon of Athens and of the wars he fought first against Sparta, then against the king of Persia. While the Spartan war is mostly described in historiographic terms, with the Persian war we are back in pure encomium. The facts of the war, its battles, duration, and outcome, are just material used for the verbal exaltation of the hero. Yet it is not too difficult to imagine that text too translated into historiography, even if the resultant account would be piteously meagre, stripped of the antithetical comparisons and its other constituent rhetoric. An attempt to transpose it into biography, on the other hand, would yield an even more insubstantial result: while many of the historical events are at least mentioned, Evagoras’ own viewpoint is entirely missing. In connection with one of the military campaigns we hear for the first and only time about Evagoras’ oldest son, Pnytagoras (). We will learn later, equally incidentally and now subordinated to the ‘good fortune’ perspective (), that the king had ‘many excellent children’ (using the abstract terms eupaidia and polypaidia) and himself reached a suitably advanced age. His private life – wife, children, domicile, health, illnesses – never becomes a topic of its own. An encomium, of course, has other objectives, as becomes obvious in the following recapitulation (–). His deeds are again mustered and praised, now largely freed of chronological bonds. The changes, metabolai, that he has brought about, in his own status and for his city and subjects, are singled out as the common denominator. The superlatives abound, to the degree that the speaker himself makes a rhetorical point of it: he cannot say which of Evagoras’ achievements is the greatest, for ‘whichever I turn my attention to seems to be the greatest and most marvellous’. Incidentally, the modern reader who might tend to sheer disbelief confronted with such hyperbolic language, both here and elsewhere in the speech, will be interested to find that a modern authority on ancient Cypriot history, Franz Georg Maier, refers to Evagoras as ‘this outstanding monarch, who
There is a good analysis of this section in Bruns , –; compare the conclusion, p. : ‘Dem Ganzen liegt das Streben zu Grunde, vom Zuf¨alligen auf das Bleibende, Wirkliche zur¨uckzugehen; daher ist keine Einzelscene, keine Anekdote eingemischt.’ See also Krischer , – and Halliwell , . Such, in effect, is the summary in Jebb , .
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1.3 Isocrates on Evagoras, his model king
was to dominate Cypriot politics for a generation’; he owned, says Maier in his recapitulation, ‘remarkable qualities as a ruler: a shrewd politician, a skilful diplomatist with a wide experience of the machinery of Persian government, and a bold strategist’. With due allowance for the different rhetorical rules that govern the two genres, the modern historian’s verdict is not so different from that of the ancient encomiast. Where Evagoras’ death would have been described, had it not occurred by assassination, there is instead a laudatio (–) of all the good fortunes life bestowed upon him and an assurance that he, if anyone, deserved immortality; for his life ‘here’ was more blessed by fortune (eutykhesteros) and more dear to the gods (theophilesteros) than any, a conclusion approaching to the makarismos, ‘blessing’, of the rhetorical schema. Death itself is closest in the statement: ‘being a mortal, he left an immortal memory of himself, and he lived just so long that he was neither unacquainted with old age nor afflicted with the infirmities of that age’. On the whole, this is a section filled with the topoi, if sometimes only in embryonic form, that typically occur towards the end of funeral speeches and consolation treatises; it is in reality just the actual death scene that is missing. There follows an epilogue (–), divided between renewed consideration of the advantages of the prose encomium (discussed above together with the proem) and some personal advice to the formal addressee of the speech, the philosopher-king in spe. The protreptic purpose that has been hiding just under the surface throughout the speech is now made explicit; after all, making the memory of a great man live for ever is not far from pronouncing him a model for emulation. The Evagoras is then, in Michael Rewa’s accurate description, ‘the earliest self-standing, extended commendatory life, from birth to death, of an historical person we possess in Greek prose’. The importance of its proem and epilogue, both as a literary critical document and as the archetype for similar self-conscious reflection in later life-writing, has been demonstrated
Maier , , –. Contrast Bruns , , in whose eyes Evagoras is ‘der hochselige Potentat eines kleinen, halbbarbarischen F¨urstentums’, a verdict obviously based less on historical knowledge than on his own emotional reaction to Isocrates’ hyperboles, ‘den widerw¨artigen Eindruck dieses Byzantinismus’. Jebb , on the other hand, better informed and more conversant with the language of rhetoric, finds that ‘the praise that it [the Evagoras] awards does not, on the whole, appear to be exaggerated’ (). A memorable wording of this topos (): qnht¼v d gen»menov qnaton tn perª aËtoÓ mnmhn katlipen. Poulakos , , from his bird’s-eye perspective of rhetorical theory, regards this shift (‘display gives way to exhortation – epideiktikon yields to symbouleutikon’) as more dramatic than a sustained reading of the speech itself warrants. Rewa , .
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
above. The model function of its rhetorical structure and encomiastic topoi has also been emphasized. It remains to look back at the account of Evagoras’ person and career from a biographical perspective. The account has the appearance of biography rather than history. ‘Isocrates’ purpose’, says Stephen Halliwell, ‘is to show and explain the unity of an individual life in its own right and for its own sake’; it is Evagoras’ own actions (praxeis) and mind (dianoia) that are the central topic (). Still, paradoxically, there is very little of the typically biographical element, Evagoras’ own viewpoint, even less than there is of concrete historical events. The work ‘almost entirely lacks a sense of closeness to, or inwardness with, its subject’. With regard to his hero, Isocrates even abstains from the elementary means of psychological characterization that classical historians and orators allow themselves, the insights into the agents’ decision-making and motivation for action. One may think of several contributing causes for this paradox. Most probably, Isocrates did not know his object personally, at least not closely enough to permit him to trace a more intimate portrait, had he wanted to. Another important factor is likely to be the dual purpose of the speech, as epitomized in Takis Poulakos’ question, ‘How can the Evagoras be both a portrait and a mirror?’ If the portrait has too many personal traits, that may be thought to endanger the model function. (Yet later Greek writers of ideal lives, such as Athanasius in his Life of St Antony, realize the attraction of the concrete detail and the necessity of the personal touch to make the model figure come alive and appear an attractive object of imitation.) The fact that we are allowed insight into the Persian king’s thoughts and feelings before the war (–), but not correspondingly into Evagoras’ mind, indicates that his elevation to a model prevented introspection even of this traditional – and public rather than private – kind. It may in the first place be this strong panegyric and protreptic component that prevents Isocrates’ life description from developing into a biographical portrait. There is no balance created, or intended, between the personal and the ideal; the ideal is never allowed to take on flesh and blood – as Plato’s Socrates does in the same period. We shall next see how Xenophon, attempting to praise his model king, handles the new literary form. Comparison between the two encomia
Halliwell , . Thus Halliwell , –, adducing more general generic factors to explain the lack of closeness. See Montgomery on this narrative device in classical historiography. Isocrates does allow glimpses of Evagoras’ motives in one particular context (–, he ‘thought’, ‘judged’, ‘was amazed’, etc.), but never in connection with specific actions as the historians do. Poulakos , , whose attempt at an answer, however, takes another direction.
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1.4 Xenophon on Agesilaus’ deeds and virtues
will be natural; but it deserves attention that while it is almost certain that Isocrates’ work was prior to Xenophon’s, perhaps as much as ten years, there is no firm evidence that Xenophon had actually read and been influenced by the Evagoras. 1.4 xenophon on agesilaus’ deeds and virtues King Agesilaus II of Sparta (reigned – bc), whom Xenophon chose for an encomium, is like Evagoras awarded high marks by modern historians as a political and military leader. Paul Cartledge describes him as ‘one of the most interesting and important figures of his day’, ‘a remarkable figure whose exceptional character may be gathered initially from the fact that he was the first Spartan king to campaign on the Asiatic mainland’. This should be kept in mind, since we often take for granted that excessive rhetorical praise covers a void, more or less – that it in a way compensates for actual mediocrity. Already the historical situations in which Isocrates and Xenophon composed their encomia should warn us that this was hardly the case. Flattery or personal gain can hardly have been their motivating force since their objects of praise were dead (Roman imperial panegyrics, delivered in the emperor’s presence, are a different matter). On the other hand, the two kings had died recently enough for people to be able to remember who they were. Moreover, for their model kings our two Athenian writers would naturally choose men that were already known as outstanding personalities; otherwise they had little prospect of achieving the long-term purpose of instruction that was dear to both these born educators. So the historical basis for the praise had to be sound, while of course the superlative terms in which it was expressed and the dropping of any unfavourable topic belong to the rhetorical genre. The risk that Xenophon really took was of another nature. As an Athenian – whether still in exile or at the time of writing perhaps even reinstated in his native city – he must have anticipated provoking a large part
Pace Momigliano , and Hirsch a, –. Quotations from Cartledge , , xi; for the nuances, see Cartledge . Jones , – characterizes him as ‘an able general, who always won his battles’, ‘politically astute’, and generally popular because ‘his policy satisfied public opinion’. The most recent historian of Sparta, Kennell , –, is less superlative: Agesilaus is ‘a competent but not brilliant general’, good enough domestically but a disaster for Sparta in international relations, ‘unfailingly choosing short-term benefits over long-term gain’ (). Hamilton , – stresses the complexity of his character. Xenophon must have composed (or at least completed and published) Agesilaus betwen (the king’s death, see Ages. . and .–) and ca. (his own death). Xenophon’s dual purpose of praise and timeless instruction is well articulated by Higgins , –.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
of his prospective readership by making a Spartan king his hero. Maybe he thought to have reduced this risk by occasionally striking a note of panhellenism, speaking of ‘Greeks’ generally as profiting from Agesilaus’ Asian strategies and advocating Greek unity against the common Persian enemy. But since he never questions Sparta’s leadership, Athenians will no doubt have read even such passages as pro-Spartan propaganda. Isocrates played more safe in his choice of a foreign king, making Evagoras openly philhellenic and introducing an Athenian statesman, Conon, as his temporary co-hero. Xenophon himself, for his other, large-scale attempt in the same genre, the Cyropaedia, wisely chose to depict as the ideal ruler a king more distant in both time and ethnicity. Now, Xenophon’s choice of Agesilaus was no accidental decision – the Spartan king had been his own patron and benefactor since the s – nor was his purpose solely to establish a model for imitation. He had embarked on the Memorabilia to defend Socrates’ memory in a current war of pamphlets, and he presumably composed his Anabasis in reply to another work that played down his own role in the Persian expedition. By the same token, he was now moved to write an apology of Agesilaus against what looks like an ongoing campaign to belittle the king’s achievement. As an active man, he may have needed such an incentive to sit down to write. His immediate intended audience then in this case were Greeks who took a positive interest in Spartan politics but needed to have the greatness of the deceased king and the wisdom of his politics reinforced. The Agesilaus, a short composition of some thirty printed pages, has a simple structure that is clearly demarcated in the text: A. Proem (.; lines). B. Genealogy (eugeneia, .–; page) C. Deeds (erga, .–.a; pages) C. Virtues (aret¯e, .b–.; pages)
See Ages. .–, ., etc. On panhellenism in ., see Dillery , (with further refs. in nn. and ). See also Breitenbach , –, Cawkwell , –, Hirsch a, –, and Cartledge , General index, s.v. Agesilaos, ‘Panhellenism’. Hirsch a, – even argues that the apologetic purpose is the main one and that Xenophon has made Agesilaus into ‘a panhellenic hero’ to defend him ‘against charges of collaboration with the Persians and hostility to fellow Greeks’ (). This is probably going too far; such a character volte-face would have defeated the paedagogic purpose. Hamilton finds traces in Plutarch’s Agesilaus of a hostile account of Agesilaus and his reign against which Xenophon will have written his defence. Using the old standard ‘Teubner page’ of lines. On the general structure, see Breitenbach = , ; see also Leo , –, and Cavallin .
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1.4 Xenophon on Agesilaus’ deeds and virtues
A. Epilogue with blessing (.–; page) C. Postscript: Recapitulation of virtues (.–; pages) The proem, in briefest possible form, states the author’s aim: to praise Agesilaus. Emphasis is placed on the impossibility of doing justice to this object of praise (.): I am well aware of the difficulty of writing a tribute (epainos) to Agesilaus that does justice to his virtue (aret¯e) and reputation (dox¯e), yet the attempt must be made. It would be wrong if a man’s perfect goodness deprived him of receiving tribute, however inadequate.
The word ‘write’ (grapsai) is used from the start: this is not a speech intended for delivery, as the Evagoras purports to be, but an essay, though its style is in fact unusually rhetorical for Xenophon. Further, epainos is the word Xenophon prefers to employ here to describe the nature of his work; this preference is followed up in repeated use of the verb epainein throughout the essay, and it emphatically recurs at the end to introduce the recapitulation (.). The term egk¯omion is reserved for the generic discussion that Xenophon has woven into his epilogue (.–): It is true that my tribute to Agesilaus follows his death, but I would not have this treatise (logos) regarded for that reason as a lament (thr¯enos). It is in fact an encomium. After all, what I am saying about him now is the same as was said of him when he lived. Moreover, a famous life and a well-timed death are hardly the proper subjects for a lament. But what could be more worthy themes for encomia than the most glorious victories and the most valuable deeds (erga)? One would justly consider blessed a man who from childhood onwards longed passionately for fame and won most of it of his contemporaries, who by nature loved honour most (philotimotatos . . . pephyk¯os) and remained undefeated after becoming king, and who after attaining the utmost limit of human life died with an unblemished record (anamart¯etos) as regards both those he led and those he fought.
This then is what corresponds to Isocrates’ detailed and self-centred reflections on the encomiastic genre. Xenophon just plays with the generic designations thr¯enos and egk¯omion to emphasize the blessed fullness of Agesilaus’ life, how he has realized his potentials and won his goals, and therefore should not be mourned. For this immediate purpose, an encomium is defined as the opposite of a lament, proper only to celebrate a happily concluded life and dismissing sentiments of grief or loss. There is no theoretical point argued here; Xenophon is totally absorbed in his encomiastic
Xenophon is quoted according to the text in Marchant . My translation is based on that of Waterfield . See Breitenbach = , . Âti telwv nr gaq¼v gneto.
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practice. Nor does he anywhere in his prose encomium show awareness – let alone pride a` la Isocrates – of inventing or reforming this rhetorical genre. If he knew he did reform it and cared, he obviously thought the innovation should be noticed rather than announced. ‘His habitual reserve fascinates and perplexes’, as George Cawkwell comments when Xenophon, in his account of Agesilaus in the Hellenika, mysteriously holds back matters he must have known well himself. For all his prolixity on some favourite topics, such as military manoeuvres, Xenophon often shows a remarkable austerity and discipline in his narrative. His own person, whether as an actual associate to Agesilaus or as the innovating author of this encomium, is conspicuously absent in the Agesilaus. He does not, like Isocrates, compete with his hero for the audience’s attention. His innovation, in the Agesilaus, is the clear division between deeds and virtues. After following his hero’s royal lineage back to Heracles and Sparta’s unbroken tradition of kingship – his genos and patris – and describing his accession to the throne as the natural consequence of his combination of lineage and personal excellence, Xenophon states the motive for his arrangement of the material (.a): I will next give an account of (di¯eg¯esomai) all the things he achieved (hosa . . . diepraxato) during his reign, because in my opinion there is no better way to gain insight into his character (tropoi) than by considering his deeds (erga).
The narrative then starts in medias res with the Persian campaign that Agesilaus conducted immediately after becoming king at the age of about forty. There is no presentation of him as he entered the Asian scene (where Xenophon met him for the first time), nothing on his physical appearance; it was left to Plutarch to comment on his lameness and his small and unprepossessing stature. Details about his parents, childhood, and education are never given. All we get to know about his life before his accession to the throne is a generalized statement in the proem (.) about the ‘virtue’ that characterized it. For a biography, this would seem somewhat meagre; for an encomium of a king and a lesson in leadership, it is less inappropriate, although we may again note that Xenophon chooses a very
Cawkwell , . The actual temporal indication in .b is a textual crux: the MSS have ti mn nov àn, ‘still young’, while some critics change ti into oÉkti, as mirrored in Waterfield’s translation, ‘no longer a young man’. Probably it is best to accept the manuscript reading, ‘still young’ being in keeping with the encomium style and not unnatural in view of the great age he was to reach (see Marchant and Bowersock , xvii n. ). Plut. Ages. .–; see Shipley , –, . See also Xen. Hell. .., .. (a scene that a biographer would have appreciated, but Xenophon omits in the Agesilaus) and Higgins , .
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1.4 Xenophon on Agesilaus’ deeds and virtues
different procedure in his Cyropaedia. It would certainly be unwise to blame the omission on lack of knowledge about Agesilaus’ early life. If Xenophon’s twenty years on his estate in Elis under the king’s patronage were not enough to collect information, he could have invented an ideal childhood as he did with Cyrus the Younger in the Anabasis. His priorities, simply, were different this time: the nearly forty years of kingly career sufficed for him to provide a full picture of the man’s achievement. The work may in this respect be described as a ‘professional’ biography, similar in type to the Old Testament Lives of prophets and the Gospel of Mark, which starts with the baptism of Jesus (below, Ch. . end, .). The chronological narrative of Agesilaus’ campaigns in Asia and Greece that follows for long stretches reads like ordinary Xenophontic history as we know it from his Hellenica and Anabasis, with detailed descriptions of marches, battles, and strategic considerations. We are reminded, however, of the framework into which the descriptions are set by authorial statements such as the following (.): ‘No clearer demonstration could be given of the kind of commander he proved to be than a narrative of his achievements.’ Agesilaus is the constant focus of attention, both as a king and commander and as the subject of an encomium. Through his acts and behaviour, he ‘reveals himself’ (e.g., . antepideixas) as the man Xenophon wants us to see. He is, first and foremost, a pious man who keeps his oaths, sacrifices at the appropriate moments, and generally respects the gods. The following passage shows both Xenophon’s priorities and his way of letting the moral follow from the description of action (.): And the sight of Agesilaus at the head of his men as they came garlanded from the gymnasia and dedicated their chaplets to Artemis would have put heart into anyone, since every aspect of a situation where men are showing reverence to the gods (theous . . . seboien), practising the arts of war, and cultivating obedience to authority (peitharkhia) is naturally bound to raise good hopes.
‘Here, in a nutshell, we find Xenophon’s personal credo’, comments Paul Cartledge; and, one might add, here we see clearly how the biographer lets his object represent his own ideals in action. It is probably futile trying to find out how far the two men’s moral and political outlooks in reality concurred, or how far they coalesce just because Xenophon had
It is thus unnecessary to suppose that Xenophon omitted the earlier part of Agesilaus’ life because it might compromise his encomiastic picture; this means underestimating his encomiast skills. In Waterfield , n. . See the discussion in Cawkwell , – and Cartledge , .
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
the privilege of drawing the portrait. Comparison with his formally nonencomiastic description of Agesilaus in the Hellenica produces a number of nuances in the picture, mostly because the encomium omits decisions and undertakings that might cast a less flattering light on Agesilaus. Xenophon, in fact, occasionally admits his present bias, as when he says in the encomium (.): ‘These campaigns may perhaps be criticized on other grounds, but there can be no doubt that they were prompted by loyalty to his comrades.’ But it is important to realize that Xenophon is the almost omnipotent intermediary between us and the king of real life. The works of a couple of fourth-century historians more critical of Agesilaus have been lost, though we see glimpses of them in Plutarch’s Agesilaus; yet Xenophon’s dual description was the main source for Plutarch as well. Agesilaus is a character who only comes to life at the discretion of his first biographer. The arrangement of the material in the ‘deeds’ part is chronological, but there are few temporal markers and no absolute dates. Agesilaus himself is ‘still a young man’ in ., and then ‘too old for campaigning on foot or horseback’ in .; but not until . does Xenophon give us a figure: he is now ‘about eighty years old’. His death is not recounted in the ‘deeds’ part, it is first mentioned in retrospect at the end of the encomium (.; .– , see below). Only by comparison with annalistically structured records, in the first place Xenophon’s own Hellenica, is it possible to see that he in fact covers Agesilaus’ career with very different degrees of detailedness: about half the narrative describes his Asia Minor campaign in –, another quarter his march home and the battle of Coronea in , while the last quarter covers all of the remaining thirty-four years of his reign. The observant reader will find that it is in this last part that most markers of the type ‘later’ (ek de toutou, meta de tauta, hysteron) occur; but there would be no way of knowing, were it not for the external evidence, that some of them bridge such large gaps in time. Whatever the main reason for the disproportion – the author’s personal interest, his access to detailed
Whether he wrote Hellenica or Agesilaus first has been much discussed, see Tuplin , –, – . For a close comparison between the pictures of Agesilaus in the encomium and the history, see Schepens , –; in the process, Schepens convincingly refutes the strange notion in some recent research that Xenophon in the encomium (!) in fact meant to criticize, between the lines, the king as responsible for Sparta’s loss of its hegemony. See Breitenbach = , –; Hirsch a, –, –; and Cartledge , –. See Cawkwell , –; Hamilton ; Shipley , –. For an attempt to look through the sources to discern Agesilaus’ character and personality, see Hamilton , –. Figures after Hirsch a, –, slightly modified; on the reasons for the disproportionateness, see also Schepens , –. ., , , , (exceptionally: ‘a year later’), , , .
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1.4 Xenophon on Agesilaus’ deeds and virtues
information, the gradual satisfaction of his need for exemplifying situations, or the panhellenic and anti-Persian tendency of the treatise – the overall lack of interest in temporal quantification betrays the exemplary rather than historical character of the narrative. ‘Winter’, for instance, in this context is not part of the revolving annual cycle, but is mentioned solely to illustrate how the ageing king defies the elements to do his duty to the state (.); and the ‘two years’ of the Asian campaign are referred to just to emphasize how short a period of time Agesilaus had needed to be able to consecrate so much looted gold to the god at Delphi (.). After the sixteen-page account of the deeds comes the important switch to the eleven-page systematic catalogue of Agesilaus’ virtues (.): So much then for the man’s public deeds (erga), accomplished in front of a host of witnesses. Such deeds do not need supporting evidence: the mere mention of (anamn¯esai monon) them is enough to win instant belief. However, I shall now try to show (d¯eloun) the virtue (aret¯e) that resided in his soul and through which he committed these deeds and felt such a desire for all that is good (kalos) and abhorrence for all that is bad (aiskhros).
Xenophon’s way of expressing himself suggests that he regards what he will now undertake as a more delicate task than the preceding narrative; whether it is also meant to signal an encomiastic innovation, an improvement on the form Isocrates used in his Evagoras, is more doubtful. Xenophon simply feels more at home with narration interspersed with morals than with having to argue from the abstract. In practice, the difference will not be all that great, for he easily slips into narrating typical episodes in the ‘virtues’ part too. It is only the ordering principle that has changed. The various virtues in the row are clearly announced and, at least partly, sorted in an hierarchical order. Xenophon starts with underlining Agesilaus’ piety (eusebeia, .–); then follow honesty (dikaiosyn¯e) in economic matters (), self-control (egkrateia) in drink, food, and sex (), courage (andreia, .–) and military skill (sophia, .–), patriotism (philopatris, .–) and panhellenism (.–), charm (to eukhari, .–), foresight (pronoia, .), and simplicity (.–). Towards the end the catalogue turns into a comparison between the personalities and lifestyles of Agesilaus and the Persian king, with the Spartan winning in all the events (.–). Finally, Agesilaus’ sister Cynisca is brought into the picture (the first and only one of his immediate family to be named), yet only to prove a moral point
It remained for Plutarch to dig out the names of Agesilaus’ wife and two daughters in Spartan records, Plut. Ages. ., see Shipley , –. A general Greek constraint on naming (nonnotorious) female members of the family (see above, Prolegomena, ‘Private and public life’) does
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
(.). The king pursuaded her to breed a team of horses to compete with them, and when she won – nothing less than the four-horse chariot-race at Olympia, a fact Xenophon suppresses – her brother could demonstrate that this was a matter of wealth rather than manly virtue (andragathia). To win the prize, not in a horse-race, but in political support, in bonds of friendship around the world, and in public and private benefaction, was in his opinion the greatest achievement and would secure his reputation both in life and after death (.). The peroration has thereby begun, and it goes on to stress that Agesilaus’ success was not a product of chance, but of endurance (karteria), bravery (alk¯e), and wisdom (gn¯om¯e). A simile from carpentry and stone-cutting explains what importance his life, through the present encomium, may have for others (.): If the chalk line and ruler are a good invention to help people produce fine objects, I think Agesilaus’ virtue sets a good example (paradeigma) for those who want to practise manly virtue (andragathia). How could anyone become irreligious (anosios) if he modelled himself on (mimoumenos) a god-fearing (theoseb¯es) person? Or dishonest (adikos), violent (hubrist¯es), or weak-willed (akrat¯es) if he modelled himself on someone who was honest (dikaios), restrained (s¯ophr¯on), and his own master (egkrat¯es)?
The epilogue ends with the generic discussion – ‘not a lament but an encomium’ – that was quoted and analysed above together with the proem. But where the treatise would properly have ended, Xenophon has added a postscript (), wanting to ‘recapitulate (en kephalaiois epanelthein) the various aspects of Agesilaus’ virtue, to make my tribute (epainos) easier to remember’. Is this simply the devoted teacher who cannot resist another opportunity for repetition, or should we with Ivo Bruns understand the addition as inspired by the central piece of Isocrates’ Evagoras, the mirror for princes proper (–)? And were its last paragraphs added, as Dietfried Kr¨omer suggests, to round off the encomium in a more biographical manner? There may be an element of truth in each of these propositions. No doubt, the postscript represents some kind of afterthought, whether added
not fully explain Xenophon’s reticence here, as Shipley suggests, since he does name Cynisca in .. As repeatedly mentioned by Pausanias (..–; ..; ..; ..–); see Cartledge , – and in Waterfield , . Bruns , , –; see Kr¨omer , –, for criticism of Bruns and a detailed analysis of the whole chapter. Kr¨omer , ; see also Bruns , .
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1.4 Xenophon on Agesilaus’ deeds and virtues
immediately after Xenophon had completed and read through his essay, or (more probably) when some time had passed, perhaps after he had come across Isocrates’ speech or (as Kr¨omer argues) some other, paraenetic work that inspired a renewed effort. For the postscript is not just a recapitulation of the virtues he has already praised in the main work; he also uses the opportunity to enlarge on some topics and deepen the perspective: while description of Agesilaus’ exemplary behaviour dominated the earlier account, the focus is now more exclusively on the ethos that prompted that behaviour. It is obvious how Xenophon delights in formulating this new series of aphoristic statements. The structure of each point (kephalaion) is invariably antithetical (as in the alleged model, Evagoras –), whether expressed with the typical men . . . de construction, or by other linguistic means (ou . . . alla, comparative + ¯e, etc.). Incidentally, one of the aphorisms, perhaps unwittingly, strikes a problematic aspect of what Xenophon himself is practising, the rhetoric of praise (.): Each time he heard people criticize or praise others, he thought he got no less (oukh h¯etton . . . ¯e) insight into the character of the speakers than of the persons they were speaking about.
As earlier with Socrates, and later with Cyrus the Great, Xenophon reveals his own character traits in praising Agesilaus, and may be accused of imposing his own ideals on his object. Bruns calls this postscript ‘the first detailed characterization of a human soul’; but whose soul? Finally, to the biographical. In contrast with Isocrates in Evagoras, Xenophon had the advantage of knowing his subject well from a couple of years of common military experiences (–) and, more at a distance, from living during the following decades on the estate at Scillus (close to Olympia) that the Spartan king had granted him. Where Isocrates has recourse to generalities and mythological exempla, Xenophon can be concrete and (to a certain extent) private. In the catalogue of virtues he is able to give glimpses of Agesilaus’ conduct towards members of his family. For example, ‘when the state decreed that Agesilaus should receive all Agis’ property, he gave half to his relatives on his mother’s side, because he saw that they were not well off’ (.); differently from Isocrates, insights into the king’s motives are granted. Agesilaus’ simple life style is illustrated by his daughter’s travelling to a religious feast by public cart, and by the condition of the front doors of his house, looking old enough to have been set up at the return of the Heraclids (.). His self-control in sexual matters is demonstrated by his refusal to let himself be kissed by a beautiful
Bruns , .
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Persian boy, in spite of his passionate nature and the desire he actually felt for the boy (.–). Such occasional glimpses, partly at least based on personal observation (though this is rarely said, as in .), give colour and atmosphere to the description of this ideal king and contribute to bringing it closer to a biographical concept than Isocrates reached in his encomium. This impression is reinforced by the end of the postscript. Agesilaus’ vitality, still in evidence after eighty, had been praised at the end of the deeds part (.–), and his happy death and continued fame were topics of the epilogue (., .–). Now, after recapitulating his timeless virtues, the author feels a need to return to the picture of Agesilaus the man. He chooses to dwell on him as he appeared in the extremity of old age – the Agesilaus many of Xenophon’s readers will have remembered best themselves. He alone, says Xenophon, has proved that ‘while physical vigour deteriorates with age, in good people mental strength is ageless (ag¯eratos)’ (.). He continued seeking glory, he outshone the young, he still frightened his enemies. They rejoiced when he died, in spite of his old age. Even on the verge of death, his participation in battle raised the morale of the troops. He was missed after his death more than any young man. His services made him a benefactor to his land even after death. All this is expressed with due perorational emphasis, with paradoxical antitheses and a series of rhetorical questions. There is no description of Agesilaus’ actual death, however, where and how it happened (in fact, he died in Cyrenaica), and the obsequies are referred to in general words; presumably, Xenophon was not present himself (.): He was brought back to his eternal dwelling-place, with memorials to his excellence (aret¯e) scattered throughout the world, and a royal tomb in his fatherland.
With these words the encomium ends. No attempt to assess Agesilaus’ political achievement (as Isocrates assesses that of Evagoras in his recapitulation), no abstract praise of virtue ensuring immortality, but first an evocation of the old king in person, still vigorously embodying the same virtues until his death, then an unadorned mention of the monuments he left behind testifying to his fame. The postscript included, the Agesilaus thus ends with the old age, death, and posthumous renown of its hero. It had started with a chronological account of his deeds, emphasizing the military exploits of the first years of his kingship, and then systematically treated his character, exemplified with further episodes from his life. Up to that point, Xenophon had created what was to become the standard structure of a biography, solving by his dichotomy the biographer’s perennial problem, ‘how to define a character
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1.5 The Education of Cyrus
without sacrificing the variety of events of an individual life’. Only birth, childhood, and youth, the formative years of a life, were still missing. 1.5 the education of cyrus Precisely the formative years of the hero are a central concern in Xenophon’s third attempt, besides the Memorabilia and the Agesilaus, to write the idealized description of a life. We do not know exactly when the Cyropaedia, or Education of Cyrus, was composed, but it probably belongs to the last decade of Xenophon’s life (he died ca. ); its postscript (.), anyway, was written after / (but may have been a later addition, by Xenophon or by someone else). It is certainly tempting to see the thematical disposition of the Memorabilia, the deeds-and-virtues arrangement in the Agesilaus, and the completed life structure of the Cyropaedia as successive stages in Xenophon’s experimental writing career, a development towards integrated biography. Yet the different solutions may rather have been prompted by the material at his disposal and the intentions behind each of the compositions, its ‘genre’. The Agesilaus, a short treatise responding to a particular situation, and the Cyropaedia, the massive result (ca. printed pages) of long study and contemplation, may well have been on his desk simultaneously. In addition to the childhood description, the Cyropaedia is also important in the history of biography for its extended death scene. The present discussion will focus on these two components, after providing a more cursory overview of the structure of the whole work. Whatever generic label one chooses to give it – historical (or biographical or philosophical) novel, romanticized (or fictionalized) biography, mirror of princes – it is clear, right from its introduction, that its main topic is leadership and government, not the life of the historical King Cyrus the Great of Persia (died bc). The introduction concludes (..):
Momigliano , . On various attempts to date the work, see Mueller-Goldingen , –, who himself places it between / and , the terminus post quem being Plato’s Politicus (dated between and ), the ante quem Xenophon’s own Agesilaus (comparing Ages. .– with Cyr. ..). Neither terminus seems compelling. Gera , –, dates it in the s. Compare Faulkner , : ‘If one were fond of contemporary formulations, one might call the Education a text of management on a world scale.’ Other recent suggestions include ‘a pamphlet on practical military reform with special relevance to the Spartan state’ (Christesen ) and ‘a generic form of political philosophy’ (Mitchell ). See also Reichel , , who lists different possible classifications and comments: ‘Jede dieser Zuordnungen trifft f¨ur bestimmte Partien oder einzelne Aspekte des Werkes zu. Wir haben es bei der Kyrup¨adie sozusagen mit einer “offenen Form” zu tun.’ The Greek text is quoted from Marchant (OCT); my translations are based on Ambler .
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So on the grounds that this man was worthy of wonder, we examined who he was by origin (genea), what his nature was, and with what education he was brought up, such that he so excelled in ruling (arkhein) men. Whatever we have learned, therefore, and think we know about him, we shall try to relate.
In this statement of the author’s aims, the main emphasis lies on the part italicized in my translation. In the Greek, it is grammatically emphasized: it contains the finite verb of the clause, while the earlier questions about descent, nature, and education are expressed through subordinate participles. Furthermore, the postscript added at the end of the work, in contrast to that of the Agesilaus, is not about the hero and his virtues, but about the Persian Empire and its deterioration since Cyrus’ time as a ruler. Much of the text of the Cyropaedia is devoted to description and discussion of military strategy, political ideology, Persian (or pseudo-Persian) customs and attitudes, and so on, formally more or less attached to Cyrus (sometimes as direct speech), but with little bearing on him as a character or (pseudo-)historical agent. This should be borne in mind when we concentrate in the following on those parts of the work that show Cyrus in action and conversation, especially as a child or youth, and that make him a more living character (regardless of historicity) than ever the Evagoras and Agesilaus of the encomia are. The general structure of the Cyropaedia may be outlined as follows: A. Introduction on leadership (.) B. Cyrus’ childhood and education (.–) B. Cyrus as commander and conqueror (.–..) B. Cyrus as ruler and administrator, and his death (..–.) A. Postscript on the decline of Persia (.) It is interesting to see how this division looks when translated into fabula and story time, that is, years and pages. B, roughly pages, covers the first twenty-six years of Cyrus’ life, but does so very unevenly. The description of his first twelve years is supplanted by a general account of Persian education (. pages). His next three or four years, on the other hand, which he spent at his grandfather’s court in Media, are given as much as . pages. Again, only a couple of pages are devoted to his next
. . . t©v potì àn genen kaª po©an tin fÅsin cwn kaª po© tinª paideuqeªv paide© tosoÓton dinegken e«v t¼ rcein nqrÛpwn. Following Due , –; see also Breitenbach = , , with a further division of B into .–.. (Cyrus commanding the Persian auxiliary troops in Media) and ..–.. (the great Assyrian war). Stadter , – and Beck a, – divide B into two, making the description of Cyrus’ death an independent ‘phase’ (.). See Due , –. The page figures are hers (from the OCT edition). See also Stadter , –; Tuplin , –; Beck a; and Stadter again in Gray , , .
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1.5 The Education of Cyrus
eleven years, when he is back home in Persia. When Cyrus is twenty-six, a Persian force is set up under his command to help the Medians, and he addresses it (. pages). His conversation with his father, as the force moves towards the Median frontier, covers the remaining pages of Book ; here, in retrospect, we get glimpses of his education as a boy, before he went to stay with his grandfather. The next main part, B, is the largest one, roughly pages, and it covers the greater part of Cyrus’ military activities before he became a king. But at a closer look, it turns out that the narration is almost exclusively devoted to one year, and that this year – about his twenty-seventh – also comprises his marriage to his cousin (..–, ) and his organization of the empire conquered so far (..–). The narrative of this same year thus continues into the greater part (some of pages) of the third structural unit, B, leaving just one page to summarize the rest of his active life (..–), before it is stated that he is now ‘a very old man’ (mala . . . presbyt¯es) and his father and mother dead long since (..). The remaining seven pages describe his last three days (..–). It may seem strange for a biography to be content to cover in any detail just a couple of the subject’s boyhood years, then one particular, if crucial, year of his mature life, and finally his last three days. Xenophon’s approach is clearly not that of a modern biographer intent on development of character, nor that of an ancient historian (like himself in the Hellenica) structuring the narrative annalistically. It is the typical and the general that occupy him throughout, and Bodil Due demonstrates how he develops a special technique of letting a particular scene turn into a general, and vice versa. He is the pedagogue who in this way imprints his ideological message on the reader’s mind, using the figure of Cyrus to actualize theory. The proportions of a lifespan have no importance in such an undertaking. In fact, his narrative technique studiously conceals what is going on, so that most readers will jump in surprise at the end of the long work, when marriage, grown-up sons, and death at an advanced age come almost all at once.
As cogently argued by Due , –, taking Cyr. .. as her point of departure. See also Beck a, . Philip Stadter in Gray , interprets the text as describing two successive years, but similarly concludes that ‘Xenophon studiously avoids establishing a chronological framework for his central narrative.’ For the interesting suggestion that Xenophon in fact takes over a rhetorical convention of Achaemenid epic-heroic tradition ‘to concentrate the king’s military feats within the framework of one year’, ‘the King’s Year’, see Nylander . See Due , –, –; Due , –. Beck a, – speaks of ‘the interweaving or blending of the iterative and singulative modes’, but does not seem to be aware of Due’s treatment.
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This brief analysis of time and narrative structure in the Cyropaedia has shown that Xenophon chose a different procedure from the one he introduced in the Agesilaus, with its division between deeds (in chronological order) and virtues (systematically arranged). The whole of the Cyropaedia consists, in principle, of chronologically arranged narrative. Yet there is a qualitative difference between the description of Cyrus’ childhood and youth in Book and the rest of the work that has made Philip Stadter apply the Bakhtinian concept of ‘biographical time’ to the Cyropaedia. He divides the work into four phases, one ‘developmental’ and three ‘static’: ‘youth and growth, military campaigns and accession to power through winning of friends and defeat of enemies, devolution of the monarch’s virtue through friends to subjects, and finally last testament and death’. The three last phases (that is, Books –), he maintains, ‘are viewed in the timeless biographical mode, with no sense of growth or development of Cyrus in time’. In a way, this observation would help explain the reader’s sense of surprise when Cyrus’ long life is suddenly at an end. It appears strange, however, to read the bulk of the work as ‘static’ or ‘timeless’. Even though chronological markers are largely missing, there is throughout a sense of chronological succession, not least through the constant growth of Cyrus’ empire. Cyrus himself is continually represented in new situations which demand new skills, so the picture of him is successively expanded. The sense of time passing by is also achieved by secondary characters reappearing in the action, notably the beautiful Panthea and her husband (on whom see below) whose love story is told in segments from Book to . Stadter notes that Bakhtin ‘is thinking especially of Plutarchean biography, to which the description is rather less apposite than to the Cyropaedia’. In fact, the concept ‘timeless biographical mode’ is perhaps applicable to a systematic ‘virtues’ part of a Life, as in Agesilaus, but less so to the Cyropaedia. Exceedingly little of the narrative about Cyrus as an adult has any bearing on his private life. His marriage to his cousin, whose name is never mentioned, is described as a purely political arrangement between the royal houses of Persia and Media, though with a personal touch added; for when the girl’s father presents her to Cyrus, he alludes to the period Cyrus spent at the Median court as a young boy (..):
Stadter , –. Direct quotations from pp. , (bis), n. . See the detailed analysis of time in this section in Beck a, –; he similarly states, ‘In general a chronological progression from one scene to another is consistently maintained’ ().
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1.5 The Education of Cyrus
This is she whom you often tended when you stayed with us as a boy. And whenever anyone asked her whom she would marry, she used to say, ‘Cyrus’.
Nothing of the sort was mentioned in the actual narrative about Cyrus’ boyhood, however, nor are any personal details revealed in the following concerning their relationship as betrothed or as man and wife. Cyrus just seeks his parents’ consent, marries the girl, ‘who is even today said to have been very beautiful’, and sets off with her for Persia (..). To find a love topic truly developed in the Cyropaedia one has to go to the subplot about the beautiful Panthea, who stabs herself to death when she finds her beloved husband Abradatas killed on the battlefield. Cyrus himself is never allowed to be distracted from his leadership duties by any romantic inclinations; his self-control reigns supreme. When Panthea, ‘the most beautiful woman in Asia’ (..), is allotted to him as a prize of war, he refuses even to go to have a look at her, fearing that her exceptional beauty will make him ‘sit gazing at her, neglecting what I have to do’ (..). Instead, he sends a young friend to be her guard, warning him in advance of the power of love (..): I have even seen people in tears from the pain of love; and people enslaved to those they love, even though before they fell in love they believed that it was bad to be enslaved; and people giving away many things of which it was better that they not be deprived; and people praying that they get free from it, just as they would from a disease, and yet not being able to get free, but being bound by some necessity stronger than if they had been bound in iron.
Araspas, the young friend, answers that only weaklings succumb to love in this fashion; nevertheless, he himself falls hopelessly in love with the prisoner and is ready to use force; but he is hindered in his intent by Cyrus, who wants to use Panthea and her husband later for political purposes. The dialogue on love between Cyrus and Araspas shows Cyrus not to be asexual; it is his deep sense of duty that hinders him from romantic affairs. As James Tatum puts it, ‘For Cyrus, the fairest woman in all of Asia is a momentary intrusion of the destabilizing power of Eros in the tightly controlled world of his evolving empire.’ We shall now have a closer look at the childhood description in Book . As mentioned, the place in the narrative where Cyrus’ first eleven or twelve
The reference to the narrator’s present time, often with the phrase ti kaª nÓn, ‘even today’, is a recurring feature of Xenophon’s narrative, see Gray b, and Beck a, –. The story is told in instalments in Books , , and , see Due , –. See also Tatum , –; Stadter , –; Gera , –; and Faulkner , –. Tatum , . Faulkner , characterizes Cyrus as basically ‘cold’ (cf. ..).
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years might have been described is instead occupied by a rather detailed description of the Persian educational system, age class after age class (..–), without any mention of Cyrus even as an illustrative example. This generalized account, cast in the present tense, is preceded by just a brief mention of Cyrus’ doubly royal parentage and an equally summary statement about his nature: ‘Cyrus is still described in word and song by the barbarians as most handsome (kallistos) in appearance and most humane (philanthr¯opotatos) of heart, most eager to learn (philomathestatos), and most ambitious (philotimotatos), so that he endured every labour and faced every risk for the sake of praise’ (..). So much for his natural endowments; ‘he was, moreover’, it is added (..), ‘educated in accordance with the laws (nomoi) of the Persians’. It is, then, the combination of noble descent, supreme nature, and an ingeniously structured educational system that has produced the boy Cyrus who first enters the narrative in the flesh at the age of twelve, ‘or a little more’ (a pseudo-authenticating component, ..). ‘He clearly surpassed all his agemates’, we are told in retrospect, now that the call comes from King Astyages of Media that his daughter Mandane is desired at the court together with her son Cyrus, ‘because he heard that he was noble and good (kalos kagathos)’ (..). At this point, the narrative switches from simply presenting young Cyrus as a paragon to representing him scenically as a boy with a personality of his own that emerges in his meeting with his grandfather and others at the Median court. By placing the boy in novel surroundings Xenophon gets a convenient opportunity to describe characterrevealing incidents and conversations, while an astonished mother and a charmed grandfather guide the reader’s perception of the display. It is, of course, significant that these new surroundings represent a distinctly different way of life: young Cyrus, in his most impressionable years, escapes from the strictly egalitarian Persian system of education to a privileged Median court life where he can freely develop his natural faculties. This is the description of his first meeting with his grandfather (..–): As soon as Cyrus arrived and recognized Astyages as his mother’s father, he immediately – since he was by nature an affectionate (philostorgos) boy – hugged him as if he had been raised with him and been friendly with him for a long time. He saw
As Nadon , n. points out, the superlatives used concerning Cyrus’ reported reputation (lgetai kaª detai) are replaced by more sober positives when the narrator himself describes him: .. filanqrwp©a, filotim©a; .. filomaqv, gc©nouv, polulog©a, pl»thv, filostorg©a; .. pmpan p©cariv. On Cyrus’ ‘multicultural education’, see Nadon , –.
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1.5 The Education of Cyrus
him adorned with eye shadow, rouge, and a wig – as was, of course, customary among the Medes. . . . Seeing the adornment of his grandfather, he looked at him and said, ‘Mother, how handsome my grandfather is!’ And when his mother asked him whom he thought more handsome, Astyages or his father, Cyrus answered, ‘Mother, of the Persians, my father is the most handsome by far; of the Medes, however, my grandfather here is by far the most handsome of those I have seen both in the streets and at court.’ Hugging him in return, his grandfather put a beautiful robe on him and honoured and adorned him with necklaces and bracelets, and if he went out somewhere, he took him along on a horse with a golden bridle, just as he himself was accustomed to travel. Since Cyrus was a boy who loved beauty and honour (philokalos, philotimos), he was pleased with the robe and greatly delighted at learning to ride. . . . When Astyages dined with his daughter and Cyrus, he wished the boy to dine as pleasantly as possible so that he might yearn less for what he had left at home. He thus put before him fancy side dishes and all sorts of sauces and meats; and they say (ephasan) that Cyrus remarked, ‘Grandfather, how much trouble you have at dinner, if you have to stretch out your hands to all these little dishes and taste all these different sorts of meat!’ ‘What?’ Astyages said. ‘Does not this dinner seem much finer to you than your Persian dinners?’ To this Cyrus answered: ‘No, grandfather, for the road to satisfaction is much more simple and direct among us than among you, for bread and meat take us to it. You hurry to the same place as we do, yet only after wandering back and forth and in circles do you finally arrive at the point that we reached long ago.’ ‘But, my boy’, Astyages said, ‘we are not distressed to wander about as we do. Taste them’, he added, ‘and you too will realize that they are pleasant.’ ‘And yet I see’, said Cyrus, ‘that even you, grandfather, are disgusted with these meats.’ And Astyages asked again, ‘On what evidence do you say this, my boy?’ ‘Because’, he said, ‘I see that when you touch your bread, you do not wipe your hand on anything; but when you touch any of these, you immediately cleanse your hand on your napkin, as if you were most distressed that it had become soiled with them.’
As we see, the description vacillates between the particular and the habitual, as is typical of the whole account of young Cyrus’ two or three years at the Median court. In this scene, he immediately on his arrival meets his host, yet he knows already how people look in the streets and at court; and before what appears to be their first dinner together, when everything is new to Cyrus, the two have already made a habit of riding out together. Verbs in the imperfect tense that may be thought to indicate iteration are mixed with lively argument of a once-only nature. A light documentary air is provided by the reporting verbs appearing in the infinitive, governed by
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one single, indefinite ephasan, ‘they say’, ‘reportedly’; the narrator provides no more specific indication of his sources for these glimpses of private or semi-private conversations. The character trait most emphatically revealed in the boy’s exchanges with his grandfather the king is his boldness. He does not let power, prestige, or foreign surroundings intimidate him; he comments freely – and often naively – on what he observes; he is quick-minded, self-confident, and yet sensitive. At the same time, he is emotional, ready for spontaneous hugging and kissing, and quickly wins his grandfather’s affection, and soon also his respect. His innocence is often paraded, to the amusement of those present, as when he suspects the king’s cupbearer of having put poison in the drinking-bowl at the king’s birthday feast. The king asks why he thinks so, and the boy answers (..): Because, by Zeus, I saw you all making mistakes, both in your judgements and with your bodies, for in the first place, you were doing what you do not allow us boys to do. You all shouted at the same time, and you did not understand each other at all. Then you sang very ridiculously, and even though you did not listen to the singer, you swore that he sang most excellently. Though each of you spoke of his own strength, yet if you stood up to dance, far from dancing in time with the rhythm, you could not even stand up straight. You all forgot yourselves entirely, you that you were king, the others that you were their ruler (arkh¯on). Then at last I understood, for the first time, that what you were practising was your boasted ‘liberty of speech’ (is¯egoria); at least, you were never silent.
Along with the humorous application of the boy’s perspective, the description also has a moral, as often related to a ruler’s right behaviour. Cyrus is not simply too young to know what drinking is, believing the whole company to have been poisoned; more importantly, he has been brought up at the more austere Persian court, where his father the king ‘just quenches his thirst and suffers no harm’ (..). Now, the years at the Median court also witness a notable change in the boy’s behaviour, from childish spontaneity and excessive talkativeness (..) to the more reserved attitude of a teenager (..): But as he grew in stature and time brought him to the age when one becomes a young man (pros¯ebos), he then used fewer words and a gentler voice. He was so filled with shame that he blushed whenever he encountered his elders, and his
Similarly lgetai, .. et passim. As the narrator says explicitly in .. Þv n pa±v mhdpw Ëpoptsswn, ‘as would a boy not yet afraid’. On banquets, Persian and Median, in the Cyropaedia, see Gera , –; on this particular scene, –. See also Tatum , –.
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1.5 The Education of Cyrus
puppyish running up to all alike was no longer so prominent in him. So he became more quiet, to be sure, but altogether charming (epikharis) in social intercourse.
This new moderation continues being thematized, although most of the narrative is occupied by young Cyrus’ astounding hunting feats. He feels that he has no longer the easy access to his grandfather he had as an impulsive child (..): I do not know what sort of fellow I have become! For I cannot speak to my grandfather, nor am I capable of looking at him as I did before. If I advance in this direction, I am afraid I may become a mere dolt and simpleton. Yet when I was a little boy (paidarion), I seemed to be quite clever at small talk (lalein).
It is important to note this insistence on character development taking place in the biographee’s childhood and on the problems it causes, more emphasized in the boy’s apprehension of his own metamorphosis than evident in his actual contacts with others. The prominence the narrator at the same time gives to Cyrus’ steadily increasing skills in riding and hunting, in which he outdoes his agemates, is recognizable from other (shorter) Xenophontic descriptions of a hero’s youth, for instance, that of Cyrus the Younger in the Anabasis (.). If more nuanced, the account is no less panegyric here than it used to be. So what makes this a landmark text in Greek biography, besides the lively description of Cyrus’ first encounter with a strange new world, is the psychological interest in his development from a child to a young boy, aptly highlighting the bewilderment it causes in the boy’s own mind. Some modern critics are eager to emphasize that Xenophon’s Cyrus is meant to appear not only charming as a child and virtuous as a man, but also consistently manipulative: ‘from the moment he first appears as a little boy in the court of his grandfather Astyages, he is ruthlessly self-serving and subversive of the status quo’. This machiavellian reading of Xenophon has little support in the text, particularly in the childhood description, and seems to rest on some anachronistic assumptions. There is no reason to think that Xenophon wants his readers to get a mixed impression of Cyrus, as both eminently honourable and ruthless. When as an adult he
This aspect is forgotten when Xenophon’s description of Cyrus the child is simply equated with the common ancient depiction of the child as ‘an embryonic version of the adult’, thus Tatum , . Tatum , . See also Too ; Nadon , –. Gera , –, in a careful analysis, finds that Xenophon for most of the Cyropaedia portrays Cyrus ‘quite simply as a model figure to be emulated’ (), but makes an exception for Cyrus in Babylon (.–.), where the ideal ruler sometimes yields to the ‘benevolent despot’ (–). The narratological analysis of Gray b arrives at a similar general conclusion: praise ‘without any reservation or a trace of irony’ ().
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
deceives the enemy, this belongs to the prerequisites for successful military leadership and does not reflect on his character. In fact, Xenophon later (..–) lets Cyrus’ father make a special point in explaining to his son that the art of deception should not be taught to children, but only to adults, who have acquired a firm sense of propriety and will apply the art only to their foes. It follows that Cyrus the boy is depicted as childishly innocent of mind, using his charm and cleverness to have his will, as any child would do, without the narrator wanting us to think that he deliberately ‘manipulates’ his mother, grandfather, or playmates, or that his behaviour prefigures any character defects in the future conqueror and ruler. That Cyrus now approaches his passage from boy to ephebe, which in Persia happened at the age of or (..), is visible in his outer life as well: hunting adventures are succeeded by the real thing, battle experience. Against the intentions of his grandfather and uncle, he takes an active part when an Assyrian intrusion into Median territory is beaten off. His wilfulness and obvious fascination with the dead bodies on the battlefield make his grandfather decide to rid himself of the responsibility by sending the youngster home to Persia. Cyrus’ emotional parting with family and friends at the court is described, including a paidikos logos which Xenophon feigns reluctance to mention, yet tells in some detail (..–). A noble Mede (his age is not disclosed) watches how Cyrus, in accordance with Persian custom, kisses his relatives goodbye on the mouth. He has long been struck with the boy’s beauty and often gazed at him from a distance. He now approaches and pretends that he too is a relative of Cyrus, and on various pretexts succeeds in getting several kisses (compare Ion of Chios’ equally innocent paidikos logos about Sophocles). All is told in a humorous mode. Cyrus seemingly appreciates the ruse and the scene ends in laughter. The Mede, whose name is Artabazus, reappears several times later in the story as a loyal friend of Cyrus, wishes to be together with him as much as possible, and at his last appearance still yearns for a kiss (..). Xenophon is anxious, however, to make it clear that their constant flirting never develops into any pederastic relationship. As in the episode with the beautiful Panthea, Cyrus is depicted as a person perfectly open to erotic attraction, but with a vocation as a leader that prevents him from yielding to any such temptation.
Variously translated: ‘a sentimental story’ (Miller), ‘a tale of boyish love’ (Dakyns), ‘an account about a boyfriend’ (Ambler), ‘a story of boy-love’ (Tatum).
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1.5 The Education of Cyrus
On his return to Persia, Cyrus enters the collective educational system again, gets rid of his luxurious Median habits, and quickly recovers a leading position in his age class. After a year, he enters among the ephebes, again ‘superior in attending to duty, in being steadfast, in respecting his elders, and in obeying the rulers’ (..). Nothing of an individual kind is told about the ten years he spends in this capacity; his characteristic openness as well as the narrator’s interest in his mental development seem to have disappeared at the moment he passed the border to Persia. He next appears in the story as a mature man (..) when his uncle Cyaxares, who has succeeded Astyages on the Median throne, needs his help against the Assyrians. Cyrus is appointed commander of the Persian expeditionary force to Media and his father, King Cambyses, accompanies him to the border. As noted above, the ensuing dialogue between father and son covers almost twenty pages (.), as much narrative time as the whole account of Cyrus’ years at this grandfather’s court. The dialogue is retrospect in nature, summing up and supplementing the instruction in leadership and piety that Cyrus has received as a boy and youth. His father is the wise teacher and unchallenged authority thoughout; nothing of the independent mind that Cyrus showed in conversation with his Median grandfather is revealed here. The balance necessary to create a dialogue is achieved through an ingenious use of memory. ‘Do you remember . . . ?’, Cambyses asks repeatedly, and his son answers, ‘Yes, I do indeed remember . . . ’, giving an account of the lessons he has received from professional educators or, in particular, his father in earlier years. So what we hear is in fact the father in dialogue with himself, and Cyrus’ role throughout is to play the obedient son and ideal pupil. This is the kyrou paideia in essence, an advanced course in the art of arkhein te kai arkhesthai, ‘to rule and be ruled’, ‘command and obey’ (..). When Xenophon engages this didactic gear, as he does for long stretches in the Cyropaedia, characterization of his hero and mouthpiece is largely sacrificed to his principal purpose: to persuade and instruct. This is no doubt the main reason why various attempts at a psychologically consistent interpretation of Xenophon’s Cyrus have failed. As James Tatum notes, though his conclusion is a different one, ‘there are as many Cyruses as the sum of the people he meets’.
mmnhsai; / mmnhmai .., , , , (bis), pelqou; .., and other varieties, such as ‘What I know you have often heard’ (pollkiv kkoav ..). One further glimpse of his pre-Median education has already been given in ..– in conversation with his mother. Tatum , . Tatum sees these character shifts as part of Cyrus’ constant manipulation of his surroundings.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
Three hundred pages later old Cyrus, now king of a large empire with its capital in Media, is on his seventh official visit to Persia when he has a dream. A superhuman figure addresses him (..): ‘Get ready, Cyrus, for you are soon going away to the gods!’ Realizing that the end of his life is near, he sacrifices and prays to the gods. In his prayer, he thanks the gods who through various signs have always shown him what to do and what not to do, and have never let his successes foster hubris in him. He asks them to keep on giving happiness (eudaimonia) to his sons, wife, friends, and fatherland, and to grant himself an end consonant with his life. He goes to bed, declines his habitual bath and his dinner, but drinks ‘with pleasure’ (h¯ede¯os). When this procedure has been repeated the second and third day, he calls for his sons, who happen to have accompanied him to Persia; this is the first time we meet them in the narrative, and they remain silent to the end. Apparently, his wife is not present, but that fact merits no comment. In the presence of sons, friends, and magistrates he starts his last speech (..–): My sons and all my friends who are here, the end of my life is now at hand. I know this clearly from many things. When I die, you must say and do everything about me as about one who was happy (eudaim¯on). For when I was a boy, I think I plucked the fruits considered best among boys; when I was a youth, those considered best among youths; and when I became a mature man, those considered best among men. As time went on, I seemed to observe that my strength was always increasing, so that I never perceived even my old age to be weaker than my youth, and I do not know that I attempted or desired anything that I did not obtain. Moreover, I beheld my friends becoming happy because of me, and my enemies enslaved by me.
This retrospect on a perfectly happy life continues with some more points: Cyrus has brought honour to his country, maintained all his conquests, and escaped excessive pride and happiness through a constant fear that he might ‘see, hear, or suffer something harsh (khalepos)’ – obviously a variation on the theme that Solon elaborates upon in Herodotus (.– ) that one should refrain from calling anybody happy (olbios) until he is dead (.., cf. ..). The last criterion for happiness that Cyrus mentions (..), that he has sons who survive him, is another commonplace that he shares with Solon (Hdt. ..). Not surprisingly, the dying Cyrus has several points in common with Agesilaus at the end of his long life, notably ‘a young soul in an old body’ (Ages. .–) and the Solonian dictum about happiness (.).
For further echoes in the Cyropaedia of the exchange between Solon and Croesus, see Gera , . See also Mueller-Goldingen , –.
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1.5 The Education of Cyrus
The rest of the speech has two main topics: advice to his sons (..–, –) and reflections about the immortality of the soul (..–). Cyrus decides that his eldest son, Cambyses, shall inherit the throne, because his age makes him the more experienced of the two. No further reason is given, and nothing more is said to characterize him, nor is the younger son (who gets some satrapies to govern) granted any characterization. Cyrus now uses all his energy to teach the two how to behave as ruler and ruled, as brothers, and as the sons of a great father and conqueror. This is a counterpart, on a smaller scale, to the Kyrou paideia he himself received from his father before going to war; but it is just a one-way monologue, and the sons’ response to the teaching is not indicated in any way. Xenophon is obviously not interested in creating a family around Cyrus, even at the time of his death; it is just the dynastic aspects that make the sons appear in the story at all (and, by the same token, make their mother’s presence dispensable); and it is the impending threat of a struggle for power between the brothers that explains the almost desperate insistence and detailedness of Cyrus’ advice. In reality, the two brothers’ bitter enmity and murderous internal fighting were to cause the beginning of the downfall of the empire created by Cyrus, as is indicated in the postscript (..). It is possible to read this part of Cyrus’ farewell address as an exercise in tragic irony: author and reader know that he speaks to completely deaf ears. Probably, however, it is to be taken at face value, as it is sandwiched between genuinely serious arguments: the plea for Cyrus’ own perfect eudaimonia and the (qualified) claim for the immortality of the soul. Just as Solon the wise statesman was an obvious point of reference in the first part, without being named, it is now in the third in Socrates’ clothes that Xenophon lets his hero array himself, and not for the first time: several of the discussions in the Cyropaedia share both formal and material traits with Socrates’ conversing in the Memorabilia. The whole farewell speech was much admired and quoted in antiquity, in particular the discussion of the soul, part of which Cicero translated in his Cato Maior De senectute (–). But to be the finale of a biography, it is curiously impersonal and lacking in emotion; it is enough to compare it to Socrates’ parting with family and friends in the Phaedo to see how such a scene might be constructed. The very last lines, however, are not lacking in pathos (..–): ‘But now’, he added, ‘my soul seems to me to be leaving from the very point from which, as it appears, it begins to leave everyone. So if any one of you either wishes
See Gera , –, ‘Socrates in Persia’.
See Gera , –.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
to touch my right hand or wants to look me in the eye while I am still alive, let him approach. When I cover myself (egkalups¯omai), I ask you, my sons, let no human being see my body any longer, not even you yourselves. But summon all Persians and our allies to my grave to share in my joy, for I will now be in security, since I can suffer no evil any more, whether I am with the divine or no longer exist at all. All those who come, do to them all the good things that are customary in honour of a happy man, and then send them back. And’, he said, ‘remember this last word of mine, that by benefiting your friends, you will also be able to punish your enemies. Farewell, my dear sons; report a farewell to your mother in my name. All you present and absent friends, farewell.’ After these words, he shook the right hand of each, covered himself (sunekalupsato), and so died.
The references to Socrates’ last minutes in the Phaedo are evident: the part of the body from which life begins to ebb no doubt alludes to feet and legs as specified by Plato (e), and Cyrus covering himself echoes Socrates covering and uncovering his face (a). Cyrus, however, asks to be spared the humiliation suffered by Socrates, to have his face uncovered to check that he is really dead. Nor has this death scene singled out anyone, family member or friend, whom we would naturally expect to play Crito, closing his mouth and eyes. The scene is monologic to the end. Xenophon’s account of Cyrus’ death is an apt point of departure for a few concluding remarks about fact and fiction in the Cyropaedia. Herodotus had let Cyrus die a violent death on the battlefield (..– ). Ctesias, in his Persica, also had him fatally wounded in battle, but left him time, before he died, to arrange for his succession and admonish his family. Xenophon, in contrast, has chosen to grant his hero a peaceful death at a ‘very old’ age. Whatever sources he may have had in addition, this is clearly an ideological choice. He is anxious to have Cyrus looking back at a successfully completed life-work, and have him preach about happiness, concord, and immortality. Cyrus is now the wise king, no more the conqueror, and can leave this world content with years and achievements. This free attitude to history is typical of the whole work. The family members and friends we met at the beginning of the story are
On the absence of reliable sources for Persian history before ca. , see Briant , –; according to his reconstruction of the chronology (, –), Cyrus succeeded his father Cambyses (I) as king of Persia in , conquered Media and dethroned Astyages in , conquered Babylon in , and died in , immediately to be succeeded by his eldest son Cambyses (II). FGrHist F.–, from Photius, Bibl. cod. , death at p. a–. For similarities and differences between Xenophon and Ctesias, see Gera , –. On possible Persian sources, see discussion in Sancisi-Weerdenburg ; Gera , –, –; Tuplin , –; and Lombardi .
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1.5 The Education of Cyrus
partly historical figures, partly the author’s own invention. And those who are historical have shifted character and function. Xenophon has avoided the scenario of cruelty, rivalry, and revenge that filled earlier accounts, and instead created an harmonious extended family, with young Cyrus as the beloved prince moving between Persian puritanism and Median liberty, assimilating and storing for the future the best of both cultures – as Xenophon himself had participated in both Athenian and Spartan society. How, then, are we to explain the constant deviations from known history? Perhaps, as Philip Stadter suggests in a penetrating discussion of Xenophon’s ‘fictional narrative’, the question is wrongly put. Xenophon simply did not set out to write historiography this time: ‘Xenophon’s idealization is essentially utopian, like Plato’s Republic. It describes not what has been, but what ought to be.’ Unlike Plato, he chose narrative as his medium, because it is didactically superior to any abstract discussion. Moreover, Cyrus the Great was a stock ingredient in contemporary Greek discussion; so Xenophon used an historical figure who already had an established reputation as an empire-builder, but filled the character with his own ideals of leadership in war and peace. He may have expected that his historiographical reputation and style would make his readers accept Cyrus and his world as historical realities, at least long enough to be absorbed by the story; but he can have had no illusions himself as to what he was actually doing. ‘Utopian biography’, then, would be a proper definition of what Xenophon created in his third book-length exercise in biographical writing. This term serves at least to distinguish the Cyropaedia from the Agesilaus: the Cyropaedia is no encomium, it was not written to praise the great Persian king, it rather uses him and his established reputation to propagate a contemporary ideal of leadership. An encomium like the Agesilaus also set up a model for imitation and preferred ideal to reality wherever there was a conflict; but it did so within certain limits necessitated by the subject’s closeness in time and place. By choosing the distant Cyrus, Xenophon was able to fill both the person, his environment, and his achievement with his
Stadter . For a different view of history and fiction in Xenophon’s work, see Tuplin , – and cf. Stadter in Gray , . Stadter , . Compare Cicero Q Fr. ..: Cyrus ille a Xenophonte non ad historiae fidem scriptus sed ad effigiem iusti imperi. See Plato Menex. d–e, Leg. a–b, Epin. , d; Isocrates Evag. –, Phil. . On Antisthenes’ lost Cyrus, see Gera , – and Mueller-Goldingen , –. Pace Zimmermann , –.
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In the beginning was Xenophon: Memoir, encomium, romance
own ideas and ideals, without risking criticism from contemporary Greeks. Socrates, his first biographical subject, had been quite another matter in this respect. In fact, the reception of the Cyropaedia through the centuries – from Cicero to Machiavelli – shows that it has mostly been read, and appreciated, for its ideological message. The notion that Xenophon wanted to present a psychologically credible picture of the historical Cyrus is of a fairly recent date.
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c h ap t er 2
Hellenistic theory and practice Fragments of industry
What emerges from our enquiry is a confirmation of our hypothesis . . . Arnaldo Momigliano
2.1 fragments and hypotheses From the first half of the fourth century bc, most of the texts that from a biographical point of view appear to have been important have actually survived; but none of them has bios in its title, and a narrowly biographical interest did not seem to be their main driving force. For the second half of the same century, the reverse is true: Lives were written and so called in the title, an unmistakably biographical form was established – but no single work has survived in anything like its complete form. Yet the fragments and testimonia are numerous enough to preclude any reasonable doubt that this was a crucial period in the history of ancient biography; also, alas, to allow the construction of several conflicting hypotheses regarding the form and purpose of the various Lives we know were produced in the late fourth as well as the following centuries of the Hellenistic age. Thus, Friedrich Leo, in his effort to trace the formal pedigree of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, concluded that there had been two distinct types of Greek biography originating in early Hellenistic times: one ‘Peripatetic’, going back to Aristotle and his immediate followers, and one ‘Alexandrian’ or ‘grammatical’, created a generation later by learned members of the Mouseion. The former was more artistic, the latter more scholarly; the former was originally used for the lives of political-historical figures and directed to a wider audience, while the latter had a didactic aim and was primarily occupied with poets and philosophers. Suetonius, Leo surmised, had started using the Alexandrian form for his Lives of grammarians and
Leo .
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
other men of letters and then simply transferred the same style to his new enterprise on the emperors; this is why instead of narrating the events of an emperor’s life in their historical order, he breaks off and describes his activities in a systematic manner, until resuming the narrative thread at the end. Plutarch, then, with his more strictly chronological framework and artistic manner of composition, would represent the Peripatetic tradition. Although this attractive schema has subsisted for a century in handbooks and general descriptions, it was in fact soon challenged by other scholars and partly blurred through the finding of new texts, such as the extensive papyrus fragment of Satyrus’ Life of Euripides first published in . Some have modified Leo’s schema or suggested different ones; but the more fundamental criticism concerns the schematizing as such, the way of looking upon the formation and reproduction of an ancient literary genre as if it had an external history of its own. Wolf Steidle, in his work on Suetonius, came to the opposite conclusion: ‘for the composition of ancient biography the decisive factor at any time is exclusively the special subject, that is, the individual way of life of the person to be described, rather than any abstractly formal distinction between literary and political personalities’. Each biographer, he contends, will have been able to choose, among a multitude of forms and possibilities, what suited his immediate purpose best; there were no ‘generic laws’ or external schemata to decide his choice, although through the community of purpose and cultural context writers came to favour some artistic principles (Gestaltungsprinzipien) before others. To put it in another way, the biographical genre that gradually came into being had a core but no sharp outlines. It may be defined on the basis of the rhetorical strategies and topoi its practitioners favoured – its fixierte Konventionen – but there is no reason to believe that it developed any distinct subgenres, still less subsisted as two separate biographical genres as Leo assumed. If that had been the case, the fragments could anyway not have told us so: as Albrecht Dihle stresses, to write Formgeschichte with only fragments and late indirect sources at one’s disposal is virtually impossible. These few hints about the literary-historical debate will have to suffice; others have recorded it in more detail. The primary purpose of the present
POxy. in Hunt ; for other biographical papyri, see Gallo and . Steidle , . On Steidle’s argument, see further the review by Dihle . Free paraphrase of Steidle , , who proceeds to give a useful list of what he regards as the most important Gestaltungsprinzipien. See Dihle , –. The term from Dihle , . Arrighetti , – and ; Gallo , – = , –; Momigliano , –; Dihle , –; Cooper , –.
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2.2 Aristoxenus’ Lives of Pythagoras and Socrates
study is to interpret the surviving texts; but the fragmentary state of the material at hand not only vitiated Leo’s historical approach, it also hinders a sustained literary analysis and appreciation of these pioneering works. Still, since this is doubtless one of the most important phases in the development of Greek biography, a few fragments of different kinds and periods will be presented here, to exemplify the sorts of evidence available and the difficulties one faces trying to make sense of the remains. Nothing like a complete coverage of texts and problems is intended. 2.2 aristoxenus’ lives of pythagoras and socrates In the preface to his compendium On Illustrious Men (ad ), Jerome evokes his great predecessor in the biographical undertaking, Suetonius, and his work of the same title, De viris illustribus. Presumably following Suetonius, Jerome then lists the names of those who ‘did the same thing (fecerunt . . . hoc idem) among the Greeks’: ‘Hermippus the Peripatetic, Antigonus of Carystus, the learned Satyrus, and by far the most learned of them all, Aristoxenus the musician’. (The list continues with four Latin counterparts, in addition to Suetonius; see below, Ch. ..) If by ‘doing the same thing’ Suetonius just meant writing biography, rather than specifically ‘compiling a biographical compendium of famous men’, his canon not only mirrors the self-understanding of later biographers but also corresponds roughly to what the surviving fragments of Hellenistic biography seem to tell us. Although the list should obviously not be understood as exhaustive, all these four certainly were industrious – and in all likelihood also particularly influential – writers of Lives. I shall discuss each of them in turn. Aristoxenus of Tarentum (ca. –after bc), according to the Suda the author of no fewer than books, was best known in later antiquity, as he is today, for his musicological writings. Biography of course is notoriously ephemeral; either the person portrayed fades away from public interest, or ‘modern’ biographies replace the outdated ones. This is the mechanism obviously at work when, for instance, Aristoxenus’ Life of Pythagoras was succeeded by several others in the Imperial period when interest in the old sage resurfaced (see below, Ch. .). Aristoxenus was also known, on the
Jerome’s De viris illustribus is available in the critical edition of Ceresa-Gastaldo and the English translation of Halton . Aristoxenus Fr. b Wehrli = iv-– Kaiser ; FGrHist ivA , (Hermippos of Smyrna) T. For discussion of the list’s exemplary character, see Brugnoli , –.
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gossipy side of biographical tradition, to have behaved as a bad loser when it turned out that Aristotle had designated Theophrastus rather than himself to succeed him as head of the Lyceum (Suda s.v., fr. Wehrli). We may extract as historical fact from the anecdote that at the time of Aristotle’s death in Aristoxenus was a central member of the Peripatetic school. The professionalization of biography production in the late fourth century is no doubt closely linked to the Peripatos, as a result of its systematic development of ethical-psychological theories combined with its habit of exoteric writing (starting with Aristotle himself ). Aristoxenus then was well placed to become a biographical innovator. Of Aristoxenus’ biographical monographs (a part of his literary output not even specifically mentioned in the Suda), fragments have survived of five: the Lives of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Archytas (a Pythagorean philosopher roughly contemporary with Plato), and Telestes (a writer of dithyrambs, ca. bc). In addition, there are fragments from two or three further works dealing with Pythagorean doctrine and lifestyle, possibly within a biographical framework like later writings of this type. To judge from the transmitted titles On Tragic Poets and On Flute-Players, he may perhaps have composed works of collective biography as well, although the tiny fragments deriving from these works give no indication of scale or purpose. They may simply have been essays discussing the work of various practitioners of these arts, perhaps from a musicological viewpoint. We shall look more closely at two of the monographical Lives, those of Pythagoras and Socrates, apparently quite different in attitude. Some reservation is necessary since the fragments on which we have to base our opinion are almost exclusively quotations found in later literature (rather than random papyrus fragments of the works themselves). Such quotations were normally made with a bias or at least for a specific purpose; for example, if many passages that survive from Aristoxenus’ Life of Pythagoras
The fragment numbers are those of Wehrli throughout. Since no concordance starting from Wehrli’s numbers is provided in the new collection of Kaiser , the Kaiser numbering is given here for all the fragments to be discussed in the following: fr. Wehrli = (x)-– Kaiser, fr. a W = ii-– K, fr. b W = iv-– K, frs. a–c W = ii-– K, fr. W = iii-– K, fr. W = iii-– K, fr. W = iv-– K, fr. W = iii-– K, fr. W = v-– K, fr. W = iii-– K, fr. W = iv-– K, fr. a W = v-– K, fr. b W = v-– K, fr. W = ii-– K, fr. W = iv-– K, fr. W = iii-– K, fr. W = INC-– K. See Dihle , – and , –, . Arnaldo Momigliano’s judgement that ‘Hellenistic biography is to be considered a Peripatetic speciality only in a limited sense’ (Momigliano , ) concerns the continuation of the practice, not its origin. According to Arrighetti , – and Brugnoli , – (with n. ), there was no Peripatetic biography at all, only the development of techniques that later resulted in ‘true’ biography. Brugnoli , (with further refs. to the discussion) discounts Aristoxenus as biographer; contra Cooper .
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2.2 Aristoxenus’ Lives of Pythagoras and Socrates
are laudatory, this may at least in part be due to the fact that they derive from the encomiastic Lives of Pythagoras written in the Imperial age; these would hardly have quoted any negative judgements, if there were such. Conversely, critical statements about Socrates were apt to be more interesting than positive ones to the Christian writers in whom a good number of those fragments are found. Such potential distortion will have to be checked along the road. Still, it would not be unnatural if the life of a sage from the legendary past turned out differently from that of someone who had walked the streets of Athens just a few decades before the biographer’s birth. The empiricism for which Aristoxenus is known through his musicological writings clearly had better working conditions in the latter case. Three witnesses (frs. a–c) unanimously declare that Aristoxenus called Pythagoras a Tyrrhenian (as opposed to a Samian). Besides perhaps betraying an Italian bias in the Tarentine author, this indicates that Aristoxenus did not write in the scholarly style we know, for instance, from the beginnings of Diogenes Laertius’ and Porphyry’s Lives of Pythagoras, where a registering of opinions – A says X, but B says Y, while C says Z – often replaces narrative. Whether this bare statement, ‘Tyrrhenian’, is a condensation of an introductory section on Pythagoras’ genos and patris, we cannot know; Aristoxenus himself may simply have used the ethnikon and spent no time on topical preliminaries of the kind we know from Isocrates’ encomium and later biography. Even the fact that these fragments of Aristoxenus have been placed first in our editions informs us of nothing other than modern editors’ own expectations for a biography. Neither the birth, childhood, and education nor the death of Pythagoras are to be found among our fragments of Pythagoras (only five printed pages in all; another six contain fragments ascribed to Aristoxenus’ other Pythagorean works). Some scraps are concerned with the chronology and topography of his life, some with his teachers and pupils; it is in connection with names and other hard facts that later writers are apt to provide a source reference, especially if there are variants, and this in turn allows the modern scholar to identify a ‘fragment’. One particular trait of his character and ideology, his will to freedom, recurs in several of the fragments and is thus probably a trait that Aristoxenus wanted to emphasize. He is said to have left Samos for Italy at the age of forty because he ‘saw that Polycrates’ rule
See Mess , . The fragments of Aristoxenus’ Life of Pythagoras are available with comments in Wehrli , –, –. For a recent discussion from a biographical point of view, see Cooper , –. Wehrli , .
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
(tyrannis) was too strict to allow a free man to endure the supervision and despotism’ (fr. ). Furthermore, he liberated the cities in Italy and Sicily that had been enslaved, ‘filled them with a free spirit through those who listened to him in each place’, and instituted beneficial laws envied by the neighbouring cities (fr. ). His unwillingness to tolerate anything despotic in a person’s character, according to Aristoxenus, even indirectly led to the catastrophe that befell the Pythagoreans in Italy in the master’s old age (fr. ): Cylon, a Crotoniate, first among the citizens in family, reputation, and wealth, but otherwise ill-tempered, violent, turbulent, and despotic in character, showed great enthusiasm to share in the Pythagorean way of life, and approached Pythagoras, who was now an old man. But he was rejected as unfit for the aforementioned reasons. When this happened, both he and his friends began a violent struggle against Pythagoras and his disciples, and so excessive and intemperate was the ambitious rivalry of Cylon himself and those with him, that it extended to the very last Pythagoreans. Pythagoras, then, for this reason, departed to Metapontium, and is said to have brought his life to an end there. But those called Cylonians continued to quarrel with the Pythagoreans, and to show total enmity.
Finally, most of the Pythagorean leaders were killed when the Cylonians set fire to the house where they were having a meeting; and this meant the end of the Pythagorean dominance in the region. It is tolerably certain that most of this description – which we read in Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Way of Life (ca. ad ; below, Ch. .) – really derives from Aristoxenus. The borrowed passage presumably starts where our quotation starts (.) and ends about a page later with the phrase (.): ‘This, then, is the account of Aristoxenus.’ Iamblichus may have restyled it to a certain extent, but the clear narrative flow, the poignant characterization of Cylon, and the matter-of-fact reporting of the tragic events are no doubt to be ascribed to his source. At this early stage of the Pythagorean legend, there had not yet accumulated all the alternative versions of events that conscientious later writers of Lives had to report. This is not, of course, to say that these later writers necessarily belonged to an Alexandrian scholarly tradition, while Aristoxenus was a Peripatetic; the difference may be explained largely by their respective place in the development of the legend and the number of written sources available to each. It may alternatively be the case that Aristoxenus deliberately manipulated his account of the Cylonian revolt, as Fritz Wehrli attempts to show by
Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life –, trans. Dillon and Hershbell , .
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2.2 Aristoxenus’ Lives of Pythagoras and Socrates
adducing other historical sources. Rather than lacking divergent sources, he would on this hypothesis have himself suppressed facts that were negative to the Pythagorean side in the conflict and made his own version as convincing as possible by rhetorical means. There is nothing improbable in the suggestion that with his native Pythagorean background this naturalized Peripatetic should have been partial in favour of his old school. However, the crucial fragments derive from Porphyry and Iamblichus and we cannot know what these late disseminators of Pythagorean philosophy, while allegedly quoting the authoritative Aristoxenus, in reality omitted, added, or changed. Consequently, the degree to which Aristoxenus was deliberately tendentious in his account cannot be determined. Aristoxenus’ Lives, so Friedrich Leo asserts, were all written ‘in Affect’, out of hatred to one, love to another, and religious veneration towards the One, Pythagoras. It is difficult, though, to find the judgement substantiated when one turns to the fragments. The pieces from the Life of Pythagoras and the Pythagorean Way of Life breathe sympathy and intimate personal knowledge of the Pythagorean ideals, but hardly veneration. Those from the Life of Socrates often concentrate, it is true, on the philosopher’s low social standing: he was a stonemason, like his father (fr. ); on his moneymaking and moneylending (fr. ); on his sexual habits: he had been the boy-love (paidika) of Archytas and he was promiscuous (fr. ); and not least on his bad temper (fr. et passim). Yet this information is given in a registering rather than an emotional, let alone hateful, tone. If there really was such a tone originally – Cyril of Alexandria in his work Against Julian (ca. ad –) refers to Aristoxenus’ ‘enmity’ (dysmeneia) towards Socrates (fr. ) – it has disappeared when Aristoxenus was filtered through Porphyry’s Philosophic History, the lost third book of which is the immediate source of the more substantial quotations from this life that we read in the Church Fathers.
Wehrli , –. Leo , –. This verdict is still echoed in scholarly literature, e.g., Wehrli b, (‘. . . der Geh¨assigkeit, womit er u¨ ber Sokrates und Platon schrieb’); D¨oring , (‘ein ziemlich unfreundliches, ja geh¨assiges Sokratesportr¨at’). See also Guthrie , with n. = , on ‘that curiously sour character A.’, whose statements are then mistranslated (fr. ) or misinterpreted (frs. –); Aristoxenus’ eyewitness report on Socrates’ ‘passionate nature’ is conceded only because Xenophon too gives an instance (Mem. ..–). Rather than accusing Socrates of teaching against payment, the point here seems to be usury. Cr¨onert , (supported by Wehrli , ; contra Kaiser , ) changes the text and translates: ‘er legte das Geld auf Zinsen und sammelte das abgeworfene Kleingeld; wenn sich dann die Summe verdoppelt hatte, lieh er sie aufs neue aus.’ See also Mess , –. The fragments of Aristoxenus’ Life of Socrates are available in Wehrli , –, –.
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
The spirit in which these quotations were collected by Christian writers comes to the fore in Cyril’s introductory exclamation: ‘Come let us first see how he (really) was, this Socrates who is so acclaimed among them!’ (fr. a). They are looking for something other than the idealized picture provided by the Socratics and perpetuated within the Academy, for the ‘real’ Socrates; and this is what they believe they have found in Aristoxenus’ description as reported by Porphyry. Here is one example from Theodoret of Cyrrhus (Cure of Hellenic Maladies .–, fr. b): Porphyry, in his Philosophic History, first reports that Socrates was irascible and easily roused to anger, using as his witness Aristoxenus in his Life of Socrates. Aristoxenus says he has never met anyone more persuasive (pithanos) than Socrates. Such was his voice and mouth and visible ¯ethos, and, above all, his very particular appearance. This was the case when he was not angry. When he was seized by that emotion, his ugliness (ask¯emosyn¯e) was frightful. He would then abstain from no word or act. After recounting other similar things, he shows him also to have been a slave under the pleasures of life (h¯edypatheiai). He says it in the following way: he was excessive in his erotic practices (t¯en t¯on aphrodisi¯on khr¯esin), but there was nothing unlawful (adikia) about it, for he had intercourse only with his spouses (gametai) or with prostitutes. He had two wives (gynaikes) at the same time, Xanthippe who was an Athenian of common descent, and Myrto, the daughter of Aristides and granddaughter of Lysimachus. He took Xanthippe as his concubine and she bore him Lamprocles, while Myrto was his lawful wife and bore him Sophroniscus and Menexenus. The two women used to fight each other, but when they had stopped, they turned against Socrates because he never tried to hinder them fighting but only laughed when he saw them fighting each other and himself. He was, he says, sometimes quarrelsome, abusive, and violent in parties.
So this is how Theodoret in the fifth century ad reports what Porphyry in the late third century had to say about Aristoxenus’ description of Socrates. From a similar report in Cyril (fr. a) we may conclude that the facts, if not necessarily all the words, are rather faithfully reproduced from Porphyry. One thing Theodoret has got wrong: it is of course not Aristoxenus himself who claims to have met and been impressed by Socrates, but – as is clear from Cyril’s quotation of Porphyry – it is Spintharus, his father (or teacher), that the biographer uses as his eyewitness informant. Behind Porphyry we cannot reach, and his is obviously a condensed and
On the doubtful historicity of this statement, apparently originating in Aristotle, Perª eÉgene©av (fr. Ross), see Wehrli , , and Guthrie , – n. = , –, with further refs. But Aristoxenus should not be blamed for stating bluntly that Socrates was a bigamist; though there is some confusion at the start ( (, (), probably due to Porphyry (who may well have believed with others that bigamy was sanctioned in postwar Athens, see Diog. Laert. .), he ends up by saying that only Myrto was his lawful wife. See Wehrli b, .
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2.2 Aristoxenus’ Lives of Pythagoras and Socrates
restructured account (phrased entirely in indirect speech) rather than any verbatim quotation of Aristoxenus. What we get are precious glimpses of the subject matter and attitude of the biography, but no reliable impression of its disposition or narrative style. Theodoret immediately goes on to speak about Socrates’ childhood and adolescence, still referring to Porphyry as his direct source. Since Aristoxenus is not explicitly named in that connection, this is not – according to strict scholarly principles – a fragment of his, although he may in fact continue to be Porphyry’s source (.–): It was told (elegeto) about him that as a child he did not behave well or in a disciplined manner. First, they say (phasi), he constantly refused to obey his father, and when he told him to take the tools of his craft and meet him somewhere, he neglected his orders and ran around wherever he wanted. Then, when he was about seventeen years old, he was approached by Archelaus, the disciple of Anaxagoras, who said he was his lover (erast¯es). Socrates did not spurn the converse and intercourse with Archelaus, but stayed with him for several years, and in this way he was led on by Archelaus to philosophy.
As we noticed discussing Xenophon’s and Plato’s accounts of Socrates (Ch. .), the philosopher’s childhood represented a vacuum. Here it is filled by the kind of proleptic description biographers often recur to for want of sources, letting the child prefigure the character and behaviour of the grown-up. Theodoret has now collected enough material to reach his conclusion (.–): in spite of all his praise of virtue, Socrates was a slave to his passions. If he was not content with two wives, but used prostitutes in addition and watched naked boys in the palaestra, if he could not restrain his anger, and if his language was unbridled, what kind of ‘philosophy’ was it he pursued? If one approaches Aristoxenus’ picture of Socrates with those drawn by Xenophon and Plato in mind, his insistence on Socrates the common human being will be shocking. Socrates himself is here subjected to the same treatment as Xanthippe his wife was in Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Symposium. Aristoxenus was not one of the Socratics, that is abundantly clear, and he had a certain satisfaction in unmasking their idealized master. But at a closer look it appears that even through the filter of Christian selection there is a certain balance in Aristoxenus’ description. Socrates may have been fond of ta aphrodisia, but he was no adulterer, it is stated. He was charismatic, but hot-tempered, and so on. It is of course possible to explain the occasional positive statements as no more than a rhetorical
Text in Canivet , .
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
device, as Plutarch – himself a devoted Platonist – does in his essay On the Malice of Herodotus (, c–d). After characterizing those who ‘shoot their slanderous shafts from under cover’, only quickly to withdraw and deny any malicious intent, he adds (fr. ): Similar to these writers are those who qualify their fault-finding with some expressions of praise, as Aristoxenus did in his verdict on Socrates, calling him uneducated, ignorant and licentious (akolastos), and adding ‘but there was nothing unlawful about it’.
We may also interpret it, however, as the biographer’s sincere attempt at objectivity. Aristoxenus obviously aims at offering an alternative life of Socrates, but when he is polemical, it is not against the historical but against the legendary Socrates. These fragments allow divergent interpretations, according to what one expects to find in them. There is not much on philosophy in our fragments from the Life of Socrates. But why should Porphyry or anybody else have bothered to cull such material precisely from Aristoxenus? In one fragment, however, we find an anecdote quoted by Eusebius (Praeparatio Evangelica ..) implying that part of Socrates’ (and Plato’s) wisdom was influenced from the East. Eusebius first states that Plato had understood that knowledge of divine and human things is one and the same, but then adds that Aristoxenus attributed this insight to the Indians (fr. ): For one of these (Indians) had met Socrates in Athens and asked him what his philosophy was all about. When he answered that he was inquiring about human life, the Indian had laughed at him and said that it was impossible for anyone to explore human matters if he was ignorant of the divine ones.
Illustrative anecdotes, then, were part of Aristoxenus’ method. Dialogues in direct speech, a` la Plato, may also have been admitted (fr. ). Yet, on the whole, the fragments provide frustratingly little guidance as to what kind of literary compositions these Lives were. That Aristoxenus’ Lives have not survived causes perhaps the most deplorable lacuna in our knowledge of early Greek biography. If they were as idiosyncratic and mean as some modern critics conclude from what is left, Aristoxenus’ honoured position in the ancient biographical tradition
Trans. Lionel Pearson in Plutarch’s Moralia, Vol. (LCL), modified. As observed by Mess , . See now also the balanced assessment in Fortenbaugh , –. On this intriguing piece of information, discussed in its Greek and Indian contexts, see Lacrosse . E.g., Leo , (‘einen Mann von schroffer und einseitiger Art’, ‘dieser Schriften, die uns in ihren versprengten Resten so wenig anziehend erscheinen’, etc.). See also Stuart , – on Aristoxenus as ‘the evil genius of biography’.
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2.3 Satyrus’ Life of Euripides
would be difficult to explain. For their literary merits, we turn again to Plutarch. He apparently disliked Aristoxenus’ non-idealizing treatment of Socrates and Plato; all the more reason to notice in what good company of entertaining narratives and essays he places Aristoxenus’ biographies in another context (fr. a): When the story (historia) and the telling (di¯eg¯esis) involves no harm or pain, and to its theme of splendid and great actions it adds the power and charm (dynamin kai kharin) of eloquence – as when Greek history is told by Herodotus and Persian by Xenophon, or as with ‘the wondrous word inspired Homer sang’ or Eudoxus’ Description of the World, Aristotle’s Foundations and Constitutions of Cities, or Aristoxenus’ Lives of men (bious andr¯on) – the joy it gives is not only great and abundant, but untainted as well and attended with no regret.
Whether ‘Lives of men’ refers to the separate bioi or rather to some work of collective biography, Aristoxenus’ biographical writings have obviously had considerable literary attraction, in addition to the factual and polemical interest that prompted their citation throughout antiquity. 2.3 satyrus’ life of euripides For Satyrus, our next stop, we are in the privileged situation of possessing an extensive papyrus fragment (second century ad) of one of his major works, the Life of Euripides. Far from the whole Life is preserved, it is true, and some of the extant parts are badly damaged, but in this case we may at least discern the literary arrangement and read the author’s words unfiltered. We shall look at the text before going on to discussing who Satyrus was and what he thought he was doing. The biography is structured as a dialogue between a person (in the editions called ‘A’) who is perhaps identical with the narrator (this will have been made clear in the lost introduction), and two interlocutors named Diodora (or Diodorus) and Eucleia. ‘A’ has the main say; the
That Epicurus actually makes a pleasant life impossible , b–c, trans. Benedict Einarson and Phillip H. De Lacy in Plutarch’s Moralia, Vol. (LCL). Wehrli , – argues that Plutarch is speaking of ‘einer einheitlichen Sammlung von Biographien’ rather than the full-scale bioi to which our fragments belong. See further discussion of the Peri bi¯on literature in Cooper , –. The name occurs twice only (fr. iii.–; xv.–), both times in the vocative case and with the last letter lost. Hunt supplemented the masculine form, Hans von Arnim in (followed by Arrighetti , Kovacs , Schorn , and Kn¨obl ) the feminine one. Lefkowitz , , plays with the idea that the main speaker as well might have been a woman (an idea hardly consistent with fr. xv.– quoted below). Arrighetti , , –, following Gerstinger , n. , argues that there are only two speakers, ‘A’ and ‘Diodora Eucleia’. Contra West , . See further discussion in Schorn , – (‘at
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
others mostly come in for comments and queries, but may also be carried away to elaborate on a topic. What we overhear sounds like the polite conversation between interested members of a literary salon. At the point where the papyrus starts, discussion is already going on about Euripides’ style: ‘. . . he was very much the speech-writer (errh¯etorizen) in the dialogue portions of his plays, being prosaic in style (logikos) and (capable of ) imitating . . .’ (fr. ). Maybe this discussion of his work was preceded by a section devoted to his family background, his upbringing, and the first part of his career; at any rate, there follows at the end of the Life an account of his later years, his death, and his posthumous honours. After a number of severely mutilated fragments that make no coherent sense comes what looks like the transition between two main topics. The present discussion of Euripides’ art ends: ‘This was his nature as an artist (kata . . . t¯en tekhn¯en)’, and attention is turned to his person: ‘He was also great in his soul (t¯en psykh¯en), almost as in his [poetry]’ (fr. II). Unfortunately, the substantiation of this claim is broken off after just a few words about some ‘fight’, and many columns pass before the papyrus again yields something continuously legible. We now arrive, with frs. –, at the better-preserved part of the papyrus, altogether about five printed pages of text, with smaller and larger lacunae, belonging to the last section of the biography. The topic is first the poet’s religion and philosophy: he ‘honoured’ Anaxagoras and ‘admired’ Socrates, the first assertion being supported by quotations from Euripides’ own plays, the second by reference to the multitude’s negative reaction when, in the Dana¨e, he exempted Socrates from any charge of avarice (frs. – i). Then there is an exchange between the discussants about political systems and the danger caused by demagogues in the Athenian democracy, about the bad upbringing of the new generation, and so on. The discussion is all along conducted by means of paraphrase and quotation of Euripides’ pronouncements on these matters in his plays (fr. ii–vi). This leads up
least three speakers’). Kn¨obl , – again takes the position that Eucleia is a nickname for Diodora. Leo , – defined this dialogue form as Peripatetic, originating in Aristotle’s lost Perª poihtän and known to us indirectly through Cicero’s Brutus: a lecture with interventions (as opposed to the Platonic investigating dialogue). Contra Gudeman , –; Momigliano , . My translations are based on Kovacs , –, sometimes modified comparing Hunt , Arrighetti , and Schorn . ‘Poetry’ translates [$(]9$ , with Hunt’s supplement, defended by Gallo = , and accepted by Kovacs and Schorn , while Arrighetti , does not approve and supplements [0 ]9$ , ‘azioni’.
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2.3 Satyrus’ Life of Euripides
to the well-known sight of the misanthropic poet sitting in his cave on the island of Salamis (fr. ix–x): ‘. . . he possessed a cave there with the mouth opening toward the sea where he passed his days thinking by himself and writing, simply disdaining everything that was not high and lofty. At any rate, Aristophanes, as though summoned on purpose as a witness, says “As are the speeches he gives his characters, so is the man” (fr. Kassel and Austin). But the story is told (legetai) that once while he was watching a comedy . . . Everyone became his enemy, the men because he was so unsociable (dia t¯en dysomilian), the women because of his abuse of them in his poetry. He ran into great danger from both sexes. For as we have mentioned he was prosecuted for impiety by Cleon the demagogue. And the women conspired against him during the Thesmophoria and came in a body to the place where he happened to be spending his time. But with this stipulation they spared the man, first out of respect for the Muses . . .’
After a lacuna, the source of this story, Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (–, –), is quoted, obviously by one of the other interlocutors, for the main speaker continues (fr. xii–xiii): ‘You have clearly understood my meaning and have saved me from having to explain it. He was put out with the sex (genos) for the following reason. It seems (h¯os eoiken) there was, living in the house, a young home-born slave by the name of Cephisophon. With him he caught his own wife . . . . . . When he had borne the outrage . . . , he told the woman, so the story goes (h¯os mn¯emoneuousi), to live with the young man, since that was the way she chose, “so that”, he said, “he may not enjoy my wife but rather I his – for this is fair – if I wish.” And he continued to fight against the whole sex in his poetry.’ ‘Laughably so. For why is it more reasonable for someone to find fault with women because of a woman seduced than with men because of the man who seduced her? For, as Socrates used to say, it is possible to find the same vices and the same virtues in both sexes.’
After this intervention by one of the women, a lively exchange on gender issues takes place between the three, until the main speaker calls the discussants to order (fr. xv.–): ‘Perhaps, Diodora; but let this be the end of your defence of women and let us return to Euripides.’ The story now draws towards a close. ‘In annoyance at the ill-will of his fellow citizens’ (fr. xv.–) and feeling himself harassed by competitors and comedians, Euripides in the following winter (fr. xvi.–), ‘after
As Kovacs points out, Thomas Magister (T . Kovacs) may have preserved the original tradition when he calls this alleged adulterer an actor rather than a slave; but Satyrus accords with most of the witnesses.
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
entering, as it were, a solemn protest (diamartyria), renounced Athens’ (fr. xvii–xviii): ‘What protest was that?’ ‘It is set off by itself in the following choral ode, “There are golden wings about my back and the winged sandals of the Sirens are fitted on my feet, and I shall go aloft far into the heavens, there with Zeus . . .”’ (fr. Nauck). ‘ . . . began the songs. Or do you not know that it is this that he says?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘In saying “mingle my flight with Zeus” he hints metaphorically at the monarch (Archelaus of Macedonia) and at the same time increases the man’s preeminence.’ ‘It seems to me that you speak with more subtlety than truth.’ ‘You may understand it as you like. At any rate, he went over and spent his old age in Macedonia, enjoying very high honour with the king; and in particular the story is told (mn¯emoneuetai) that . . .’
The dialogue form, then, is used not only to make the narrative livelier, but also to question or clarify the points raised by the main speaker. In addition, Satyrus uses another way of distancing himself from what is told, while still telling it. For instance, when arriving at the poet’s death, he is cautious to state from what kind of source the story derives (fr. xx): ‘That was what befell Euripides while alive (namely, his being admired all over Sicily and honoured in Macedonia). But the death he met with was most unpleasant and strange, as the learned old men of Macedon tell the tale (mythologousi).’ ‘What do they say?’ ‘There is in Macedonia . . .’
In the following lacuna was probably told the story of how Euripides, known for his rhetorical gifts, was asked to prevail upon King Archelaus not to punish some Thracians living in Macedonia who had sacrificed and eaten one of the king’s Molossian hounds. The papyrus resumes (fr. xxi): ‘. . . and he won their release. Some time later Euripides happened to be spending some time on his own in a grove some distance from the city, while Archelaus was going out to hunt. When the huntsmen were outside the gates of the city, they let loose their hounds and sent them ahead while they themselves were left behind. When the hounds encountered Euripides alone, they killed him, and the huntsmen came along too late. That, as the story goes (phasin), is why there is
See Lefkowitz , . = ? $
$ 59$ @ . While West , sees the phrase as a ‘rather portentous reference to local tradition . . . reminiscent of a somewhat suspect Herodotean mannerism’ (but disregards the verb), Lefkowitz , (who translates logioi ‘story-tellers’ with Hunt) more convincingly argues that this is the author’s way of indicating that what follows is a ‘tall tale’. Kovacs translates ‘chroniclers’, Schorn ‘Geschichtenerz¨ahler’.
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2.3 Satyrus’ Life of Euripides
even today a proverb in Macedonia, “There is a justice even for dogs.” For these [were descended] from the hounds . . .’
The last readable part of the papyrus (fr. xxii) at first sight looks displaced if one assumes an overall chronological arrangement of the biography: it recounts how Euripides encouraged the musician and poet Timotheus, who was deeply depressed because his innovations in music had met with no understanding among the Athenians. However, comparison with later lives of Euripides shows that Satyrus must have brought in the good relationship between Euripides and Timotheus in connection with quoting (or mentioning) the epigram inscribed on the poet’s cenotaph in Athens. This epigram, the late vitae inform us (T . and T . Kovacs), was composed ‘by Thucydides the historian or Timotheus the lyric poet’, both of whom were said to have stayed at the court of Archelaus. So Satyrus’ Life probably ended with the honours bestowed upon Euripides posthumously, among them the grave in Macedonia and the cenotaph in Athens with the epigram beginning ‘All Hellas is the tomb of Euripides . . .’ (Anthologia Palatina .). The general impression we get of Satyrus through these fragments is well described by Gilbert Murray: ‘It is a mass of quotations, anecdotes, bits of literary criticism, all run together with an air of culture and pleasantness, a spice of gallantry and a surprising indifference to historical fact.’ Only the last statement needs some qualification: it is ‘surprising’ only if one applies modern biographical standards. If one measures Satyrus against the ancient Lives of Euripides transmitted in Byzantine lexica or prefixed to his tragedies, what strikes one is rather Satyrus’ cautious reservations and his skilled use of the dialogue form to question some statements. Moreover, the author is quite open about utilizing the text of the dramas to draw conclusions about the poet himself. We may find that method misdirected, but used openly as here (contrast the later Lives) it does at any rate not betray ‘indifference to historical fact’. What Murray searches for in vain is historicity and documentation of quite another kind (and age), as becomes clear later on in his comments. Satyrus tells of Euripides’ wife being (in Murray’s words) ‘false to him, but the story will not bear historical criticism’ (my italics). ‘However likely it may be in itself that a man of this kind should meet with domestic unhappiness’, Murray states, Satyrus does not prove his specific case. This, of course, is irritating to the modern scholar who is just writing Euripides and His Age and needs documented fact – but it is hardly a
See Leo , .
Murray , .
Both quotations from Murray , .
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
valid criticism of an Hellenistic writer of literary Lives. Mary Lefkowitz, in contrast, relying on her intimate knowledge of the Lives of the Greek poets, calls Satyrus’ Euripides ‘a balanced and entertaining assessment of the very limited materials at the biographer’s disposal’. This does not imply that stories like Satyrus’ about Euripides’ marriage crisis should be taken at face value; it is simply the ancient biographer’s way of telling in the form of an illustrative anecdote what the modern scholar discusses in terms of ‘likelihood’. Both, one might add, base their supposed knowledge of ‘a man of this kind’ on the poet’s texts. But who was ‘Satyrus the Peripatetic’ (as Athenaeus repeatedly calls him) himself? As Stephanie West has shown, he need neither have been a Peripatetic in any strict sense, nor have worked in the Alexandrian Mouseion, as is often supposed. He was born in Callatis (on the west coast of the Black Sea), a papyrus informs us. He may have been called ‘Peripatetic’ just because his art of biography, with its appeal to the general public, coincided with what was associated with Aristotle’s school. As to his date, the latter part of the third century bc, or possibly the beginning of the second, seems a reasonable guess – that is, he lived some two hundred years later than Euripides – but there is no firm evidence. The name was common enough, so there is no necessity to identify him, as Wilamowitz once did with his usual aplomb, with the writer of a treatise On the Demes of Alexandria of which extracts have survived. It is to the fragments of his biographies we have to turn to trace his interests and character. Apart from the Euripides, his works of literary biography apparently included Lives of Aeschylus and Sophocles as well (fr. xxiii). Whether, in his literary biographies, he was more of a literary critic than strictly a biographer, as Graziano Arrighetti insists, is an academic question with a peculiar ring today, when prominent specimens of the flourishing genre of literary biography are precisely, at the same time, works of literary criticism. But even if we only take the historical milieu of the Hellenistic age into account, there can hardly be any doubt that Satyrus looked upon himself as a biographer. Though it may be argued that the title recorded in
Lefkowitz , ; in the same vein, Pfeiffer , . Kn¨obl’s idea that Satyrus is in fact subverting traditional patterns of literary-critical debate seems an overinterpretation. West ; see also Dihle , –. Contra Schorn , –, who argues that Satyrus was in fact a Peripatetic, although he wrote popularizing Lives instead of philosophical treatises proper. See Gudeman , –; West , ; and the detailed discussion in Schorn , –, who concludes that Satyrus wrote his Lives some time in the period – bc. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , –. Contra West , –, pro (cautiously) Lefkowitz . Arrighetti , – and , –; contra Gallo = , –; Cooper , –. See now also the balanced general discussion of ‘Critica letteraria e biografia’ in Arrighetti , –.
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2.3 Satyrus’ Life of Euripides
the papyrus, referring to ‘Satyrus’ Collection of Lives’, need not be genuine, the number of Lives attested by fragments and testimonia in Diogenes Laertius and other encyclopaedic writers makes his main literary profession unambiguous. In addition to the literary Lives, he wrote works of political biography, describing Alcibiades, Philip II of Macedon, and Dionysius II of Syracuse, furthermore Lives of rhetoricians (that of Demosthenes is attested), of the Seven Wise Men, and of numerous philosophers (Pythagoras, Empedocles, Zenon, etc.). Some of these may have been short Lives presented in a serial fashion – as the title Lives of Kings and Generals seems to imply – while others were full-scale Lives, as Euripides apparently was. By contrast with those of Aristoxenus, whose life-writing was not his main branch of research, the fragments of Satyrus are predominantly of that kind. We return to the Life of Euripides to sum up. It shows an author intent on mixing learning with pleasure, on being didactic and entertaining at the same time. He had chosen a form eminently suitable for the purpose: the dialogue (we do not know if any biographer had done that before him, or if he did it himself in other biographies). The poet’s ethos and art, rather than the external facts of his life (productions, victories, etc.), was his focus (even if some reservation must be made, since the first part of the Life is lost). If his discussion of the poet’s ‘life and letters’ does not impress us as particularly deep, the questions he addressed are definitely among those that still interest us: the literary form of the dramas, including influence from rhetoric; the philosophical and religious themes one may discern in Euripides’ work; his social and political standpoints; the possible connections between private life and literary work; his contemporary reception and posthumous honours. Satyrus’ influence on later Lives of Euripides seems to have been considerable. But he cannot be blamed for their gossipy and artless character, simply because he contributed some of the material, or for the gradual debasement of the tradition. Some later biographical sketches told the same story about the dogs revenging themselves on Euripides,
Fr. xxiii: / - A 'B C9%-, /', D$ , ‘Book of Satyrus’ Collection of Lives: (Lives) of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides’. On anagraph¯e meaning ‘collection’ rather than ‘list’, see Schorn , –. The testimonia and fragments in Schorn ; discussion of the testimonia, –. See also Leo , –; Gudeman , . The parallels are listed in Leo , –. The extent of Satyrus’ influence is disputed, see Gudeman , –; Lewis , ; Arrighetti , –; Schorn , –, –. The texts are collected in Kovacs , –, as T(estimonia) –, and there is a recent richly annotated translation into Spanish by Campos Daroca et al. ; see also the analysis in Leo , – and the discussion in Lefkowitz , –, –.
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but without Satyrus’ reservations as to his source (local tales); they simply stated: ‘He died in the following manner: . . .’ Others improved on the story by letting the dogs not only kill but eat him as well. In one late source the event is placed late at night when Euripides was stealing out, seventy-five years old, for a secret meeting with Archelaus’ boy-love (er¯omenos) – ‘for he was, they say, . . . disposed toward this kind of love’ – and by letting it be women rather than dogs that tear him apart. There are indeed nuances to the picture of the Greek Lives of the poets. These Lives of Euripides are in no way unique in concentrating on supposedly negative aspects of the poet’s life; it happened also to poets who were not already, like Euripides, subjected to such slander by hostile contemporaries. But what is the point of ‘attacking’ or ‘slandering’ authors long dead, while still admiring and copying their poems and dramas? It would be wrong to regard the derogatory lives as just the negative counterpart of the panegyrical ones; the latter wish to enhance the reputation of a certain individual, whereas the former can hardly have been compiled with the opposite aim. These Lives may owe their existence and popularity to a more general human mechanism. Kenneth Dover, tracing the reasons why anecdotes about famous persons so often take this negative direction, has this answer: ‘Since most of us are neither great nor signally good, we take particular pleasure and interest in communications which reveal to us that the apparently great and good are in fact dishonest, selfish, greedy, lecherous and cowardly.’ What may be called ‘gossip’ when it is told about living or recently deceased persons lives on in the biographical tradition; it thrives and expands there, not because the poet is particularly hated, but to satisfy people’s constant yearning to see their heroes exposed as common human beings. A tradition with such priorities cannot be expected to yield essential and historically correct data when the occasion arises for letting the poet’s Life introduce a manuscript edition of his work or writing an entry for a lexicon like the Suda. 2.4 hermippus the callimachean The names of potentially interesting biographers or would-be biographers of the Hellenistic period to be found in ancient testimonia and modern scholarly discussion are legion. Some remain just names and possibilities
The sources are: Genos Euripidou kai bios, T . Kovacs; Thomas Magister, T .; and Suda, T .. Dover , . According to Bollans´ee b, ix, no fewer than thirty-nine biographers’ names are known from the Hellenistic period, ‘and little short of for the whole of antiquity’. It should be noted that these
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2.4 Hermippus the Callimachean
even if one conscientiously follows the references to alleged fragments of their works. What is left of the real Sotion and his Lives of various philosophers after they have been first epitomized by Heraclides Lembus and then recycled by Diogenes Laertius? Others have fared better by being read and used by Plutarch or others with a feeling for style, artistry, and illustrative detail, not just an interest in the dry facts. We shall look at a couple of the latter category to supplement, in some respects, the picture that the remains of Aristoxenus and Satyrus have managed to give of the Hellenistic multitude. Of Hermippus of Smyrna, active in the second half of the third century bc and thus roughly of the same biographical generation as Satyrus, some ninety fragments have survived to be included in the comprehensive collection by Jan Bollans´ee. Almost all of them are quotations or reports in later literature; there is nothing that corresponds in scale or kind to the Satyrus papyrus. Besides works of collective biography – On Lawgivers, On the Seven Wise Men, On the Pupils of Isocrates, and others – there are extracts from what appears to have been full-scale biographies, some of them in several books. Hermippus thus wrote Lives of Pythagoras, Gorgias, Isocrates, Aristotle, and Theophrastus. There is in addition a variety of fragments that treat other persons, although in the absence of a book title we cannot always be sure that they belong to a separate biography of the person in question. To illustrate his biographical style, a fragment of the last category will be presented. In his Alexander, Plutarch pays special attention to Callisthenes of Olynthus, the historian who accompanied Alexander the Great on his Asian campaign, wrote a glorifying account of The Deeds of Alexander, but later fell into disgrace with his king and was executed in (though Plutarch, Alex. ., has three different versions of how he died). Our extract, deriving from Hermippus, is from the beginning of the process that led to Callisthenes’ fall (fr. , Alex. .–.):
figures are based on a rather restricted (though unstated) definition of ‘biography’, as is evident from the following statement (ibid.): ‘with the exception of the extant writings of Plutarch, Suetonius and Nepos . . . not a single ancient biography has been preserved in its entirety’. None of the texts treated in our Chs. , –, and is thus included in the definition. On this epitomator of the second century bc, see Bollans´ee a, –. See Dihle , . The fragments of Sotion are in Wehrli and scheduled to appear in FGrHist ivA as No. . For the precarious evidence for this ethnikon, see Bollans´ee b, –. Bollans´ee a = FGrHist ivA , . Trans. Bollans´ee a, , modified. Fr. Wehrli .
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Once when a lot of people had been invited to dine with the king, Callisthenes, it is said (legetai), was requested, when the wine-cup came to him, to pronounce a eulogy on the Macedonians. He spoke so successfully on the subject that the guests jumped up to applaud him and throw their wreaths at him. To this Alexander’s reaction was, quoting Euripides, that for a man who dwells on ‘a magnificent subject, it is no great achievement to speak well.’ (Bacch. –) ‘But’, so he continued, ‘can you also give proof to us of the power of your eloquence by delivering an indictment against the Macedonians, in order that they may learn from their faults and become even better?’ Whereupon Callisthenes concentrated on his recantation, and he spoke long and boldly (polla parr¯esiasasthai) against the Macedonians. After he had singled out the disunity among the Greeks as the real cause of Philip’s rise to power, he went on as follows: ‘In times of dissension even the most wicked man gets his share of honour.’ This caused a feeling of bitter and stern hatred for him among the Macedonians, and Alexander declared that Callisthenes had given evidence, not of his ability to orate (deinot¯es), but of his ill-will (dysmeneia) towards the Macedonians. This, then – so we are told by Hermippus (ho H. ph¯esi) – is the story which Stroebus, the slave who was trained to read to Callisthenes, reported to Aristotle. Hermippus adds that when Callisthenes realized the king’s alienation, he muttered this verse to himself two or three times as he was leaving: ‘Patroclus is also dead, a man far better than you.’ (Homer, Iliad .)
Hermippus may have narrated this in a separate biography of Callisthenes, or he may have included the anecdote in his extensive Life of Aristotle, whose nephew and disciple Callisthenes was. In either case, his source will have been Peripatetic, since it is to Aristotle he lets the (otherwise unknown) slave and ‘reader’ (anagn¯ost¯es) Stroebus escape to tell the story of his master’s downfall. It is typical of Hermippus to make this kind of explicit references to named eye- or earwitnesses in order to give his account a documentary quality. There is reason to believe that Plutarch took over the whole story in more or less the original form, including the poetic quotations, from Hermippus. The episode is well told to illustrate Callisthenes’ eloquence
A proverb in hexameter that Plutarch repeats in other contexts (Mor. a, Nic. ., Comp. Lys. et Sull. .). See Bollans´ee a, –. On the source, context, and delineation of the fragment, see the discussion in Bollans´ee a, –. See Wehrli , and Bollans´ee a, –.
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2.4 Hermippus the Callimachean
as well as his independent mind and free speech (parrh¯esia), with the shifting moods of the dinner guests as a background. Alexander’s true character – according to anti-Macedonian circles – is demonstrated without commentary. The focus is Callisthenes, and Plutarch kept it that way, in spite of including the scene in a biography of Alexander. The faculty of creating an atmosphere and a concrete setting for an anecdote reminds one of Ion of Chios; nothing similar is extant in Satyrus’ Life of Euripides, in spite of the many anecdotes told. Death scenes are naturally a stock ingredient in any complete biography. Many such descriptions by Hermippus were quoted by later authors, among them no fewer than eighteen philosophical deaths quoted by Diogenes Laertius. Plutarch too has transmitted one of Hermippus’ death scenes to us, in his Demosthenes (fr. a, Dem. .–). Fleeing before the Macedonian occupation forces headed by Antipater, Demosthenes takes refuge in the sanctuary of Poseidon on the island of Calauria (Poros). Antipater’s special exile-hunter, Archias, arrives with his Thracian guard and tries to persuade Demosthenes to accompany him back. But Demosthenes, who knows what fate then awaits him, asks for time to write a message to send home, and withdraws into the temple. With the Thracians as witnesses at the door, he takes a sheet, thoughtfully bites at his reed-pen, then covers his head; when he feels the effect of the poison he has administered to himself in this way, he walks to the altar supported by Archias, falls down there, and expires. ‘Ariston’ – evidently the biographical source Plutarch has followed so far in his description – ‘says he took the poison from his reed-pen, as mentioned; but a certain Pappus, from whom Hermippus has the story, says that’ after he had fallen beside the altar, there was found written on the sheet the beginning of a letter: ‘Demosthenes to Antipater’, nothing more. As people were amazed at the suddenness of his death, the Thracians who had stood guard at the door described how he had taken the poison from a piece of cloth into his hand, put it to his mouth and swallowed it – they had believed it was gold he swallowed. The slave-girl who attended on him said, when Archias and his men interrogated her, that Demosthenes had been wearing that little bag for a long time as an amulet.
Plutarch has the main story, then, from another source, presumably Ariston of Keos the Peripatetic; it is just for a supplement he turns to Hermippus. There he finds the addressee of the unfinished letter and another attempt
See Bollans´ee b, –, for an analysis of Hermippus’ ‘death-stories’. Trans. Bollans´ee a, , modified.
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to explain how Demosthenes had concealed his poison. Witnesses are produced both for the story as a whole – ‘a certain Pappus’: an historian or a simple informant like Stroebus in the Callisthenes fragment? – and for the picturesque details about the ‘amulet’: the Thracians and the slavegirl. Since the concealment and administering of the poison was a matter of much speculation (reed-pen, signet-ring, bracelet . . . ?), as an experienced biographer Hermippus knew that his particular version needed to be verified by reference to people present at the occasion, whether real or invented for the purpose. While Jerome gives Hermippus the epithet ‘the Peripatetic’, Athenaeus repeatedly calls him ‘the Callimachean’. The former epithet probably just refers to the kind of literary activity he was engaged in, without implying any formal membership of the philosophical school, still less any ‘Aristotelian’ methods of research. The epithet ‘Callimachean’ seems more specific and may be combined with some references to his (probably bibliographical) work at the Alexandrian Mouseion in the wake of Callimachus (d. after bc). Whether he was born early enough to have been the great poet-scholar’s personal assistant in his work on the Pinakes, the famous critical inventory of Greek authors, we do not know. But we may confidently conclude that he was in a learned tradition and had access to copious written material about the sometimes rather distant figures he so vividly portrays. Hermippus is the Greek biographer most frequently cited by name by his successors in the trade; but this statistical fact hardly means that he was the most influential, rather that he was often the source for specific information or variant traditions that needed to be recorded and labelled (as in the description of Demosthenes’ death). Such divergent material, sometimes more sensational than immediately credible, earned him a particularly bad reputation in modern scholarship; he was criticized for ‘his unbounded credulity, his deliberate mendacity and his malicious inventions’. Only in recent decades, particularly with his editors Fritz Wehrli and Jan Bollans´ee, have judgements become more balanced. There is a fair chance that his ‘inventions’ are sometimes the result of his search in Alexandrian archives,
For details, see Bollans´ee a, –. Thus Wehrli , ; indecisive discussion in Bollans´ee b, –. Pace Bollans´ee b, –, –. On the Pinakes and Hermippus, see also Pfeiffer , –, ; Wehrli , –; and Blum , –. On Hermippus’ Nachleben, see Bollans´ee b, –. Thus summarized by Bollans´ee b, xiii, in his survey ‘Modern reception (and rejection) of Hermippos’ (xii–xv). See Wehrli , – and Bollans´ee b, –.
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2.5 Antigonus of Carystus
which of course need not mean that the data unearthed are themselves historically true. In addition, scholars are nowadays more inclined to accept that biography may well – even legitimately – consist of a mixture of ‘fact and fiction, history and anecdote, truth and gossip, praise and slander’ than they were in the times of Wilamowitz and Leo. 2.5 antigonus of carystus If Hermippus found his spicy material in the archives, his elder contemporary Antigonus from the city of Carystus on southern Euboea (born ca. bc) represents the opposite approach. He seems to have had no personal connection with the Alexandrian learned world, and the quality he relies on in his biographical work is personal knowledge. He writes about men he has himself seen and heard in his youth, mostly in Athens – a second Ion of Chios (above, Ch. .). His form of biography, then, probably came close to what might be called ‘memoirs’. Instead of being attached to the Ptolemaic court of Alexandria, as several biographers besides Hermippus were, it appears that Antigonus of Carystus (provided he is identical with the sculptor of the same name) enjoyed the hospitality of King Attalus I of Pergamum (– bc). It is uncertain to what extent Antigonus’ Lives of philosophers were chronologically structured accounts. His Life of Polemon, which Tiziano Dorandi believes it to be possible to reconstruct from the corresponding Life in Philodemus’ History of Philosophers (first century bc), has indeed a general progression from family background and youth to Polemon’s conversion to philosophy and his subsequent life in the Academy; but it lacks chronological indications, and we do not know whether it ended with a description of his death. It is also, as Dorandi stresses, an open question whether this Life is at all typical of Antigonus’ method. To judge from the certain fragments of his writings, his emphasis was on characterization by means of anecdotes, typical utterances, and in particular graphic descriptions of the subject’s ‘way of life’, as observed by Antigonus himself or his
The quotation from Chroust , , who embraces the negative view of D¨uring regarding Hermippus’ role in the biographical tradition on Aristotle. On the date see Dorandi a, cxxi. See Misch , . On Antigonus as a biographer generally, see Dorandi a, xxxiii–lxxxi, with detailed discussion of previous research. Their identity was argued by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , – and has been widely accepted (e.g., OCD); it is endorsed by Dorandi , –, – and a, lxxxiii–cii. Dorandi , – (analysis), – (text) and a, liii–lvii, –. Dorandi b, –, –.
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oral informants (perhaps occasionally supplemented with some written sources). He seems to have had little interest in doctrines; his main attention was on how philosophical, especially ethical theory was mirrored – or not – in the everyday behaviour and lifestyle of the philosopher. Antigonus has shared the fate of many Hellenistic writers of philosophic biography in surviving mainly through Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (early third century ad; below, Ch. .), sometimes with some other philosophical compilation as an intermediary. Such compendium survival often means that the fragments are stripped of such stylistic elegance and descriptional detail as the original may have had (while part of the vocabulary may persist). Moreover, it is a matter of dispute how much of Diogenes’ material concerning third-century philosophers really derives from Antigonus. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, to whom we owe the seminal collection and analysis of the fragments, has been criticized for having overconfidently attributed far too much of Diogenes’ texts to the Carystian. His characterization of Antigonus as a biographer is accordingly full and precise; if we choose to form our picture just from the fragments that are explicitly ascribed to Antigonus in the ancient sources, it gets much more lacunose, with the ‘memoir’ quality more easily discernible than the overall biographical structure. We shall first look at Antigonus’ portrait of his fellow Euboean, the philosopher Menedemus of Eretria, who was his senior by at least fifty years, but whom he may still have seen and heard as a young student. Exactly this perspective is discernible when Diogenes describes Menedemus’ physical appearance, so there is reason to believe that in this case his source was really Antigonus (fr. Dorandi; Diog. Laert. .): As to his physical condition, he was even in his old age as strong as any athlete and sunburnt in appearance, oiled and well-trained. In stature he was well proportioned, as may be seen from the statue (eikonion) in the old stadium of Eretria. For following the convention it represents him almost naked, displaying the greater part of his body.
See Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , –. For comparison of Diogenes’ version of a text of Antigonus with that of Athenaeus, see below, Ch. .. See Rohde , –, reviewing Wilamowitz-Moellendorff . Others have been more ready to accept Wilamowitz’ judgements, but Dorandi b, , , and in his collection a applies less ‘generous’ criteria and reduces the number of fragments accordingly. For an assessment of Wilamowitz’ achievement, see Dorandi . Translations of Diogenes Laertius based on Hicks (LCL), comparing Knoepfler and Dorandi a. On which fragments may be attributed to Antigonus’ Menedemus, see Dorandi b, – and a, lxvii–lxviii, –. Statue rather than statuette, as Knoepfler , n. notes (‘d´epourvu ici de toute valeur diminutive’).
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2.5 Antigonus of Carystus
The use of a statue as evidence, adding a reference to an artistic convention, reminds us that Antigonus was probably also a sculptor and art historian himself. No such (bronze?) statue has been found, but the ‘old’ stadium has been identified close to the agora. Our biographer is accurate in depicting the historical milieu. In another fragment, the philosopher’s intellectual manners are characterized (fr. ; Diog. Laert. .): Antigonus of Carystus asserts (ph¯esi) that Menedemus never wrote or composed anything, and so never adhered firmly to any doctrine. He adds that in philosophical debates (z¯et¯eseis) he was so aggressive that he would leave badly mauled. And yet, though he was like that in his speech (en tois logois), he was as mild as possible (praotatos) in his acts (en tois ergois). For instance, though he often made fun of Alexinus and mocked him cruelly, he nevertheless did him a service by escorting his wife from Delphi to Chalcis, because she was afraid of thieves and robbers on her journey.
Judgement on his subject’s literary works (if any) and style seems to have been a stock ingredient in Antigonus’ Lives (here he can just comment on his oral ‘style’). The biographer’s own periodic and flowery prose – one is reminded of Plutarch – comes through better when Athenaeus quotes him in his Deipnosophistai (fr. A, Athen. .e–a): Antigonus of Carystus in his Life of Menedemus, when he describes (di¯egoumenos) how the philosopher’s drinking parties were organized, says that he used to have the equivalent of lunch along with one or two guests; he adds that the others needed to have had their dinner before they got there, because this was how light a meal Menedemus served. Afterward they would invite in anyone who was there. As one might expect, any of them who arrived early would walk back and forth in front of the doors and ask the slaves as they were coming out what was being served and how far along the schedule the meal had got. When they heard that the main course was a vegetable or some saltfish, they left, whereas when they heard it was a cut of meat, they went into the room that had been prepared for the occasion. In the summer, a rush mat was set on each couch ahead of time, whereas during the winter there was a sheepskin; but everyone had to bring his own pillow. The cup that was passed around held less than a ladleful, and the snack that was offered was normally lupine-seeds or beans, although occasionally seasonal fruit was served, pears or pomegranates in the summer, pulses in the spring, or figs in the wintertime.
Dorandi a, fr. admits only the first two sentences as genuinely deriving from Antigonus. Translation based on S. Douglas Olson in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, Vol. , – (LCL). Basically the same description is also in Diog. Laert. .. The texts are edited as fr. A and B, respectively, in Dorandi a, –; see also Knoepfler , –.
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
Another philosopher, Lycon, for more than four decades the leader of the Peripatetic school (/–/ bc), is portrayed with the same ironic distance, but less sympathy. Antigonus admits his sweetness of speech (Diog. Laert. .) and also his bodily fitness (fr. Dorandi, Diog. Laert. .): ‘He was well practised in gymnastics and kept himself in good shape, displaying all an athlete’s habit of body, with battered ears and oiled skin.’ In the context of Diogenes Laertius this sounds innocent enough, but we may be sure that a reader of Antigonus in the original could not miss the criticism implied. It becomes more explicit when the topic is his lifestyle and leadership of the school. Athenaeus, after dwelling on various exponents of pleasure such as Epicurus and Sophocles, takes this third-century follower of Aristotle as his next example (fr. , Athen. .d–b): So too, according to (h¯os ph¯esin) Antigonus of Carystus, when Lycon the Peripatetic visited Athens initially, in order to get an education, he acquired a detailed knowledge of the type of drinking-party to which everyone contributes money, and of the price that each of the city’s prostitutes charged. And later, after he became the head of the Peripatetic school, he gave ostentatious and extremely expensive dinner parties for his friends. For in addition to the entertainers who were invited to them, and the silver dishes, and the bedding, the rest of the preparations, including the elaborate nature of the meals and the host of waiters and cooks, were enough to horrify most people.
‘All of this patently had nothing to do with dialectic or philosophy’, is Antigonus’ typical comment. Though the common meals (syssitia) and symposia arranged by the heads of the philosophical schools at Athens had educational purposes, Antigonus chooses to stress what he regards as the degeneration of the system. The frugality or greed of some Hellenistic philosophers, like Menedemus, and the exuberance of others are similarly targeted by Antigonus’ satire. It seems that Antigonus’ literary qualities made him much read and used, so the philosophers who happened to have come before his sharp eye risked passing into posterity exactly as he had pictured them, with their personal habits mercilessly exposed. Whether Antigonus is as trustworthy a source as Wilamowitz judged him – he freely administered light and shadow, but never lied – is not so easy to decide, with the other potential
On which fragments may be attributed to Antigonus’ Lycon, see Dorandi b, – and a, lxiii–lxvi, –. The fragments of Lycon were edited, with commentary, by Wehrli a, –, –; those discussed here are Nos. and Wehrli. Translation based on S. Douglas Olson in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, Vol. , (LCL). For comments, see Wehrli b, . See Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , –; Dorandi b, , . Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , .
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2.6 Unity and diversity
witnesses more or less silenced. On his style the young Wilamowitz, himself reprimanded by Erwin Rohde and others for his stylistic excesses, has some memorable words: ‘The tone is subjective throughout, the chronicler does not speak with the dispassionate tediousness that philistines have always regarded as objective because they lack the ability to warm up to a cause, but using his own knowledge and his own feelings.’ That food and drink are so prominent in our literal extracts, it should be added, is at least partly to be blamed on Athenaeus, whose learned banqueters naturally favour topics connected with gastronomy. But the graphicness with which Antigonus describes the social and private aspects of the prominent philosophers’ lives, and the way he lets economic and other matters in the administration of the Peripatetic school come in as subordinate to the description of the festivities and luxury, reveal that this was an important part of the outward image of Hellenistic philosophers, and one that Antigonus wanted to emphasize as a supplement and corrective to the ethical doxography that dominated other accounts. In his satirical acumen he is sometimes reminiscent of how the philosopher Xanthus is characterized in the Life of Aesop (below, Ch. .); but what is the farcical focus of that text here just resides in the fine nuances of the memoir. 2.6 unity and diversity Of the thirty-nine Hellenistic biographers whose names are recorded, we have now looked at some of the extant fragments of four. One of them, Aristoxenus, was in all likelihood a leading man in the process that made biography a recognizable literary form in the late fourth century bc. The focus was on the whole life of a person, rather than deeds or ideas or artistic oeuvre viewed in isolation. Furthermore, we already notice much of the scholarly apparatus that will mark the rhetoric of biography, irrespective of the actual blend of fact and fiction: eyewitnesses, written sources, the weighing of evidence, a declared will to find out the truth about a character, and open or hidden polemics against earlier representations of the same figure. The other three were active in the second half of the third century, when the genre was consolidated and, to all appearances, experienced its Hellenistic heyday. To the interest in ethics and in character revealed in life and lifestyle has now been added the antiquarian urge, the obsession to record variant traditions, however mutually irreconcilable, and the will to document, sometimes at the expense of portrayal.
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , .
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
So much for general tendencies. Our three third-century specimens have shown that the diversity in practice was great; and if we had gone on to look at others, the picture would have become still more varied. Besides Satyrus’ kind of literary biography that thrives on the texts of the poet and uses them to reconstruct character and opinions and to explain the vicissitudes of the poet’s life, there is the other main branch of this period, philosophic biography. Bioi philosoph¯on may at one extreme be doxography in the transparent disguise of biography, at the other keen attention to the philosopher’s lifestyle and social appearance, as in Antigonus of Carystus (with obvious lines back to the literary portraits of Socrates). Political biography is also in evidence – we have seen Hermippus describing a dramatic episode at Alexander’s court and providing sensational details on Demosthenes’ death – but it seems to have prospered less than the other kinds. The biographical interest in the statesmen of the period was instead cultivated by the Hellenistic historiographers. Unlike their fifth-century predecessors, they were willing also to satisfy the audience’s curiosity about the private and personal circumstances behind the public events. Concerning the literary structure of the biographies, the fragments allow only few indisputable conclusions. Although we have a substantial part of Satyrus’ Life of Euripides, we do not know how much of the poet’s career Satyrus narrated in a chronological manner before turning to the systematic treatment of his literary production and social role to which the extant part belongs. It is in the nature of things that the other fragments of Hellenistic biography – quotations in later literature as well as minor papyrus scraps – give very few clues about structure. It is perhaps reasonable to assume that most of the Lives were chronologically arranged; but it must be kept in mind that this is a conclusion largely based on post-Hellenistic Greek and Roman biography. In the individual case, it is possible that bios in a reference or a quoted title means ‘lifestyle’ rather than ‘Life’. Of our four samples, Antigonus in particular exemplifies this uncertainty, though it is evident that his ‘memoirs’ covered more of each philosopher’s life than the character sketches provided by Ion of Chios had done. But what other than a generously inclusive reading of Diogenes Laertius (or Philodemus) guarantees that he arranged his remembrances as real Lives from cradle to
E.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Pomp. ) praises the fourth-century historian Theopompus for examining ‘even the hidden reasons for actions and the motives of their agents, and the feelings in their hearts ( 0 ! E%)’ (trans. S. Usher, LCL, Vol. ii, ) – otherwise considered a biographical privilege. On Theopompus and ‘the beginnings of biography and psychological historiography’, see Mess . See also below on Polybius.
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2.6 Unity and diversity
grave? In contrast, the many death scenes quoted from Hermippus give us firmer ground to stand on: they do not tell us that he had a particularly morbid mind (as some modern critics have assumed), but that his works were built as life stories. Other biographical elements, such as narrative style and characterization, are more likely to pass through the fragmentation filter. The graphic detail, and the atmosphere of a setting, are present in both Hermippus and Antigonus, whereas there is no example of anecdotal material similarly transformed into true scenes in our fragments of Aristoxenus and Satyrus. Hermippus’ authenticating mention of names of witnesses (instanced in Aristoxenus as well) was perhaps replaced in Antigonus by a general framework of personal recollection; but it is worth noting that not even in the extensive fragments from his Lives of Lycon and Menedemus is there a single reference inserted to remind us that the author was himself a witness to any of the happenings or habits he describes. Theoretical reflection on the art of biography is absent in our fragments; this may be simply because that kind of commentary did not interest the quoting authors. Modern scholars’ pronouncements about Peripatetic theory in this field are thus deduced from what may be glimpsed in the remains of the practice or from our general knowledge of the scholarly trends and ethical theories of Aristotle and his school. The interest in types of human behaviour that we find manifested in Theophrastus’ Characters is relevant in that reconstruction. But still more important are the theoretical statements appearing in Plutarch and other authors of the Imperial period, which in some cases are likely to reflect early thinking about biography; we shall look at some of them when we reach Plutarch (Ch. .). There is, however, an intriguing passage in the historian Polybius (ca. –ca. bc) that merits discussion before we leave the Hellenistic remnants. When Polybius arrives at the place in his narrative where Philopoemen of Megalopolis is appointed cavalry commander of the Achaean Confederacy ( bc), he remarks (Histories ..–) that his usual procedure would be to introduce the man by tracing his upbringing (ag¯og¯e) and character (phusis). While other historians describe in detail the foundation of cities, Polybius himself, he says, regards information about the training and ambitions (z¯eloi) of the acting historical persons as more profitable. He continues (..–):
E.g., Momigliano , . To the point Bollans´ee b, : ‘death is anyhow an integral part of life and of biography’. Trans. W. R. Paton in Polybius, The Histories, Vol. , – (LCL), modified.
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
[] For inasmuch as one is better fitted to emulate and to imitate living men than lifeless buildings, so much more important for the improvement (epanorth¯osis) of a reader is it to learn about the former. [] Now had I not dealt with Philopoemen in a special work (syntaxis) in which I explained who he and his family were, and the nature of his training (ag¯ogai) when young, I should be compelled to give an account (apologismos) of all these matters here. [] Since, however, I have formerly in three books, which do not form part of the present work (syntaxis), treated of him, stating what was his training as a boy (paidik¯e ag¯og¯e) and enumerating his most famous actions (praxeis), [] it is evident that in the present narrative (ex¯eg¯esis) my proper course is to omit details concerning his early training and the ambitions of his youth, but to add detail to the summary (kephalai¯od¯os) account I there gave of the achievements (erga) of his riper years, in order that the proper character of each work may be preserved. [] For just as the former kind (tropos), being encomiastic, demanded a summary and amplified account of his achievements, so the present history, which distributes praise and blame impartially, demands a strictly true account which also explains the considerations on which each action is based.
Polybius thus distinguishes between two different accounts of Philopoemen by his hand, the one he is presently including in his Histories and an earlier monographic work in three books (FGrHist T ) – obviously a biography, although he fails to label it generically (he just uses the nonspecific word syntaxis for both works). The addition egk¯omiastikos, ‘being encomiastic (in nature)’, should probably be interpreted as characterizing biography in general (‘the former kind’), rather than classifying his threebook work as technically an ‘encomium’ (among other things, no early encomia of that size are known). He is not saying, contrary to what some modern critics have believed, that biographical accounts do not belong in historical works (or vice versa). (Cornelius Nepos and Plutarch will come closer to indicating some such distinction between history and biography; see below, Chs. . and ..) On the contrary, Polybius says he would indeed have described Philopoemen’s personal background in greater detail in the Histories, had he not already published his biographical
Plb. .. (Greek text according to E. Foulon, Bud´e, ): F9 ) , 40G % $9 $ , (" $ 2 '$;! * H(9 & 0H $9 , I ) ?9 , $ 2 8 E , 3! 2 ! 2 * H & J09 $ 9 $9& . I follow Foulon in accepting Naber’s conjecture ‘kind’. Paton (LCL) keeps the MS reading
and translates ‘the former work’. Discussion in Dihle , – and , –. See also Walbank , ; Geiger , –; Gentili and Cerri , n. . Most recently, Fortenbaugh , –, in a close reading of Polybius’ chapter, opts for ‘encomium’ but admits that the adjective $9 $ may as well indicate that a work has encomiastic traits or parts (). E.g., Momigliano , , criticized by Gentili and Cerri , –.
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2.6 Unity and diversity
monograph. For his didactic purpose of improving his audience (. epanorth¯osis t¯on akouont¯on) he considers such detailed descriptions essential, in order to provide his readers with models for imitation. In this statement, presumably with primary reference to his biographical digressions rather than his history generally, he approaches the moral aim that Plutarch would later ascribe to his biographies. Yet Polybius’ idea of ‘improvement’ seems to include more of practical profit, picking out the ‘training’ and ‘ambitions’ of the historical actors as specific objects of imitation by aspiring statesmen. Particularly interesting in our context are the distinctions Polybius makes between the two genres with regard to () the relative emphasis placed on the subject’s upbringing or on the achievements of his manhood, respectively, and () the proportions, in each genre, of praise and blame. To preserve ‘the proper character’ (to prepon) of each ‘kind’ (tropos), in biography he has to concentrate on family, training, and youthful ambitions, and then merely enumerate his hero’s most famous actions, while in history the riper years (akm¯e) should receive equally detailed treatment. (The abridged account of the formative years only applies to the present case, because of his preceding biography, and constitutes no generic rule.) Moreover, the difference between the two genres lies in quality as well as quantity: history demands truth and a balance between praise and blame, whereas biography just amplifies a selection of the achievements – aux¯esis (amplification) and kephalai¯od¯es (selecting the main points) being the key concepts – and may thus without qualm, we are to understand, omit the less flattering deeds. With the shadow of Polybius’ Philopoemen added to Satyrus’ Euripides and the various fragments of Lives of philosophers, we have discussed samples of the three traditional branches of Hellenistic biography: political (or historical), literary, and philosophic. This categorization, however, does not imply formal differences determined by the social or professional status of the subject; critical and laudatory, scholarly and artistic varieties may occur within all three branches. For convenience, we may subsume the three under the heading ‘professional biography’, since each author typically seems to have written a series of works of the same kind. This distinguishes the Hellenistic products from both the pre-Hellenistic beginnings of Greek biography and the texts to be treated in the next chapter, representing what might be called legendary or popular biography. A similar division according to subject matter might be applied to these, the Life of Alexander
Thus Dihle , . Pace Dihle , and , n. , '$&, -( (‘summarisch-einteilend’) does not exclude a chronological arrangement; but a systematic one is often more convenient in a summary account.
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Hellenistic theory and practice: Fragments of industry
representing political, the Lives of Homer literary, and the Life of Aesop a mixture of literary and philosophical biography. But from a literary point of view, these anonymous works with their roots in the Hellenistic age have more in common between them than with contemporary professional biography.
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c h a p te r 3
Popular heroes The slave, the king, the poet
In the case of what I am calling open texts, the effort to retrieve an original form is not only futile but detrimental. For such a procedure would generate a text less authentic than any of the diverse recensions transmitted – a work that in fact no one had ever read or written. David Konstan
3.1 open biography Simultaneously with the emergence of a bookish form of biography in the late classical and Hellenistic periods, vital biographic traditions were in progress at an oral or subliterary level, concerning in the first place legendary figures of great popular appeal. The three most important of these traditions will be discussed in the present chapter: the Lives of Aesop the fabulist and slave, Alexander the Great, and Homer. In contrast to the Lives treated in the previous chapter, which are the works of distinctive authors and largely remain under authorial control, these are anonymous; and they are ‘open texts’, with regard to origin as well as transmission. The written versions that we actually possess all belong to the Roman Imperial period, but the roots apparently go back, more or less, to the times in which the three heroes were active and first achieved their fame. This would mean, in the case of Aesop, the sixth century bc (traditional date of death / bc); of Alexander, the second half of the fourth (died bc); and of Homer, the early archaic period. In each case, then, there are some six hundred years or more for the stories to grow, coalesce, and diversify before being provisionally codified in the first versions at our disposal. Like most biography, these narratives have the lifespan of their heroes as the main structuring principle. In the case of Alexander and Homer, their lives are told all the way from conception to burial, while Aesop first meets us as an adult. When it comes to filling this space of time with concrete narrative material, the Lives show, as David Konstan expresses it,
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Popular heroes: The slave, the king, the poet
an ‘almost promiscuous inclusiveness’. This is true, in particular, of the Lives of Aesop and Alexander. In a process of ‘segmentary composition’, various independent traditions attached to the hero, historical or legendary, are combined without much effort to accommodate them to each other or the resulting whole. One consequence is that the works admit what would have been regarded as foreign bodies in more strictly literary works, among them minor literary forms such as riddles, fables, and letters. More specifically, in the Life of Aesop a number of ‘Aesopic’ fables are told at crucial points in the story; the Life of Alexander incorporates letters of different kinds which sometimes completely take over the narrative; while the major Lives of Homer liberally include pieces of epic verse. It is true that such items do occur in other Greek poetry and prose as well – for instance, fables in Hesiod and letters in the novels – but their proportion and centrality in the open texts are special. Another consequence of the liberal admittance policy is that consistent characterization of the hero easily becomes subordinated to the wish to include as many exciting stories about him as possible, whatever their origin and tendency. What is more, their original character of agglutinative, anonymous works continued to invite additions, subtractions, and transpositions all through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. But while earlier scholarship spoke about the Verwilderung of their textual transmission – in contrast to the ideally stable state of the classical canon – we may now with Konstan emphasize the ‘dynamic instability’ of these popular texts. It was the very inclusiveness and chameleon-like adaptability of, in particular, Alexander and Aesop that ensured their continued success in a multitude of versions. Due to the largely fictitious nature of these two Lives, they are nowadays mostly referred to as ‘romances’, the Alexander Romance and the Aesop Romance. The original title of the former, however, seems to have been Bios Alexandrou, ‘Life of Alexander’, whereas Bios Ais¯opou is only one of several alternative titles in the Life of Aesop manuscripts. Though no generic designation, ancient or modern, can be satisfactory for these composite and multiple works, I shall use the ‘Life’ titles in my discussion; and it is as Lives they will be analysed here. Though I shall also attempt to delimit and characterize the various compositional parts, the literary analysis will mainly be based on the earliest extant or reconstructable version of each work as a whole. This is, in fact, the only option available; as David Konstan
Konstan , . The present paragraph is heavily indebted to this article (further quotations from pp. , ). See Reiser , – on the question of their genre in comparison with the gospels.
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3.2 The Life of Aesop
warns, the procedure would otherwise be ‘like pulling apart a collage: the individual bits of material stuck onto the canvas reveal something about how the image was put together, but the bare canvas is not a prototype of the final product’. Whether we prefer to call the persons who put the transmitted versions together authors, compilers, or redactors, they had each a vision of what they wanted to achieve, and the overwhelming success of these texts shows that they had not misjudged their audiences. 3.2 the life of aesop The fabulist Aesop, most useful in all vicissitudes of life, was by fortune (tukh¯e) a slave but by origin (genos) a Phrygian, from Amorion in Phrygia, of loathsome aspect, decayed, potbellied, misshapen of head, snubnosed, saddle-backed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped – a pure mistake . In addition to this he had a handicap more serious than his unsightliness in being dumb: he was toothless and could not say a word.
This expressive description of the hero is the very opening of the Life of Aesop in the earliest version we can reconstruct, labelled G after the tenth-century Grottaferrata manuscript that is its codex unicus. Version G is believed to be reasonably close to a text composed in (or around) the first century ad, from which another, shortened version called W is also derived. One or several manuscripts belonging to the W tradition, in turn, were the basis for the widespread version ascribed to the Byzantine scholar Maximus Planudes (–). Richard Pervo offers a succinct characterization of the two ancient versions: G ‘is a fuller, livelier, and better-organized text’, while W ‘is abbreviated, “secularized”, and rationalized’ – as well as censored, as Corinne Jouanno has shown by a detailed comparison. The Byzantine
Konstan , . Trans. Daly , modified, especially at beginning and end, and adapted to the critical edition of Ferrari et al. , which reads: KL 0 M$' 9 CN9, ) $ , [)] -%! 5, $ OPH